SAP NOW AI Tour London: Icertis on AI Guardrails for Contract Lifecycle Management
At the SAP NOW AI Tour UKI in London, the thread was clear: AI that delivers outcomes wins. John McLaren, Director New Sales UK at Icertis, laid out how contract intelligence and agentic AI can work together to capture value that often slips through the cracks.
His premise is simple. Every pound or dollar a company spends, earns, or commits runs through a contract. Most are negotiated with care, signed, and then hidden away until renewal. That gap between what's agreed and what's executed is costly.
The value hiding in contracts
Research from independent bodies has long flagged value loss from weak contract execution and poor visibility. World Commerce & Contracting puts commercial value erosion in a similar range to what many enterprises see day to day. Learn more.
Icertis' stance: contracts should become data. Turn obligations, rights, SLAs, pricing, and risks into structured, queryable context. Feed that into workflows, analytics, and-crucially-AI agents that need a reliable source of truth.
Deep SAP integration: SolEx and Ariba
Icertis is a Solution Extension (SolEx) partner with SAP. That matters for CIOs and procurement leads because SAP sells SAP Ariba Contract Intelligence powered by Icertis. You can buy, deploy, and manage it through your SAP relationship.
The benefit isn't just procurement convenience. As a solution extension, updates and upgrades are pre-tested for compatibility, reducing integration risk and downtime. See SAP's contract management overview.
AI that respects the contract
There's plenty of hype around agentic AI making decisions on behalf of the business. The risk is obvious: hallucinations and unchecked actions. McLaren's point is practical-build guardrails from your commercial agreements.
Think of it as a digital twin of your commercial relationships. Price caps, rate cards, service credits, change controls, renewal windows-codified and enforced. Agents can draft, monitor, and recommend, but within the constraints your contracts define.
From admin to impact
Automation should remove the repetitive work: clause comparisons, obligation tracking, date-driven reminders, and baseline compliance checks. That frees legal, procurement, finance, and engineering stakeholders to focus on negotiation strategy, supplier performance, and insights that move the numbers.
The outcome: fewer misses on rebates and milestones, faster cycle times, tighter controls on spend, and cleaner data for forecasting.
Why events like SAP NOW matter
For SAP-centric organisations, the platform is the backbone. Events like this help leaders see what's possible when core systems, partners, and customers connect. You leave with a clearer path to value and a shortlist of use cases worth piloting.
Practical steps for IT, procurement, and dev teams
- Audit your current contracts: where are they stored, who owns them, and what's machine-readable today?
- Prioritise use cases with hard ROI: renewal management, price indexation, obligations tracking, and clause standardisation.
- Wire contracts into your operational stack: source-to-pay, CRM, ERP, ticketing, and data warehouse.
- Define AI guardrails from contracts: pricing limits, approval thresholds, authority levels, and service commitments.
- Start with a narrow agent scope: let agents draft, compare, flag, and recommend-keep humans in the loop for approval.
- Measure value capture: revenue realised, leakage reduced, cycle-time improvements, and compliance rates.
- Plan for upgrades: use pre-tested extensions where possible to cut maintenance effort and integration risk.
What this means for technical teams
CLM becomes a source of clean, high-signal data for AI. That means schema design for clauses and obligations, event-driven workflows, API-first integration, and policy-as-code to tie contract terms to agent behaviour.
Security and governance stay front and centre: role-based access, audit trails, PII handling, and consistent controls across legal, procurement, and finance.
The bottom line
AI without contract context is guesswork. AI with contract intelligence is actionable. If you use SAP and manage significant third-party spend or complex sales terms, bringing Icertis into your stack can help you capture value that's been left on the table for years.
If your teams are building AI skills for projects like this, you can browse practical, up-to-date courses here: Latest AI courses.
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