With businesses excited about adopting artificial intelligence (AI), it seems that the technology has also found its way into contract intelligence, end to end contract lifecycle management and the broader legal-tech industry. Research shows that sub-optimal contract management can have an impact of upto 9.2% to the company’s bottomline.
AI-native contract lifecycle management systems can provide businesses with instant intelligence and analytics that can help them make informed decisions. These insights can help them mitigate contractual risks and help them manage obligations, revenue leaks, governance and compliance on an automated and ongoing basis.
While contracts and workflow based CLM’s have existed for at least a couple of decades, the adoption from the legal fraternity has been relatively slow. This was mostly because of the complexity of the product and the steep learning and maintenance curve. With the latest advancement in AI/LLM technology, there is an opportunity to make the product exceptionally simple. Perhaps this is also the reason why Gautam Sinha, former CEO, Times Internet, launched an AI-based contract management system, called SimpleO.ai. With this product suite, Sinha plans to simplify management of contracts and related risks, obligations, service-levels agreement (SLA), audits and governance, among others in an automated way. In a conversation with FETransformX, Sinha, CEO, SimpleO.ai, talks about how AI can streamline contact lifecycle management systems . (Edited Excerpts)
How can SimpleO.ai simplify contract management? What is the USP of your product?
The value of a contract can be realised only if you manage the end to end to lifecycle holistically and deterministically. This includes significant efficiency to team productivity, prevention of revenue leak as well as management of contractual risks. SimpleO’s AI can automatically create a CXO dashboard for end to end management of risks, obligations compliance and governance issues around the contracts. The alternative today is mostly in the form of manual management through spreadsheets.
In order to extract the enterprise value of contracts, enterprises must have a system which is intelligent enough to extract the data and integrate it in the other enterprise systems like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Slack, Workday, Google, Microsoft to name a few. Traditionally a large team was needed for this process but with SimpleO.ai, this can be optimised with automation and instant responses.
In India, online signatures are still not taken into jurisdiction. How will you resolve that problem?
Our platform provides integrations with almost all of the digital signature providers , as well as e-stamp and physical stamp paper providers. We offer integrations with five digital signature providers, including DocuSign and Adobe. So we can cater to most of the e-signature providers in India and abroad.
How many companies are you working with currently in India? What are the challenges that your product solves?
Currently, we are working with about 15 companies in India. There are use cases with focus on increasing efficiency (up to 85%), managing receivables on the clock, minimising contractual risks, to contractual governance and compliance.
When it comes to using legal applications, it sometimes gets a bit complicated. Is SimpleO.ai user friendly? If yes then how?
Most user interfaces of SimpleO.ai are using natural language prompts with a focus on day zero gratification and minimal learning curve. We expect anyone to become productive within the first 30 minutes.
So far, we have seen AI based start-ups generating limited funds from investors. Given the market sentiments, how well are you prepared to run the product with much funding?
The funding requirements for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business is significantly less, as compared to a consumer facing (B2C) business. For a SaaS business, we consider it important to first figure out the product market fit (PMF) and identify the ideal customer profile (ICP). Once the PMF and the ICP is tested, then the focus shifts to the right GTM. The quality, innovation and completeness of the product starts speaking for itself within the first six months of launch. My personal belief is that it is the best time to build a business when the market sentiments are rational.
Finally, why legal tech?
AI has been around for little more than 3 decades. My first job in the US was with an AI startup called Neural Applications Corporation (1992-1996) where I was writing software for neural networks, genetic algorithms and adaptive fuzzy logic. It was an exciting time of my professional career. In late 2022 when the AI/LLM technology matured with the launch of ChatGPT, it presented an opportunity again. I decided to jump in and not just watch it from the sideline.
While AI technology itself is not much of a challenge, finding the right use case certainly is. We started with legal-tech and were delighted to see how well AI fits into this domain and the disruption it can do in a $32b global market opportunity.
