Most companies still treat contracts as records.
They negotiate the agreement, sign it, store it, and return to it when someone has a question, a renewal approaches, or a dispute arises. The contract governs the relationship, but much of the business operates without consulting it every time a decision is made.
AI agents may change that pattern.
As agents begin purchasing products, renewing subscriptions, managing suppliers, issuing payments, and negotiating terms, they will need to consult contracts before they act. The agreement will no longer sit quietly in a repository waiting for a person to search for it. Its terms may become active inputs into transactions as they occur.
That turns contracts into infrastructure.
Consider an agent managing a company’s software subscriptions. Before renewing a product, it could confirm whether renewal is automatic, calculate any permitted price increase, review service performance, identify unused licenses, verify the required notice period, and determine whether human approval is necessary.
Another agent might evaluate a supplier’s request to use company data. It could examine the applicable contract, identify permitted purposes, check retention limits, review geographic restrictions, and determine whether the proposed activity falls within the parties’ agreement.
In each case, the contract does more than document rights and obligations. It provides permissions, constraints, and decision rules.
This is different from asking an AI system to summarize a document. A summary tells a person what the contract says. Transactional infrastructure helps determine what a system may do next.
For that to work, the agent must receive more than a block of text. It needs to know which agreement applies, whether it has been amended, which provisions survived, and how the terms interact. It must distinguish an obligation from an option, a prohibition from a preference, and a contractual right from an internal decision to exercise that right.
The agent also needs context beyond the four corners of the agreement. A contract may permit renewal, but company policy may require competitive review. It may allow a price increase, but the business may have established a lower approval threshold. It may permit a particular use of data while a new law or internal policy imposes a tighter restriction.
Contracts will therefore become one layer in a broader decision system. They will operate alongside company standards, approval rules, market information, performance data, and legal requirements. The value will come from connecting these sources, not treating the agreement as self-executing.
This shift has important implications for in-house legal teams.
First, contract data must become more reliable. If an agent is expected to act on a renewal date, usage restriction, or approval right, that information cannot be buried in an unverified summary. Companies will need provenance, version control, and a clear connection to the governing language.
Second, drafting will need to account for machine use. That does not mean writing contracts in code or abandoning language designed for human interpretation. It means recognizing that ambiguity, inconsistent terminology, scattered definitions, and poorly documented amendments create operational problems when systems rely on the agreement.
Third, legal teams will need to decide which provisions can function as direct rules and which require interpretation. “Payment is due within 30 days” may be relatively straightforward. “The supplier will maintain commercially reasonable security” is not. A mature system must preserve that distinction rather than creating false certainty.
Lastly, contracts designed for agents must remain understandable to people. Humans will still negotiate the terms, approve exceptions, resolve ambiguity, and bear responsibility for the results. Machine usability cannot come at the expense of meaningful human review.
The near-term task is not to redesign every contract for autonomous execution. It is to identify which recurring business decisions already depend on contractual information and determine whether that information is accurate, accessible, and connected to the appropriate controls.
Contracts have always governed commercial relationships. What is changing is how directly they may govern commercial activity.
In-house lawyers should prepare for a world in which contracts are not merely documents that explain what happened. They are part of the infrastructure that determines what happens next.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, where she builds legal systems that make contracts faster to understand, easier to operate, and more trustworthy in real business conditions. Her work focuses on how legal rules allocate power, manage risk, and shape decisions under uncertainty. A serial CEO and former General Counsel, Olga previously led a legal technology company through acquisition by LexisNexis. She teaches at Berkeley Law and is a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. She has authored several books on legal innovation and technology, delivered six TEDx talks, and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Above the Law. Her work treats law as essential infrastructure, designed for how organizations actually operate.
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