Procurement AI agent · Contract management
Contract Management AI Agent
Unpack a signed portfolio into a register of duties, each one citing the clause it came from and dated to when it falls due, and hold that register for a named commercial owner.
- Typical delivery
- 4–6 weeks
- Deployment
- Your stack
- Named owner
- Clause cited
- After launch
- Agent Care
What this agent does
Registers the obligation, never waives it
In
- 01
A contract is loaded, and the duties it creates are written out as lines, each with an owner and a date.
- 02
A schedule nobody has reopened since signature is read alongside the body it hangs off.
Reason
- 03
An obligation falls due, and it is dated from the clause that set the date, not from the filing date.
- 04
A duty runs toward the supplier, and the one running the other way is registered in the same pass.
- 05
A clause carries its exception in a second sentence, and the exception travels with the summary.
Decide
- 06
An amendment, side letter or change order is bound to the contract it altered before either is read.
- 07
A rebate, credit or price review has to be claimed, and the claiming is what the register dates.
Out
- 08
A clause resists extraction, and that resistance is recorded as a finding rather than left as a blank.
- 09
Execute write actions only inside the approval boundaries agreed during implementation.
Product statement
Reading, extraction and dating belong to the agent. Meaning belongs to a named commercial owner, who decides what a clause obliges and acts on it.
Example workflow
One contract, signature to register
- 1Signed contract receivedExecuted agreements, schedules, amendments, side letters or change orders
- 2Obligations extractedThe duty, the party who owes it, the date it falls due and the clause it was read from
- 3Register entries raisedEach obligation, its owner, its due date and the extraction confidence
- 4Controls appliedClause-citation checks, amendment checks, date checks and extraction confidence
No human action required
Stages 1 to 4 run unaided, and nothing is waived or served at any of them — the agent is extracting, and the owner lane opens at the confidence gate.
Goes to the commercial owner to confirm.
Adds a contract-manager read first.
Commercial review
The obligation is held with its clause, its due date and the confidence it was read at.
Confirm · Reassign · Send to contract review
Confirmed — by the commercial owner
- 6Contract and calendar records updatedOnly where write access and records policy allow it
- 7Outcome evaluatedClause-citation accuracy, amendment coverage, owner corrections and what review found
Corrections
Each commercial-owner correction is counted in the evaluation.
What should not run autonomously
Human approval stays in control
Outside the boundary — human approval required
8 items
- Deciding what an extracted clause means.
- Waiving an obligation the company owes.
- Serving a notice under a contract.
- Judging whether the company is in breach.
Automation boundary
Agent acts unaided
- ✓Read the signed portfolio into an obligation register.
- ✓Point each obligation at the clause it came from, in the document.
- ✓Date what falls due against the clause that set it.
- ✓Mark any obligation the document would not yield with confidence.
Nothing is waived or served except by a named commercial owner, inside agreed boundaries.
- Agreeing a variation to a signed term.
- Telling a supplier an obligation is met.
- Choosing which duty to enforce and which to let go.
- Changes to extraction rules or register owners.
Example output
One obligation, annotated
Our contract review agent reads a draft for legal risk before signature; this is the obligation register after it, and below is one entry exactly as the agent leaves it.
Obligation entry · single clause
Illustrative example- Obligation
- Volume rebate, annual claim
- Recorded as
- Claimable only on written notice
- Counterparty
- A duty the buyer owes
- Evidence of record
- Schedule 3, clause 4.2, page 41
- Confidence
- Held unconfirmed
- Held for
- The commercial owner, by name
As received
Read off the executed agreement and the schedule attached to it, and it claims nothing past those two.
What the record holds
- The clause as signed
- The schedule it sits in
- The amendment history
Why no confirmation here
Deciding what this clause obliges is a judgement the owner makes.
What the score decides
Below the threshold an entry gets a contract-manager read before the owner sees it.
Action
ConfirmReassignSend to contract reviewValue
Where AI adds value
The same four claims, placed at the point in the workflow where each one applies.
Where the value lands
Value 01 – 04
Every obligation
From the contract that created it
Where the evidence is used
Where an obligation was missed and the date has already gone by, the owner records what was forfeited against the clause, the entry reopens with its extraction attached, and the case joins the suite.
The clause outlives the deal
Negotiation ends and the file closes, but the duties it created run on for years, in schedules nobody has reopened since the day of signature.
What was checked, and not found
No repository examined here states a duty. A contract repository stores documents, versions them and controls who may open them; a register of obligations is a different artefact, stating what is owed, by whom and by when, with a named owner against each line. Almost every company has the first and believes it has the second. Nothing in a signed document records whether the duty was performed, so the register holds what was extracted and what was not, and performance is asserted by the owner rather than read off the page.
