Agentic Contract Review and Redlining Is Here

In this article we discuss:

• Agentic Contract Review Features
• Staying Ahead of the Curve
• Driving AI Responsibility
• Fulfilling the True Goals of Negotiation

Let’s start by stating the obvious: No one likes reading contracts.

It’s a generalization, but essentially true: Even most people who negotiate contracts for a living don’t particularly like reading them. Legal, procurement, sales, and other professionals read and edit contracts to protect our companies, procure supplies, grow revenue, reduce costs, manage risks, and other specific goals. 

Reviewing pre-signature contracts is a means to these ends, and anything that helps us get there faster and more easily is dearly welcome. 

Using generative AI to speed contract review and redlining is not new. Evisort introduced clause-level AI review and redlining in 2023—back when Workday was a customer, well before the acquisition. Customers of Workday Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) routinely ask it to review specific clauses against their preferred language and suggest edits to make them compliant. 

But three years in AI terms is a generation. Today we’re at a new threshold in agentic contract negotiation, and there’s no going back.

Introducing Agentic Full-Document Review

The Workday Contract Negotiation Agent now reviews and edits entire documents at once, delivering accurate, automated pre-signature contract analysis and redlining like never before. It dramatically streamlines human review while empowering contract managers to focus on the strategic goals of their negotiations, rather than the mechanics of drafting. 

The Contract Negotiation Agent analyzes whole agreements against your corporate playbook to identify points of risk and noncompliance. It works on any pre-signature contract, but delivers the most value when reviewing inbound agreements, meaning contracts drafted by the other party, turning that tedious first pass—and subsequent reviews—into a swift, scalable process.

Pinpoint Edits, Not Just Swapped Clauses

Nothing drags out a contract negotiation like seeing entire sections replaced by alternate language. Smooth negotiations are better served by making the minimal necessary changes to achieve your goal. 

Rather than replacing, say, an entire indemnification clause with your company’s pre-approved one, the Contract Negotiation Agent will suggest pinpoint redlines that achieve the purpose of your approved terms, making the impact of the indemnification language compliant with your limitations and preferences. 

Discrete edits are far easier for the counterparty to understand and consider—and hopefully accept without a lengthy, back-and-forth exchange.

Clear Guidance for the Human-in-the-Loop

Simply providing a suggested edit isn’t always enough to expedite your team’s efforts; the contract reviewer needs to understand the rationale behind the change before agreeing to send it off to the counterparty. The Workday Contract Negotiation Agent doesn't just redline your documents—it provides clear, immediate context for every suggestion.

By explicitly detailing why a specific clause was flagged and exactly how the proposed edit aligns with your playbook parameters, the agent eliminates the guesswork. It empowers contract professionals to quickly evaluate the rationale, approve changes with confidence, and keep negotiations moving swiftly without sacrificing compliance.

A Secure End-to-End Contract Lifecycle

Contract review and redlining doesn't happen in isolation. It's part of a broader pre-signature process that draws on your existing contracts, negotiation history, efficiency tracking, and more.

That’s why it’s best to take advantage of innovative contract AI in the context of a complete contract management solution—one that has your full repository of executed contracts as well as your templates, playbooks, approved clause library, and pre-signature workflows.

With rigorous user management, data security, and an audit trail to track activity, you and your team can confidently leverage cutting-edge contract AI without introducing disconnectedness, inefficiency, and unnecessary risk.

Optimizing Contract Playbooks

An AI agent’s results can only be as good as the guidance it receives, which makes having detailed contract playbooks critically valuable for automating negotiation. But organizations struggle to draft comprehensive contract playbooks for the many kinds of contracts they need to execute, let alone to keep those playbooks current over time as strategies and realities change. Instead, institutional knowledge is often buried in older contracts and in people’s heads.

That’s why the Workday CLM product team is currently developing new AI tools to automate the drafting of contract playbooks based on existing contracts, with the goal of making playbook creation as simple as uploading sample documents (like existing agreements and policy notes) from which our AI can derive preferred and fallback language and criteria.

We’re also working to deliver users proactive insights over time about their teams’ adherence to those playbooks, so they can make informed decisions about keeping those playbooks current and optimized. Watch this space!

Staying Ahead of the Curve

All AI is not created equal, and the rapid evolution of AI necessitates a forward-looking strategy for developing legal AI tools. Here are three ways the Contract Negotiation Agent distinguishes itself in the market, and turns change into an advantage:

• It leverages sophisticated AI orchestration, enabling it to choose the best AI tool to support the task at hand. Instead of relying exclusively on one large language model (LLM), its capabilities grow naturally with the latest advances in AI.

• Its foundational, purpose-built AI helps ensure accurate results from LLMs by conducting core analysis of the customer’s contract repository and creating a trusted base of structured data to enable retrieval augmented generation (RAG). 

• It’s fully customizable, enabling customers to create their own AI models to extract and generate all the contract data points they care about over time, rather than being limited to a finite set of core extractions.

Driving AI Responsibility

In-house legal teams are the stewards of compliance and risk management for their organizations, with legal leaders routinely serving on strategy committees pursuing safe adoption of AI across the enterprise. That’s why it’s critical for legal teams to choose AI for their own use that meets strict criteria for accuracy, reliability, and data privacy. 

In 2024, Evisort became one of the first AI companies in the world to achieve an accredited certification for ISO/IEC 42001, a global standard for responsible, reliable AI development and management. In 2025, Workday achieved the same.

As of this writing, to our knowledge, Workday CLM is still the only contract management solution in the market to have achieved this distinction. ISO 42001 certification is rapidly becoming a threshold requirement for global technology investments. If it’s not on your organization’s procurement checklist, I encourage you to learn more.

Fulfilling the True Goals of Negotiation

When evaluating ways to streamline contract processes, it's important to remember why those processes developed in the first place. We don't review agreements for the love of it; we do it to protect our businesses, manage spend, and grow revenue. By delegating the tedious mechanics of review and manual redlining to agentic AI, legal and procurement teams can reclaim their time. 

The Workday Contract Negotiation Agent removes the friction of the drafting process, allowing you to focus on the strategic outcomes your contracts are actually meant to secure—achieving the true ends of your negotiation faster and more easily than ever before.

Want to learn more? Book a demo today to see the Workday Contract Negotiation Agent in action.