For most organizations, the signature page doesn’t just feel like the finish line. It becomes it. The deal gets celebrated, executed agreements get filed away as trophies of negotiations won, and contracts quietly disappear into a shared drive – until something breaks.
Then the ‘after’ shows up: a renewal notice arrives too late, a rebate was never claimed, or a key obligation gets missed because no one can find the latest version (or agree which version is the latest).
That’s the shift we need to talk about. Contracts need to be recognized for what they actually are: the beginning of value creation; dynamic instruments of commercial leverage that require active management.
For many organizations, the challenge is in scale. Standardizing obligation tracking, performance oversight, and risk controls, across hundreds – or thousands – of agreements can be a logistical nightmare.
Technology has promised to fix this. But even the most sophisticated CLM platforms and GenAI tools struggle when the underlying data is fragmented and unstructured. If you can’t reliably surface the right clauses and obligations, it’s difficult to shorten cycle times, enforce standards, or systematically capture commercial upside.
That gap in contracting oversight can contribute to as much as 15% revenue loss annually.
But the upside is just as real. When contract management is treated as an execution discipline rather than a filing function, it becomes a lever for efficiency and growth. Below are five ways to close that gap and actually see ROI from your contracts.
A large share of contract risk and delay starts at intake.
Requests arrive via email, chat, or generic ticketing systems with inconsistent context. Commercial terms are incomplete. Approvals are unclear. Key metadata never makes it into your CLM or tracking tools. Someone has to backfill it later – if they remember – which introduces both friction and inconsistency.
Meanwhile, contract work is consuming a disproportionate share of legal capacity. In many legal departments, contracting can absorb up to half of the team’s time, pulling senior lawyers into routine tasks and away from strategic work.
Intelligent intake changes the front end of this process.
Instead of acting as a glorified inbox, intake becomes a triage layer that:
In practice, that means:
Instead of scattering responsibility across sourcing, finance, and business units, a single function or role monitors whether negotiated value actually materializes, preventing contract value leakage. They track adherence to price terms, fulfillment of obligations, and recovery of rebates or credits.
Think of it as a bifurcated workflow: the intake layer acts like a triage nurse, making sure every request is sorted and prioritized before it reaches a lawyer’s desk.
Ensuring that every obligation aligns with your commercial and risk standards requires a rigorous comparison of third-party paper against your internal playbook. Done manually, this is tedious, error-prone work. It also doesn’t scale.
This is where AI should help, but only if it’s implemented in a way that respects legal reality.
The most effective pattern is AI as pre-processor, humans as validators. Instead of promising “AI review” as a replacement for lawyers, treat AI as a first-pass logic check sitting between the raw contract and the attorney:
The point is not to replace legal scrutiny, but to move it up the value chain. Instead of spending hours just finding issues, your team starts at the decision line: “Are we comfortable with this deviation in this context?”
For risk and compliance leaders, this model offers two advantages:
And because a human is always in the loop, you address the core anxiety most lawyers have about AI: that it will hallucinate in ways they can’t see or control.
Companies routinely lose established value because they cannot track what they signed. Some lose an average of 15% of contract value annually due to poor management. Answering questions about this value leakage can be a huge struggle without launching a manual audit. Think if a simple query from CFO about uncapped liability clauses can mean a weekend fire drill for your team.
This is what happens when contracts are treated as files rather than structured data. The key is in having effective governance to turn these often flat documents into queryable assets. Yet effective governance requires more than just ‘digitization’ in the scanning sense. It requires turning contracts into data, and not just documents.
And it’s not only about visibility, it’s about change at scale. When regulatory or policy requirements shift, teams are forced into repapering: updating terms across hundreds or thousands of active agreements (for example, GDPR-era data protection updates or DORA-driven vendor contract changes).
This is where intelligent digitization comes in:
Once this information is structured, you can finally put it to work:
For PE and VC investors, this is particularly important. Contracts are where the operating model and the revenue model intersect. If you can’t interrogate that data at scale, you’re flying blind on key drivers of margin and risk.
