The business of negotiations requires significant skill to navigate. Knowledge of your aim and your worth, an understanding of the other negotiating parties, an ability to find areas of mutual benefit or compromise, and an intuition that knows when to push and when to hold back – or disengage altogether – is critical. However, artificial intelligence can go a long way to helping on these fronts, too, granting benefits for term discussion all the way to after the ink on the contract has just started to dry. Here are some of the biggest impacts brought along with AI technology.
Better Term Compliance
One of the issues with welcoming new partners to the fold is that you can never be fully sure of their intentions or their likelihood of delivery. Reliability is always up for question. Will they uphold the terms they agree to? Are the ones they’re offering within their own scope of ability or are they getting in over their heads – whether intentionally or not? Can their supply, assets, services, etc. be consistent in quality, amount, and more? Even beyond this, do they fully understand what they’re agreeing to? After all, it’s kind of hard to stick with an agreement that’s foggy even to the parties involved.
None of the answers to these can be immediately assumed in the positive, and sussing out if the odds are in your favor (or not) can be difficult even for the most experienced, perceptive negotiator. AI takes care of some of the guesswork, such as providing compliance guardrails to prevent out-of-compliance terms or even detect fraud based on previous negotiation data. This can then keep you from wasting your time or bring agreement, supply, or other concerns to light before they are an active, inevitable problem. Long-term, these AI guardrails can lead to better purchasing and partnership decisions.
Automated Decision-Making
Have you been sitting at the negotiation table recently? If so, you obviously don’t need us to tell you how drawn out and taxing the experience can be. Term discussions simply take time, which in turn takes energy and money. This always seems to be in short supply, so finding spaces you can quicken and improve this process is an absolute must. Predictive modeling and automatic decision-making driven by artificial intelligence can go a long way here.
Connected to the term compliance mentioned previously, AI can use available data to automatically predict portfolio outcomes, find common ground within terms, suggest proper pricing, detect potential conflicts, and a whole range of other useful things. It can also automatically detect certain unwanted terms and immediately turn down an offer that contains them, meaning you can focus on more important steps in the negotiation process.
Smarter Document Management
Once upon a time, contract negotiations were an even messier affair, with countless pages of notes, agreements, edits, etc. spread out here and there. It could be incredibly disorganized, leaving documents uncategorized, making collaboration more difficult, and turning simple document filing into a dreaded event. AI tools like “natural language processing” and Google Vision API can aid in getting this under control. Data’s then used to automatically process documents, invoices, and images, and even directly file purchased assets or detect anomalies – and all without any outside intervention. Meanwhile, our service gathers all your documents in one space while also supplying built-in collaboration tools, term sheets, outcome prediction, and more. Improved user experience, greater efficiency, and less fraud naturally result.
About Intellext™
Intellext is an AI startup that is revolutionizing the way contracts are negotiated, accelerating time to close, and improving deal terms. Intellext’s Intelligent Negotiation Platform™ eliminates the complexities of contract redlines and stakeholder collaboration and optimizes deal terms by applying machine learning during the negotiation process.