Build an evidence trail
The obligation, the clause it came from and the owner who holds it stay together.
Integrations
Typical integrations
Five system groups connect to the same agent. Which of them are in scope is decided in discovery.
Contract repositories
- Icertis
- Agiloft
- Ironclad
- DocuSign CLM
- SharePoint stores
Signed documents
- Executed PDFs
- scanned originals
- Schedules and annexures
Amendments and variations
- Side letters
- signed change orders
- Variations, waivers and consents
Agent
Contract management and obligation registers
- Reads the contracts
- Raises the register
- Holds for the owner
Calendars and workflow
- Diary systems
- notification queues
- Owners, due dates and reminders
Observability & evaluation
- OpenTelemetry
- Langfuse
- Supported monitoring/evaluation sources
Integration availability depends on the client's existing systems and API access.
Agent controls
Six seals between the model and the register
Six seals on one deed, the last the hardest to break. What holds is set out in the map below.
L6 · Outermost — last line of defence
Inward → L1 · closest to the model
- L1 – L2
- Test whether an entry may stand
- L3
- Leaves the meaning to a commercial owner
- L4 – L5
- Keep the obligation and its clause of origin
- L6
- Reports the clause unread when signals degrade
How Nestack evaluates it
Evaluate the whole extraction — not only the register that comes out.
Coverage runs the whole depth of the workflow, and every layer is cut by slice.
Surface — the register a commercial owner works from
- E1Final-output evaluationDid each entry cite the clause it was actually read from?
- E2Step-level evaluationDid the agent read the live contract, its schedules and its amendments?
- E3Tool evaluationDid it read and write the correct contract and the correct entry?
- E4Confidence calibrationDo low-confidence extractions actually attract more owner corrections?
- E5Slice evaluationHow does performance change across specific obligation types?
- E6Business outcomeHow many entries needed a correction before the owner confirmed?
Floor — the duty a company actually owes
Failure modes
Where each failure originates in the agent
Seven failure modes, placed at the stage each one first becomes visible.
Agent lifecycle
Direction of processing →
01 · Retrieval
1 mode
- OJ-03
Amendment left unbound
A side letter sits apart from the contract it changed.
Stage gathers
The contract, its schedules, dates and owners
02 · Reasoning
2 modes
- OJ-04
Exception dropped from summary
A clause is summarised without its carve-out.
- OJ-06
Superseded clause read as live
A replaced term is worked as the current one.
Stage proposes
The clause, the duty, the owner and the date
03 · Tool / write
2 modes
- OJ-02
Thin extraction passed forward
An entry moves on without the manager read.
- OJ-05
Obligation bound to wrong contract
The duty is filed against another agreement.
Stage writes
Only where write access and approval policy allow it
04 · Output
1 mode
- OJ-01
Registered with no clause cited
The entry states a duty with no source.
Stage returns
The register a commercial owner works from
05 · Change / Version
1 mode
- OJ-07
Silent extraction drift
A rules change widens what the agent will assert.
Stage tracks
Model, prompt, clause rules and contract dates
- Sev-1 · an entry stated on no clause
- Sev-2 · a duty falls due unregistered
- Sev-3 · document degrades, entry held back
Affected slices
Rebate clauses absorb the corrections
A type-level extraction figure can read clean while rebate and credit clauses carry most of the entries an owner had to correct. Nestack reports the correction rate by obligation type, not only in total.
Slice performance — reported separately, not only in aggregate
Illustrative example| Slice | Failure rate | Lift | Lift vs. threshold | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rebate and credit clauses | 10.5% | 3.7× | Review | |
| Buyer-side undertakings | 7.5% | 2.6× | Review | |
| Amended or varied terms | 4.7% | 1.7× | Watch | |
| Standard payment terms | 2.3% | 0.8× | Normal |
Bar: correction-rate lift vs. standard-payment-term baseline · scale 0–4.0× · tick marks the 2.0× review threshold
2 of 4 slices over threshold
Evidence-linked improvement
What an unread schedule costs
A cycle closes when the missed obligation is a regression case. That suite is what the next contract loaded is measured against.
Improvement cycle · five stages
Switchback — the path turns at Improve and returns at Learn
- 01
Detect
Correction rate rises on rebate and credit clauses.
- 02
Diagnose
The obligation buried in a schedule to a contract nobody has opened since signature is worked backwards until one cause is left standing.
- 03
Improve
Number the change; the contracts that drove it are filed beneath it.
- 04
Verify
One contract case still failing holds the entire release back.
- 05
Learn
It is retained permanently, and the extraction rules move with it.
