Q: You’ve been with Pramata for 20 years. That’s longer than a lot of tech companies even last. What drew you here in the first place?
I was just coming out of college with a degree in philosophy and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I’d tried a couple of jobs and they didn’t stick. Luckily, a good friend of mine was the first engineer at Pramata, and he mentioned they were looking for someone to fill a business analyst role. I’d always wanted to get into entrepreneurship, and this was my chance to get in on the ground floor. I basically showed up and said, “I’ll do whatever you want—I just want to get some experience!” And it all just grew from there.
Q: And what’s made you stay all these years?
Two things, really. The first is intellectual. There’s a real problem here that affects a lot of people, and it’s surprisingly hard to solve. Most enterprises have contracts that are scattered across inboxes and shared drives or locked inside a system only Legal uses. Which is strange when you think about what a contract actually is. Each contract is essentially a mini business model, defining pricing, scope, obligations, and how the relationship is supposed to operate. A portfolio of those contracts is, in a real sense, how the company should run. But almost nobody runs their business off them, because they can’t get to the data in a way the rest of the enterprise can use. We haven’t fully cracked that yet as an industry, and it keeps me engaged. With AI coming online now, I genuinely feel like we have an opportunity to make a big dent in this foundational business challenge.
The second reason is more personal, because I really enjoy the people I work with, both at Pramata and on the customer side. I like listening to people, understanding what’s causing them pain, and trying to help. That’s deeply rewarding for me on a personal level.
Q: How has your life changed over the past 20 years?
Pretty dramatically. I was hired at 22, and I’m 43 now, so I’ve essentially grown up with Pramata. I’ve lived in five different cities, spent significant time overseas, and gone from being basically a kid fresh out of college to a married adult who’s expecting his first child in July. It’s been quite a ride!
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
To stay healthy, I play hockey every week, and I spend a lot of time at the gym. I’m an ok guitarist and singer. I’m part of this organization where they match you with other musicians, you practice a handful of songs over the course of a month, and then you play a show. It’s super fun. Beyond music, I love sports, both watching and competing. And I read a lot: sci-fi, mystery and detective novels, and philosophy. My love for philosophy is something that never really went away. And playing games, all kinds of games!
Q: You started as a Business Analyst. Walk me through your journey to Chief Solutions Architect.
There were a lot of roles in between. In the early days, we were still figuring out what the heck the industry needed and what we were going to do as a company. When we started getting customers, I shifted into what we’d now call a Customer Success Manager role, where I led contract digitization and handled project management. Then as we started productizing the platform, I moved into product and spent time as a Product Director. From there, I shifted into Solution Architect with a focus on go-to-market and sales. And in the very early days, I was also the go-to person for admin tasks, and setting up our offices in India. You could say I was the jack-of-all-trades for Pramata.
Q: How has the Chief Solutions Architect role evolved over the years?
It started as something very customer-specific— making sure individual customers were getting solutions that actually solved their problems. What we’re trying to do now is elevate that. Instead of having a customer by customer focus, I’m looking across our entire prospect and customer base to find patterns, identify vertical solutions, and bring learnings from one industry to bear across others. I’m really pushing to move the solutions from the individual to the organizational level.
Q: What’s the core problem you’ve been solving for customers since day one?
Contracts as an enterprise asset. They really are, and companies should be running their businesses off of their contracts. But for most organizations, that’s almost impossible today for a thousand different reasons. What we at Pramata do is help companies elevate contracts to an enterprise-level asset so the entire organization can leverage them: to optimize operations, serve customers better, manage procurement costs, and support other business critical functions.
Here’s what I find remarkable: if you read a company’s quarterly report or listen in on a boardroom conversation, contracts come up constantly. And yet on the ground, they’re still treated like a tactical instrument that gets signed and thrown in a back room. That disconnect is what we’re working hard to close every day.
Q: How have you seen that philosophy resonate—or not—with enterprise customers over the years?
It’s been a challenge, honestly. Most organizations still silo contracts to the legal department and treat it as a one-time instrument. Part of what we do every day is help companies understand that this is an enterprise asset and needs to be treated as such. That said, I do see more and more companies coming to us with that vision already — we don’t have to convince them from scratch. That marks a real shift in understanding the data within contracts. But there’s still a lot of work to do across the industry to educate buyers on what we’re really talking about. It’s not just about efficiency. It’s about elevating the contract to something that’s treated with the same seriousness across the rest of the enterprise as it gets in the boardroom.
Q: If you had a crystal ball, what’s the one change you think could define enterprise contract intelligence in the next five years?
I think a lot of what people traditionally think of as CLM, such as contract drafting, redlining, negotiation, is going to be commoditized and baked into the tools people already use every day, like Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Google Docs. I don’t foresee those features living in heavy standalone SaaS applications much longer. What companies like Pramata will provide is the underlying intelligence layer these tools need to operate: the contract data, the context, the playbooks, the company standards — the things that inform and power those everyday workflows. It’s going to become less about creating separate systems and more about injecting hyper-specific contract intelligence into the processes people are already running.
Q: If the 22-year-old version of you walked into the office today, what would absolutely blow his mind?
The robots. We actually have robots now. I mean, it’s really AI — but the concept of real AI that actually works would have been completely unimaginable to me back then.
Q: Last one, what are you most excited about in your personal life right now?
Having a baby! We’re due in mid-July!.
Here’s to 20 More Years!
Tom’s contributions have shaped the Pramata we know today, from the early days of figuring out what contract intelligence could even look like, to helping define what it will look like now in the age of AI. His passion for solving hard problems, his genuine care for the people he works with, and his unwavering belief that contracts deserve a seat at the enterprise table have made him an invaluable part of this team for two decades. We’re grateful for everything Tom brings to Pramata every day, and we can’t wait to see what the next 20 years hold, robots and all. Congratulations, Tom!