Contract lifecycle management vendor Agiloft today (25 January) announces that its customers will now be able to have an “interactive conversation” with their contracts via natural language questions, powered by Cognizer’s Genius platform.
In a demo major new search feature ConvoAI, Agiloft’s chief product officer Andy Wishart told Legal IT Insider: “In the global search area of Agiloft we’re saying, ‘Show me all of the service agreements with the termination for convenience clause.’ We’re not going in by keyword, we’re asking a question, and we get the answer back in that right hand pane that says, ‘I have found 11 contracts that meet your criteria.’”
Users are then able to further drill down into the contracts by asking in natural language the likes of what the termination clause is in a certain agreement; what the effective date is; and any questions around notice or warranties.
Wishart told us: “We’re really trying to change the way in which users are getting to the information in their underlying contract. In many ways, one of the best things about ConvoAI is that you don’t even know that the AI is there.”
The company announced this release at its yearly global contract management industry conference, The Agiloft Summit, which draws customers, prospects, partners and contract thought leaders worldwide from the worlds of legal, procurement and sales.
Agiloft says that ConvoAI will come standard for all new and existing customers and is accessible from the Agiloft CLM user interface and Agiloft for Microsoft Teams. This makes it possible for business users who are looking for contract data and not regularly using the company’s CLM solution, to find the information they are looking for in the Teams interface in which they already work. Permissions for which data they can access is established in Agiloft and flows through to the Teams user.
In a statement marking the release, Wishart said: “Today marks an important day for AI in CLM. Extending our open and scalable Agiloft AI platform to integrate with Cognizer’s Genius platform provides new ways for organizations to unlock information in unstructured contracts. Our new ConvoAI feature not only enables contract operations professionals to search and find information more easily, but it will also help these professionals drive greater adoption of CLM across the enterprise by providing business users with an intuitive way to query the contracts they are responsible for, and find the data they need, to speed value creation in their organizations.”
Cognizer’s Genius technology delivers a patented combination of natural language AI and graph database technologies. ConvoAI uses Cognizer’s Cortex Neural Vector Engine that includes modern large-language AI transformer models initially trained by reading huge knowledge bases and millions of commercial contracts, and then fine-tuned for on hundreds of contract types, clauses, and terms across 500,000 annotated samples.
Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri, former Apple AI lead, and Cognizer board member, said: “Cognizer realizes the dream of conversational AI – a conversation with an agent that truly understands the meaning of what it is talking about – for the legal domain. After more than a decade of improvement in AI and conversational interaction, it is amazing to see the breakthrough that Cognizer has achieved. Its Genius technology has mastered the deep understanding of structured information in unstructured content, such as legal contracts, and offers what it knows in an easy-to-use conversational interface that any professional can use.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com