Learn → Detect
The return edge. The next contract is measured against a suite one case longer.
Typical build scope
Twelve workstreams across six weeks
The build scope read against the delivery timeline. Week structure follows the six-week plan — discovery, sources, extraction and register logic, evaluation, integration, then production validation and handover.
Workstream
Week 1Week 2Week 3Week 4Week 5Week 6
- 01Portfolio discovery and automation-boundary design.Week 1
- 02Repository and amendment sources.Week 1, Week 2
- 03Clause-to-obligation and register-coverage mapping.Week 1, Week 2
- 04Contract ingestion and clause segmentation.Week 2
- 05Obligation extraction and clause binding.Week 2, Week 3
- 06Confidence scoring and review routing.Week 3
- 07Commercial review workflow.Week 3, Week 4
- 08Repository and calendar integration.Week 5
- 09Obligation and clause cases.Week 4, Week 5
- 10Guardrails and extraction controls.Week 4
- 11Clause-trail instrumentation.Week 5, Week 6
- 12Deployment, documentation and Agent Care handover.Week 6
12 workstreams · 6 weeks · bar shows the weeks a workstream is active — several run in parallel
Final scope and sequence confirmed in discovery
Engagement tiers
What each tier includes
Rows are the capabilities named in each tier's scope. Higher tiers include everything below them.
| Capability✓ in scope · — not at this tier | PilotOne portfolio, one entity | ProductionProduction contract workflow | AdvancedMultiple entities / portfolios |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduced at Pilot | |||
| Obligation extraction to your clauses | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Named commercial-owner confirmation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contract-inventory baseline | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Introduced at Production | |||
| Reporting by obligation type | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contract review workflow in your systems | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Approved write-back | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contract-repository integration | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Introduced at Advanced | |||
| Multi-language clause reading | — | — | ✓ |
| Cross-entity obligation packs | — | — | ✓ |
| Large contract portfolios | — | — | ✓ |
| Multi-entity clause controls | — | — | ✓ |
| Build price | From $5,000 | From $8,000 | Custom quote |
- Final build price
- Confirmed after discovery based on integrations, workflow complexity, portfolio size, approval controls and deployment requirements.
- Separate from build
- Build pricing is separate from recurring Agent Care, which covers managed monitoring, evaluations, incidents and verified improvements after launch.
What we need from you
What you bring, and what we build with it
Each input maps to a piece of build scope and a week in the delivery timeline.
You bring
We build with it
01Your signed portfolio and the entity each contract sits under
→Contract ingestion and clause segmentation
Week 102Representative contracts, schedules and amendments
→Clause binding, extraction logic and the obligation baseline
Week 203Your contract calendar and the owners it names
→Clause mapping, obligation binding and the automation boundary
Week 104Access to relevant APIs, feeds or exports
→Repository, document and amendment source assessment, then integration setup
Week 205Obligations you would not want missed
→Clause cases and the evaluation run
Week 406What no extracted clause may decide
→Confidence scoring, review routing, guardrails and release controls
Week 307A named commercial owner who confirms the entry
→Release to the commercial owner, then pilot and production validation
Weeks 5–6
Nothing else is required
Deployment, documentation and Agent Care handover are ours.
Delivery timeline
Four phases across six weeks
The grid is not decoration. Where two phases genuinely run together, week five shows them both.
Phase
W1
W2
W3
W4
W5
W6
- DiscoveryW1
- BuildW2 – W3
- EvaluateW4 – W5
- Pilot & LaunchW5 – W6
Week focus
W1Portfolio discovery, clause mapping and the automation boundary
W2Repository integration and the contract-inventory baseline
W3Extraction logic, register structure and release controls
W4Evaluation suite, clause cases and failure-mode testing
W5Calendar integration, pilot contracts and targeted corrections
W6One contract cycle run under the commercial owner, then Agent Care handover
- Reading the band
- Each bar covers only the weeks its own work is named for, and week five carries a pair by design.
- At the end of W6
- Once the obligation record validates, Agent Care takes the agent on.
- Duration
- Six-week plan shown · typical delivery 4–6 weeks depending on scope confirmed in discovery.
Next step · Procurement AI agent
Build a contract management agent around the obligation your last portfolio never registered.
Show us one contract you signed and the schedule nobody has opened since. Not a repository of documents. A register of duties, each with an owner and a date against it. An obligation the company owed and forfeited by silence comes back as a finding.
- Typical delivery
- 4–6 weeks
- Deployment
- Your signed portfolio
- Named owner
- Clause cited
- After launch
- Agent Care available
Nestack Agents · Contract management
AGT-PR-04 · Agent Care available after launch