Agiloft adds AI engine to its no-code CLM platform
With a new AI engine for its contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, Agiloft is giving developers assistance in building CLM applications using the company's no-code tech.
Software application vendors such as Agiloft, which offer packaged capabilities, as well as low-code/no-code features for app extension and creation, have turned to AI as a means of adding more capabilities without overwhelming the ability of nonprogrammers.
Agiloft recently added an AI engine to help developers build apps for its no-code-based contract automation platform. The Agiloft AI Engine provides prebuilt AI capabilities for contract management and an open AI integration system that allows customers to incorporate custom-built AI tools into the no-code platform, said Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft in Redwood City, Calif.
The company leads with its contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, which is built on their no-code system that Agiloft offers to its users. Now the company provides custom AI capabilities with the AI engine.
"Whereas the other CLM companies, many of whom got into AI earlier than we did, have taken an approach of hardwiring AI capabilities into the CLM platform, we've stayed with our true open platform approach and built integration between Agiloft and AWS SageMaker and Google TensorFlow, so that any Google model or AWS model can be used within Agiloft to automate workflows to provide automation and automate contract restoring," Earl said. "And we've built on top of this open integration with out-of-the-box AI capabilities."
The new Agiloft AI offering uses artificial intelligence to address contract management issues, including metadata and clause extraction from contracts and other documents, as well as document classification and contract risk scoring. Moreover, prebuilt machine learning models also enable users to implement their own custom AI tools with existing data, he said.
"The Agiloft no-code platform democratizes the use of AI" for Agiloft users who are not coders and also not familiar with AI concepts, said Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer and managing director at Azul Partners in Chicago.
The Agiloft no-code platform's user interface enables users to build machine learning-based predictive analytics where the system looks at the data and files input, understands what they are and unpacks them to answer the users' questions, Mitchell said.
Moreover, there are different kinds of low-code/no-code platforms, Mitchell said. There are general-purpose low-code/no-code platforms, there are low-code platforms tied to application areas and there are no-code platforms such as Agiloft that are "eating their own dog food" and building apps with their own system, he said.
"They just happen have picked two great application areas where they're actually using their low-code/no-code platform" to upgrade the CLM system with AI enhancements, such that "you have CLM contract management on steroids," Mitchell said.
To simplify things for developers, the Agiloft tool provides an integration template to bring in machine learning models from Amazon SageMaker and Google TensorFlow so developers can build their own custom AI tools on Agiloft's no-code platform, Earl said.
Agiloft's AI engine also integrates with Google Translate to enable users to translate new or changed field labels from any language supported to any other language. It also features Microsoft Dynamics integration, which joins Agiloft's integrations with applications such as Salesforce, Jira and Microsoft Office to automate processes across enterprise departments.
In addition, the Agiloft tool has integration to Amazon's Alexa AI assistant that uses voice commands to boost productivity and allow hands-free connectivity with the Agiloft platform, Earl said. With this integration users can interface with Agiloft directly, including search, reading, or editing fields and records, as well as counting. And the openness of the system enables developers to add their own custom tools as needed.
Using the platform
Paul Gamble, contract administrator at Inland Technologies, in Truro, Nova Scotia, which is an Agiloft customer, said he believes the new AI engine could be useful to his company's contract management capabilities, particularly in terms of risk assessment.
"Having the system learn our standard terms in our contracts, comparing those with another contract that comes in or comparing those two like a contract where we can we can measure the risk or have the system measure the risk on that I think is something that we will probably ... use actually," Gamble said.
I can generally do everything myself without having to get those [IT] guys to do something for me.
Paul GambleContract administrator, Inland Technologies
The company's interest in Agiloft stemmed from its need for a CLM system with the easiest and most friendly user interface, he said.
Before using Agiloft, Inland Technologies wrote up its contracts manually and stored them in binders in file cabinets.
"What Agiloft does for us is it allows us to store our contracts for one in a centralized location where people can access them from wherever they are because it's a web-based system," Gamble said. "We also use it for the approval workflow to get contracts approved and keep all of that approval information in the database."
In addition, the ease of use of the Agiloft no-code platform enables Gamble, a nonprogrammer, to work on applications.
"What we found was the Agiloft user interface seems the most user-friendly, but the big thing is the ability to customize it for whatever we need," he said. "I can generally do everything myself without having to get those [IT] guys to do something for me."
