In my decade running Concord, I’ve witnessed a quiet revolution taking place: finance teams are increasingly taking the reins of contract management from legal departments. This shift isn’t just happening because of new technology—it’s a fundamental rethinking of what contracts actually are within an organization. And AI is accelerating this transformation dramatically.
The Shift from Legal Document to Business Process
I’ve been saying this for years: a contract is not a legal document. A contract is a business process—actually the most central business process you have in a company. Whether you buy something, sell something, or hire someone, there is always a contract in the middle.
From my conversations with hundreds of finance leaders, I’ve seen this takeover makes strategic sense for several reasons:
- Financial visibility: CFOs need real-time insights into contractual commitments to build accurate forecasts, especially for cloud resources and other variable expenses.
- Operational integration: Finance teams, unlike legal, focus on automating workflows and reducing bottlenecks rather than just risk mitigation.
- Contract simplification: Today, over 90% of contracts signed on our platform have zero negotiation. The world has changed when it comes to contracts. People understand they need to go fast and don’t want to lose a month in a negotiation cycle.
- AI readiness: Finance departments are typically more digitally mature and better positioned to leverage AI tools.
How AI Transformed Contract Management Overnight
What’s interesting about AI is that I don’t think AI is fundamentally changing things. I think it’s just accelerating what we’ve already seen. The changes were already happening—AI just made them possible at scale.
One of the most powerful applications I’ve seen of AI in contract lifecycle management is the ability to extract financial insights that were previously inaccessible or required hours of manual work. We’re helping CFOs to actually start building forecasting, not just based on past expenses, but on their actual contractual commitments. You’ll be able to know exactly what money is coming out per month from your company for the next 10 years based on the contracts that you have.
This matters because poor contract management is believed to cause massive revenue losses. Research indicates that poor supplier contract management can increase the total cost of ownership by 10-20%, representing a huge opportunity for finance-led optimization.
What Contract Management Will Look Like in 5 Years
Based on what I’m seeing in the market, the future of contract management will look dramatically different:
- Contracts will be structured data, not documents: Instead of dense legal documents, contracts will evolve into structured financial data that can be queried, analyzed, and used for predictive modeling. If tomorrow you have a world where there are absolutely no contracts and we ask AI to build a certain relationship with a customer or vendor—do you think that AI would write contracts the way we have been writing them for the past centuries? I don’t think so.
- Finance will own contract data as strategic assets: Contracts will be viewed as financial intelligence assets rather than legal documents, with finance using them for forecasting, risk management, and strategic decision-making.
- Legal will focus on governance: Legal departments will evolve to set policies, create playbooks for AI systems, and handle exceptions and strategic matters rather than day-to-day contract processing.
- AI will handle routine tasks: Within five years, AI will draft, review, and manage most standard contracts with minimal human oversight, with legal only involved in complex agreements.
What This Means for Legal Departments
For general counsel, this isn’t a diminishment of your role—it’s an opportunity for evolution. The most forward-thinking legal departments I work with aren’t fighting this trend—they’re leading it.
They’re partnering with finance to create integrated approaches:
- Legal provides governance, templates, and playbooks
- Finance handles execution and data analysis
- AI bridges the gap between departments
This approach frees legal departments to focus on truly strategic work while ensuring contracts deliver maximum financial value to the organization.
Embracing the Future
The future of contract management will be driven by finance, enabled by AI, and governed by legal. This isn’t speculation—it’s happening right now across companies of all sizes.
For tech leaders, this transformation offers a tremendous opportunity to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. The technology that enables finance to extract value from contracts while maintaining legal oversight will become an essential part of the modern business stack.
The question isn’t whether this shift will happen—it’s already underway. The question is whether your organization will be a proactive participant in shaping this future or will be forced to adapt reactively as it unfolds around you.
Matt Lhoumeau is the Co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Prior to founding Concord, Matt worked for the second-largest telecom company in France, where he experienced firsthand the pain of manual contract management—an experience that inspired him to build Concord.
