Workday Brings Agentic AI to the Entire Contract Lifecycle

Eighty-nine percent of respondents in a Workday-sponsored survey of nearly 7,000 professionals said their organizations routinely absorb financial losses from vendor contracts that auto-renew without anyone’s knowledge. 

Not occasionally. Routinely.

Ten years ago, I co-founded Evisort to pioneer AI-native contract intelligence. We introduced agentic contract intelligence with customizable AI, so our customers can know everything about their existing agreements. We delivered agentic review and redlining with custom playbooks, to help them negotiate new agreements faster and more consistently.  

But, for most organizations, the challenge of optimizing processes across the contract lifecycle remains. Deals stall, requests get misrouted, termination windows are missed, and revenue is lost. There’s simply not enough automation or visibility to efficiently drive the action these teams need.

That starts changing today. 

Workday Contract Workflow Agent is now in Early Access. It’s one of a series of major enhancements coming to Workday Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)—and it marks the beginning of a new era of agentic CLM.

The Most Expensive Place a Contract Can Be Is Nowhere

"Every time I'm working on contracts, in the back of my mind, I know why I'm doing it," said Sofya Mikhelson, VP of contract lifecycle management at Fairview Health Services. "If we don't get it right, it's more than a monetary expense—it affects everyone who walks through our doors looking for care."

For customers like Mikhelson, these are the real stakes of broken contracting processes: not just lost revenue, but suppliers not onboarded, hires not completed, and patients awaiting care.

Ask anyone in your company who handles contracts and you’ll hear a similar story: A request went in—such as an NDA before tomorrow's sales call, an offer letter for a new hire, or an updated supplier agreement. Then, silence. And while the request sits, a deal is aging, a start date is slipping, or a vendor is waiting to onboard. 

An active contract moves the business forward. A stalled one costs it. 

Contract Workflow Agent closes that gap. Here’s how.

It Starts With a Conversation

Ask for what you need and the agent delivers results. This simple premise is at the core of our new release, and it lays the foundation for advances where you won’t even have to ask. 

Here's what it means for teams: 

• Building workflows now takes minutes, not days: The skill I'm proudest of is the first one we’re releasing: agentic workflow creation. Constructing a complex workflow used to be a huge project, consuming many work hours or large service fees. Now, it starts with a plain-language description of what you’re seeking (“an MSA workflow with legal and finance review conditional on contract value…”) and an upload of a sample agreement. The agent not only builds the workflow but also identifies key data fields in the sample agreement, automatically mapping them to a questions intake form. Of course, the contracts manager gets the final say, editing the workflow directly or via a conversational experience.

• Contract requests are routed correctly the first time: Describe what you need in plain language—an NDA, a renewal, a new hire's agreement—and the agent will automatically direct the request to the right workflow, asking follow-up questions as needed to ensure optimal results. No more hunting for the right form or figuring out who owns the process. The agent even fills in the intake form with available data to get the ball rolling.

• Processes will overcome bottlenecks: Looking ahead, agentic alerts and escalations will help keep every agreement on track automatically—nudging stakeholders when a deadline approaches, reassigning tasks when a reviewer is out, and proactively flagging an auto-renewal or termination window—so deals never stall and teams never miss an important deadline. Our reimagined CLM user experience sets the stage: It keeps agentic conversation always in easy reach so users can get answers and take action easily. It even prioritizes items for the user’s attention right on their personalized homepage. 

• Trust is built in: Contracts can contain some of the most sensitive data in the business, so handing contract work to an agent requires trust. Contract Workflow Agent is part of our complete, end-to-end CLM solution with advanced administration, custom user roles, extensive guardrails, and a full audit trail. There’s a reason Evisort was one of the first companies in the world to achieve an accredited ISO 42001 certification for responsible AI, something no other CLM appears to have achieved even two years later.

Customers Are Already Seeing Results From Workday's Agentic CLM

Our customers are already reshaping their contract management with Workday agents. 

FlexGen is one example. When tariff policy started whipsawing, FlexGen quickly found more than $50 million in tariff exposure buried across its supplier agreements, and implemented a contractual strategy that let them  avoid over $35 million of it. Analysis took about a day and a half. Done manually, it would have taken two and a half weeks. "Tariffs weren't just a pricing issue for us," said Anthony Tacker, FlexGen's director of risk and procurement. "They were a contract issue."

NetApp analyzed more than 90,000 agreements, saving over $2.5 million and thousands of hours. "When you see leaders making business decisions based on contract data that you provide, and they can trust it, that's an awesome feeling," said Shelle Elzer, legal operations manager at NetApp. "That's not something you could really do before AI."

Workday’s legal and procurement teams also experienced these results firsthand before acquiring Evisort in 2024. As our SVP and Deputy General Counsel Áine Lyons notes, our legal team achieved a 35x return of investment based on averted outside counsel fees alone. Our procurement team put their savings at 77x. 

That’s why my co-founders and I knew Workday would be the right home for our company, and the best way to bring our vision of enterprise-wide, agentic CLM to fruition for customers around the globe.

Want to see Workday’s new CLM experience and new agent in action? Register for our upcoming webinar.