Icertis Finally Releases AI-Based Contract Analytics: Is The CLM Death Star Now Complete?

Pardon the “Star Wars” reference, but I’m excited about the new Han Solo movie.

AI is one of the few critical differentiators within the CLM space, and there’s not a hotter CLM pure-play provider than Icertis. Eighteen months ago, we wrote a four-part series about AI in contract management that explained the various value propositions of AI in the CLM space. (To summarize, “Alexa, please translate this dense legalese to/from business information that helps me reduce risks and increase value.”) In the first installment, we mentioned Icertis, but had to add a caveat to the mention:

Note that Icertis is not [yet] an AI pure-play vendor within the contract management space, but rather a leading CLM suite with emerging AI capabilities. Exari is also a broad based CLM solution, and has proven AI-based contract analytics. The pure-play AI-enabled contract automation space is currently hotly contested by contract analytics vendors such as Seal Software (the clear leader based on the number of procurement implementations), Kira Systems, RAVN (iManage), Legal Sifter, LawGeex, Luminance, LegalRobot, Counselytics and others.

As of Tuesday, we’re going to have to finally update that post. We’ve been waiting for Icertis to release this new product — two products, actually, albeit with common components underneath — and we look forward to kicking the tires more deeply in the upcoming weeks. Basically, the DiscoverAI product allows metadata/clause extraction within the core CLM workflow, and the DigitizeAI product serves up this capability in batch to apply to legacy contracts getting loaded into the contract repository. (Our sister site in the UK wrote about this yesterday.)

Icertis appears to be making some smart choices in leveraging its Microsoft DNA to utilize some of the emerging machine learning goodies capabilities the Azure AI technology stack. More strategically, though, these products really represent the only big chink in Icertis’ product armor, and it’ll help the provider differentiate in other areas beyond CLM, as well (e.g., in sourcing and maybe even in supplier management).

While it’s certainly not likely to match the power and customer reference strength of a data/analytics pure play like Seal Software, these capabilities will certainly increase Icertis’ Solution score leadership position within our CLM SolutionMap rankings.

Still, the market is moving fast. Exari was the first CLM platform (not just analytics) with AI — albeit acquired — and it’s certainly not sitting still. Apttus will finally be joining the ranks of our SolutionMap participants in Q3 2018, when we’ll see how it fares when we take it deep on the buy side. And SAP Ariba will eventually get there when Leonardo gets properly embedded within its applications.

Stay tuned as we dive more into the new Icertis products and talk to a customer or two.