Risk management continues to dominate business conversations this year and with good reason.While risk is inherent in business, recent events revealed that many companies lacked the means to adequately manage third-party risk. Despite the digital transformation efforts companies have undertaken, many companies' obligations related to contractual, regulatory, financial reporting, and environmental requirements are still often managed manually. This creates informational silos that make it difficult for organizations to form a complete picture of potential risk and compliance exposures throughout their supply chains. As a result, companies lack the visibility to proactively manage these obligations and end up taking a reactive approach to identifying and addressing third-party risk. As industry and government regulation increases and pressure mounts to deliver quality goods at a competitive price, companies recognize the need to approach their risk management initiatives differently.

Choosing the right contract management software can increase productivity in any company. The main factors are cloud-based and the use of artificial intelligence. Contracts have a direct impact on the success of the company. In order to maintain an overview of the portfolio of contracts and the resulting rights and obligations, automated and clearly defined processes as well as clear lists and dashboards are required. This is especially true when the creation, conclusion and storage of contract documents is decentralized.

Across companies, a contract is viewed as something to be signed, filed away, and neglected until something goes astray. In an event when something goes off track, it is usually a frantic effort to obtain the required documents to recognise the implications for a company. Advance innovation like artificial intelligence is supporting companies to get past the issues when it comes to contracting using AI-based contracting software. By leveraging algorithms on data sets of contracts, it can discover patterns and spins out the different variables, including specific agreement terms, dates, and names of the parties. This empowers businesses to have much better and transparent control over their contracts, which can serve to be very valuable during challenging times, such as an ongoing pandemic. Complex contracts may be scattered across different repositories, locations and sources which is incredibly challenging to manage if done manually.

We've long been fascinated with the idea of smart robots that serve human society. Think about Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" short stories, Robby in the film "Forbidden Plant," and R2D2 or BB8 in "Star Wars." In these works, robots have some significant advantages over people. They are highly intelligent without being ruled by emotions. They act according to logical if-then processes.