Why contract intelligence is everywhere – and what does it actually mean?

Summize CEO & Co-Founder Tom Dunlop explores why contract intelligence is reshaping CLM, what it actually means in practice and how legal teams are using contract data now and into the future.

If you’ve recently spent any time around legal technology (especially in the contract world), you may have noticed a shift in the language we’re using to describe our software, platforms and products.

For years, we were talking almost exclusively about contract lifecycle management (CLM) – but today, the conversation is moving towards contract intelligence.

Legal tech isn’t short of buzzwords, and at first glance the phrase “contract intelligence” might seem like yet another one. But from where I am, I don’t think the popularity of this terminology is just a marketing trend. I think it reflects a fundamental shift in what legal teams and lawyers expect technology to do.

The question is no longer “how do we manage contracts more efficiently?”. The question is moving towards “how do we use the information inside our contracts to drive better business decisions?”.

Now that’s a different challenge entirely.

The limits of traditional CLM

When most people talk about CLM, they’re really talking about workflows and the process that surrounds the end-to-end lifecycle of a contract. Traditional CLM platforms were built to help legal teams manage the journey of a contract from request to signature and beyond. They help automate manual tasks and bring structure to fragmented processes, and that’s still immensely valuable.

The thing is that most of those systems were designed around human actions – lawyers still have to review contracts, click buttons, trigger workflows and decide who should be notified next. The technology made those activities faster, but the process was still mostly driven by people.

What we’re seeing now is a shift away from workflows that sit around contracts and a shift towards systems that understand the contracts themselves.

The contract is the intelligence – but how do you unlock it?

This is why we’re now beginning to move the conversation away from just talking about CLM, to more talking about contract intelligence.

To me, contract intelligence means using the contents of a contract to drive actions automatically.

Instead of a lawyer needing to take the actions to identify key clauses, extract information and initiate processes, the technology itself can analyze the document, understand what’s inside it and use that information to trigger the right next steps – without the lawyer having to go into the document at all.

The contract itself becomes the source of truth, and the difference sounds subtle, but it’s significant. We’re moving from workflow automation to intelligence-driven automation.

Is the market embracing contract intelligence too?

Part of this shift is because vendors like us are educating the market on what’s possible. The rise of generative AI, agentic systems and legal AI platforms has introduced entirely new expectations about how software should behave and what it can do.

We’re noticing that customers are asking a different question now – they now want to know what the system can do on its own, rather than what the system can help them do.

That’s a pretty major shift.

But we have to be realistic – awareness doesn’t always translate directly into adoption. In my experience, legal teams are often more cautious in practice than vendor-driven industry headlines might suggest, and rightly so.

At its core, legal is still an advisory function. If something goes wrong, responsibility still sits with the people, not the technology, which has been reflected time and time again in regulations like the EU AI Act and professional guidance set out by bodies like the American Bar Association.

It’s more that the expectations have changed. Legal teams now know that technology can do more than just automate simple admin tasks.

Is the future about AI, or just better data?

I think there’s a strong misconception in the legal tech world that contract intelligence starts with AI. In my opinion, it actually starts with data.

The quality of any intelligence (artificial or otherwise) depends on the quality of the data driving it. If your contract data is inconsistent, incomplete or unreliable, no amount of AI will fix that problem.  

For me, it comes down to one question: can you extract high-quality, structured information from contracts consistently and at scale? If the answer is yes, everything else becomes possible. You can identify trends, answer questions instantly, and surface risks before they become problems. But more importantly, you can turn contract knowledge into a business asset rather than something that lives in documents, inboxes or the heads of individual lawyers.

Historically, contract knowledge has been hard to access and even harder to use strategically – it doesn’t scale well if it’s tied to individuals.

But when contract data becomes structured and accessible, it then becomes possible to answer questions spanning entire contract portfolios instantly, that in the past would’ve taken days, or even weeks of manual work to answer.

With trusted contract data, the answers are far easier to find and act upon, and that’s where contract intelligence becomes genuinely valuable.

What does it mean for lawyers?

When AI enters the conversation, someone inevitably asks whether it’s coming for lawyers’ jobs. To me, that’s the wrong question to ask.

In my eyes, jobs aren’t single activities, but collections of tasks. The reality is that AI is most effective when it’s applied to the parts of legal work that lawyers don’t often enjoy doing in the first place: searching for information, extracting data, reviewing repetitive language, and managing administrative processes. So the role of the lawyer doesn’t disappear; it simply evolves.

Lawyers will always stay responsible for judgment, context, negotiation, commercial decision-making and risk balancing. Those are inherently human activities and require huge amounts of legal skills and experience.

But lawyers who understand how to combine those skills with contract intelligence will spend less time finding information and more time applying it. In other words, the legal teams of the future aren’t defined by how many contracts they review, but how effectively they turn contract knowledge into business value.

Is contract intelligence the end of CLM?

In short, no. Contract intelligence doesn’t replace CLM. In fact, I think the strongest contract intelligence solutions will be built on solid contract management foundations. It’s about having the context that sits within that: the historical contract data, the negotiated positions and the lifecycle history that gives meaning to what’s inside each agreement. At the end of the day, governance, process and approvals still matter. It’s just that the workflow itself isn’t the competitive advantage anymore.

That advantage will come from understanding the information in the workflow and using it to make better decisions, and that’s really why contract intelligence is the phrase everyone is talking about.

Legal teams really don’t need another category of software – they need more value from the contracts they already have.

That’s the real shift that will define the next generation of legal tech.