Last week’s CLOC Global Institute (CGI) wasn’t just another gathering of legal operations professionals—it was a wake-up call.
Nearly every hallway conversation, panel discussion, and vendor pitch circled back to one powerful theme: AI is coming fast.
But actual adoption remains the elephant in the room. Not to mention the question of whether AI technology will perform at the level promised. As someone who’s spent two decades helping enterprises wrangle complex contracts, I can’t help but feel like we’re standing at a critical inflection point.
We don’t need more proof that AI can work in the fields of legal and legal operations; We just need more examples of how to make it actually work.
The energy around AI Is real, and the path forward Is clearer than ever
Across sessions with titles like “Building Your Own Custom GPTs,” “CLOC Must-Know: AI, Automation, and Business Alignment,” and “Harnessing GenAI,” the buzz around AI at CGI was electric. You could feel the shift happening. Legal teams are no longer asking if AI will play a role—they’re asking how soon and how deeply it can be embedded in their operations.
And with good reason. Contract AI holds enormous promise: Imagine surfacing risk in seconds, proactively managing obligations, or enabling sales to view complete customer histories without digging through shared drives. That vision is absolutely within reach.
But here’s what we don’t always say out loud: Real success takes thoughtful execution.
Not because the technology isn’t ready—but because adoption depends on more than just the tool. Contract hygiene, clear expectations, cross-functional collaboration, and realistic timelines all matter. These are the factors that determine whether AI becomes a daily advantage or just another stalled initiative.
The encouraging part? With the right approach, these challenges are absolutely manageable.
When you understand where the common pitfalls lie—and have strategies to address them—you can unlock the full value of AI. It’s not about finding the perfect solution out of the box. It’s about building a foundation your teams can adopt, use, and grow with.
A shared journey: Conversations that stuck with me
What really struck me this year wasn’t just the panels or the product demos—it was the conversations I had in between.
I spoke with Legal Ops professionals from all kinds of industries and company sizes, and the common thread was clear: These are people deeply committed to helping their legal departments work smarter. They’re process optimizers, tech translators, change managers—and now, AI evaluators.
And the truth is, we’re all figuring this out together.
Yes, AI is going to play a critical role in the future of legal operations. But it’s not about chasing shiny tools—it’s about asking the right questions. How do we define success? How do we make AI usable for teams outside of Legal? What do we need to clean up first?
These professionals aren’t looking for magic—they’re looking for momentum. And that’s what excites me most. There’s a real willingness in this community to share, experiment, and learn together. That’s how we’re going to move the needle—not just through better tech, but through better conversations and collaboration.
Adoption is the problem no one wants to admit
I’ve met with dozens of legal teams who’ve poured time and money into AI-powered CLMs or contract intelligence platforms, only to hit a wall. Why? Because while the tech demos sparkle, the real-world results often fall short.
Here’s what we’ve learned at Pramata from working with some of the world’s most complex contract environments:
- Flashy demos fall short. Many vendors showcase AI with a dozen curated NDAs. Try throwing thousands of multi-entity, amended, OCR-scanned contracts into the mix and the cracks show quickly.
- Garbage in, garbage out. If your contract data is incomplete, inconsistent, or poorly organized, even the best AI will struggle to produce usable insights.
- Most systems are not built for non-lawyers. If Finance, Sales, or Procurement can’t easily access and use the data, the adoption stops at Legal—and so does the ROI.
We’ve spent years thinking hard about these exact adoption bottlenecks—and designing Pramata’s Contract AI to solve them.
At Pramata, We Don’t Just Talk About Adoption. We Engineer for It.
Pramata’s approach is different because we started with a tough question: What would it take to make Contract AI work for legal AND the whole business?
The answer, we realized, is a platform that focuses on the invisible work no one else wants to touch:
- We cleanse and normalize your entire contract repository—including identifying duplicates, OCR errors, and missing documents—before the AI ever starts.
- We build contract hierarchies and customer relationship views automatically so users can understand the full context of each agreement, without hours of manual tagging.
- We surface insights that make sense to Sales, Finance, and Legal Ops—not just Legal—with CRM integrations, intuitive UX, and intelligent search that works like you think.
- We track amendments, superseded terms, and co-terminous agreements dynamically, so your data stays current—even as your business evolves.
We’ve even designed our system to require minimal IT support and offer a managed service for legacy clean-up with 99%+ accuracy—because we know adoption dies when complexity spikes.
The real test isn’t the demo. It’s Day 200.
AI should feel like a superpower, not a science experiment. But the only way to get there is to stop treating “AI” like a magic wand and start treating adoption like a product feature.
At Pramata, we’re proud that our customers don’t just get cool tech—they get contract intelligence that actually works in the messiness of the real world. That’s what separates tools that look good in a trial from solutions that transform how business gets done.
So if you left CLOC this year with questions about how to turn Contract AI from buzzword into business value, you’re not alone.
Let’s talk about how to build a roadmap from your current state, to a future you can only dream of, using Contract AI that actually works.
Want to learn more about what makes AI-powered contract management truly adoptable?
📄 Download our practical evaluation guide or get in touch for a conversation.
