By AC Agarwal, VP of Product, Pramata

I spent the ACC Annual Meeting talking with chief legal officers, general counsel, legal ops leaders, and in-house teams from just about every industry. One question came up more than any other: “How are you different?”

With all of the vendors on the tradeshow floor promising their tools had real contract intelligence, it’s a fair question. It’s clear no one wants another CLM, but cutting through the noise of promised features seems to be a challenge for most everyone I spoke to.

Here’s what I took away from my time on the ACC trade show floor.

Contract intelligence is a dime a dozen

Walking the exhibit hall, I found claims of intelligence at every turn. CLM platforms, AI redlining tools, and a new wave of lawyer productivity tools all claiming some version of contract intelligence. The trouble is how little there was to back those claims up. I saw a lack of demos that could mimic a company’s actual contract history, no real understanding of the business challenges the company faces in their industry, and a total misunderstanding of what intelligence actually means in 2026. 

Surprisingly enough, most of the conversations I heard about ROI value from these products also stopped at legal efficiency and speed to signature, which leaves a lot on the table. The hyperfocus on what happens before a contract is signed doesn’t allow for the proactive management needed to actually make an impact on ROI.

Cutting through all of that noise has become a job in and of itself for most of the professionals I connected with.

CLM left a bad taste

Nearly everyone shared the same frustration with CLM (and when they heard the term mentioned, they wanted to run for the hills). Several attendees told me they were two or more years into an implementation with only a handful of workflows live. Nobody I met was eager to sign up for yet another rip-and-replace project. For most of the attendees, no matter how many CLMs they had tried, their business needs still weren’t being met. And the main question we got at our booth was, “what makes you different?”

The difference is in what you can solve

The answer starts with the problems we solve. The GCs who leaned in cared about outcomes that reach well beyond legal: recovering revenue leakage for finance, holding suppliers to negotiated terms for procurement, and spotting renewal and pricing opportunities for sales,  and giving negotiators a clear view of what’s already been agreed to before the next deal is signed. Those wins gave them a way to show their CFO real ROI. For a team so often seen as a cost center, that changes the conversation.

We’ve been solving these problems for enterprise customers for decades, and it all starts with contract data you can trust. With our AI TrueCheck, we can now prove that accuracy at scale. Every term our AI extracts is compared against a human-curated answer key built from real contracts, then scored by a separate AI validation layer. Anything that falls short of high confidence goes to Pramata experts, who review and correct it. 

Customers see the results in a dashboard with accuracy scores, citations back to the source contract, and a full audit trail. That’s how we deliver 99%+ accuracy with no black box.

Partnership is the real differentiator

Our product does things other platforms can’t, and I’m proud of that. AI TrueCheck is a solid example of this. 

But what resonated most at ACC when answering “What makes you different?”, was the way we work. 

Technology has become powerful and increasingly commoditized. What teams want is a partner, a technology company that takes the time to understand their specific contracts, challenges, and industry, then makes the system fit them. 

Sometimes that means working alongside the tools a team already has. Sometimes it means finding the problem nobody else has been able to solve and tackling it head on. In every case, it means helping teams grow and scale without layering on more expense. That kind of flexibility is hard to find in traditional CLM, and it’s where we focus. We’re on a quest to make better work together.

If you’d like to learn more about Pramata and AI TrueCheck, schedule time here.