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I was LinkSquares’ first employee.
When I joined as an SDR, CLM was still a young category. LinkSquares was one of the early companies using AI to help Legal manage contracts, and we saw an opportunity to solve a problem that went well beyond document storage.
Contracts affect the whole business.
Sales needs to know what it can promise a customer. Finance needs to understand pricing and payment terms. Operations needs visibility into obligations. Executives need to know where the company has exposure. Legal sits at the center of all of it.
That is why I believe the next generation of AI contract lifecycle management needs to serve the whole company, not just the Legal department.
What is AI CLM?
AI contract lifecycle management uses artificial intelligence to support contract drafting, review, negotiation, approval, and management.
That can mean analyzing an agreement, identifying terms, comparing language, answering questions, or helping draft a contract. These capabilities can save Legal teams substantial time.
But there is an important distinction between AI-enhanced contract management and agentic contract management. AI can help a person do a task faster. An agent can take responsibility for completing a defined workflow.
That difference is where things get interesting.
Agentic CLM is about workflows, not better search
Imagine a non-standard sales contract comes into Legal. An AI-powered CLM system can identify the unusual provisions and surface the relevant information. An agentic CLM can actually perform the next steps in the process.
An AI agent could intake the non-standard paper, identify which approval rules apply, assemble the information required for review, route the agreement to the appropriate stakeholders, track their responses, and prepare the contract for the next stage. The agent is not simply finding information. It is moving work through a process.
The same idea applies to contract drafting. An AI agent could gather the relevant deal information, use approved language, and prepare a draft for review. During approval, it could check the agreement against established requirements, identify exceptions, and make sure the right people are involved.
Those are workflows. They have inputs, rules, decisions, and actions. Agentic AI can execute those steps while keeping people in control of the decisions that require human judgment.
The work does not stop when the contract is signed
The same principle applies after execution.
A signed agreement can trigger a series of business tasks. Someone may need to record an obligation, notify another team, monitor a renewal, confirm that a requirement has been met, or escalate an issue when something changes.
Today, those processes often depend on people reading contracts and manually moving information between teams and systems. Agentic CLM can connect the contract to the work that follows it.
That is a much bigger opportunity than making the contract repository easier to search.
Legal gets better tools. The business gets better workflows.
Expanding CLM across the business does not mean taking Legal out of the process.
Legal should set the rules, establish standards, and make the decisions that require legal judgment. They also deserve technology that removes repetitive work from their day. That was part of the original LinkSquares vision, and it still matters to me.
When agents handle defined steps in the contracting process, Legal can spend more time on negotiation, risk, and strategy. Sales, Finance, Operations, and Procurement can move their own work forward without creating another manual request for Legal.
That is the real promise of agentic contract management.
Contracts can drive revenue, too
I have never thought of Legal as a cost center.
A contract can determine when a customer starts paying, establish the economics of a deal, define renewal terms, or create obligations that affect how a company operates. Those are business outcomes, and Legal has a direct role in them.
The faster a company can review and approve a deal, the faster it can start realizing revenue. The better its contracting workflows operate, the less time employees spend moving information around. And when contract obligations connect directly to business processes, the company has a better chance of doing what it promised.
That is where AI contract management starts creating value beyond Legal.
What we are building with Agentic
I have watched LinkSquares and the CLM category evolve from contract management toward AI-powered contract analysis and automation. Agentic AI takes that progression further.
We are building toward a system that can support the work surrounding a contract from the first draft through approval and into the life of the agreement. Which is to say, the entire contract lifecycle, from request to renewal. That means smarter drafting, more informed approvals, and workflows that can actually move forward without requiring someone to manage every individual step.
The goal is not to put an AI layer over an existing repository and call it agentic. We're giving Legal and the broader business a system that can understand a contract, follow the rules around it, and take meaningful action to move a contract forward.
The business case for agentic CLM
The agentic CLM business case is straightforward.
Legal gets more time for high-value work. Sales can move deals through contracting with less friction. Finance and Operations can participate in contract workflows without relying on Legal to coordinate every step. Executives get better visibility into the commitments and economics contained in the company’s agreements. Above all, the company gets more value from the contracts it creates.
That is what excites me about Agentic at LinkSquares. We are taking something every business depends on -- the contract -- and connecting it to the work the business needs to get done. CLM started as a Legal system. Agentic AI gives it the potential to become part of how the whole business operates.
If you want to see how an agentic CLM can transform not just your contracting process, but your entire business, schedule your personalized LinkSquares demo today.
Written by: Lyle McCutcheon-Schour, SVP of Revenue, LinkSquares
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