The contract lifecycle, and its risks, continues long after the glory of the signed deal.
In many organizations, a significant share of value leakage happens post-signature, when obligations need to be enforced and commercial rights need to be exercised:
This isn’t usually a competence problem, but more on bandwidth and ownership. In-house teams cannot realistically police every vendor and customer obligation across thousands of active agreements. Responsibility is shared among Legal, Procurement, Finance, and Operations, but without a clear system and cadence, obligations slip through the cracks.
The solution is to systematize how obligations are captured, monitored, and acted upon, and to let AI support the heavy lifting where it’s best suited.
A mature performance tracking layer will:
AI is well-suited to this pattern: scanning large volumes of contract and operational data to spot where the real world is drifting away from the contract’s intended design.
The practical impacts are fewer missed renewals and unplanned rollovers, better capture of negotiated value (rebates, discounts, service credits), and earlier detection of compliance and performance issues.
For senior leaders, this is where contracts stop being static records and start functioning as living guardrails around financial and operational performance.
By this point, we can agree on the theory that the challenge is most likely in the execution.
You may already have the systems, potentially even including a CLM. You know what good looks like in principle: playbooks, standards, governance. You have experiments with AI in pilots.
But there is still a gap between knowing the right process and having the capacity and operating model to run it every day.
Traditionally, there have been two options that each come with their own pros and cons:
A managed service model builds on what those approaches do well, and adds the missing layer: an operating model that’s accountable for results.
Instead of buying tools or extra hands, you engage an operational partner that:
In other words, the provider isn’t just selling you the car (software) or the passengers (staff). They’re providing the driver and the driving school: the people, process, and technology to operate the function reliably.
This is where Execo’s managed services approach sits: agents + domain experts + execution discipline, deployed as a service. For a GC, Head of GRC, or investor, that means you can scale contract oversight without continuously adding headcount or running another internal transformation project.
Contracts don’t deliver maximum value just by being signed. The maximum value comes from when they’re run.
The teams seeing real ROI aren’t necessarily using the most tools. They’re using the most discipline: structured intake, playbook-driven review, governed data, and ongoing performance tracking that turns obligations into action. That’s what makes contract oversight scalable, auditable, and commercially useful.
For most organizations, the hard part isn’t knowing what “good” looks like. It’s operating it consistently – every day, across thousands of agreements, without adding headcount or relying on heroics.
That’s where a managed services model changes the equation: a system that combines AI for speed and pattern recognition with domain experts for judgment, escalation, and accountability, so performance improves without governance breaking.
If you’re ready to turn contracts into an execution layer (not a storage problem), Execo can help you design, and run, the operating model that makes contract ROI real.
Start by tightening the front door and the data layer. Build an intake workflow that standardizes required inputs (terms, counterparties, approvals), enforce version control, and centralize contracts into a reliable contract repository. Then operationalize governance so critical fields and obligations remain accurate day-forward, not just after a cleanup sprint.
A practical four-pillar view is: (1) intake and contract workflows, (2) playbook-driven review and risk management, (3) contract repository + data governance, and (4) contract performance tracking (obligations, renewals, value capture). These pillars work together, weakness in one usually breaks ROI in the others.
Because inefficiency doesn’t just cost time, it creates risk and value leakage. Delays slow revenue, inconsistent terms increase exposure, and weak post-signature tracking causes missed renewals, lost rebates, uncollected SLA credits, and damaged business relationships.
CLM software helps centralize contracts, standardize contract templates and workflows, automate routing and approvals, and improve visibility. But ROI depends on adoption and data quality, if the repository isn’t trusted or obligations aren’t operationalized, the tool becomes a storage layer instead of an execution layer.
Focus on three areas: commercial fluency (understanding pricing, renewals, incentives), risk management judgment (knowing what matters and why), and operational rigor (playbooks, version control, contract workflows, and governance). Strong contract managers also get good at turning contract terms into actions for finance, procurement, and operations.