By Amit Garg
2025 arrived with a feeling of acceleration that was impossible to ignore. Artificial Intelligence moved from being a promising idea to a defining force. Global investments nearly doubled, new national AI policies took shape, and across the world, leaders invested heavily in AI infrastructure, signalling a clear shift in how industries will operate in the years ahead. It was a year that asked every business to pause, reassess how they work, and prepare for a future where technology is not just an enabler, but a partner. In many ways, 2025 encouraged all of us to think faster, adapt faster, and imagine bigger.
How these shifts shaped the CLM world
These global changes reshaped expectations in Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). As AI became more accessible and powerful, organizations began expecting not just automation, but intelligence. Teams across legal, procurement, finance, and sales sought augmentation, moving beyond the need for mere storage toward systems that elevate their expertise. Responsible AI use, transparency, and trust became central themes, and the market shifted toward tools that feel intuitive, supportive, and built for real decision-making. 2025 marked the moment when AI in CLM was no longer a concept; it became an everyday expectation.
How we responded to this changing world
Against this backdrop of a rapidly accelerating AI landscape, we spent 2025 making very deliberate choices about where smartContract CLM should focus. We knew that simply adding features was not enough. What customers needed was clarity over complexity, confidence in decision-making, and intelligence that worked quietly in the background rather than demanding attention.
This belief shaped our product evolution throughout the year. We moved Artificial Intelligence closer to the moment of decision-making, helping teams summarize and understand complex risks without searching through endless documents. We moved beyond storage to intelligent extraction, surfacing key contractual responsibilities so nothing falls through the cracks. We’ve made contractual data accessible at scale, transforming static documents into a dynamic asset that drives deep business insights and faster decision-making. At the same time, we focused on making the experience simpler and more intuitive, so intelligence feels like a natural extension of how people already work, not an additional layer to manage.
What this made possible for our customers
One of the clearest validations of this approach came through our work with a large global enterprise operating across multiple regions. The highly dynamic nature of their business made the contracting process complex and cumbersome. By focusing on clarity and alignment through contract intelligence, we transformed their contracting from a bottleneck into a strategic asset, delivering one of our most complex yet fastest implementations to date. When their teams told us that the process finally felt clear, it reinforced that process improvement driven by the right application of AI can bring excellence to even the most complex environments.
A milestone that reflected customer trust
One of the most meaningful moments of the year was being recognized as a Strong Performer in the Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer report for the CLM market. This recognition mattered because it came directly from customers. Moving from the Aspiring category to the Strong Performer category in just one year reaffirmed something we strongly believe: progress follows when you listen closely. With a 4.9-star rating and 93 percent of users recommending smartContract CLM across industries such as finance, media, manufacturing, and services, this milestone reflected trust built through consistent, thoughtful execution.
The people behind the progress
None of this would have been possible without our teams. Throughout our journey as a company, we have invested in creating an environment where people could learn, experiment, and grow together. One of the highlights was our company-wide AI hackathons, where teams came together to explore ideas and push boundaries as we expanded our generative AI capabilities. Many of our product features came from these hackathons. These moments reminded us that while technology shapes the product, people shape the purpose.
Looking ahead to 2026
As we look toward 2026, we are pursuing a vision that goes far beyond managing documents. This direction is driven by the belief that a contract should no longer be a static record of the past, but a living engine of the future. We are moving toward an era where information finds the person who needs it exactly when they need it, turning contractual data into an effortless stream of institutional memory. Our vision is to see legal and business teams stop being document processors and start being strategic architects, designing the outcomes that technology then orchestrates. Every contract signed should instantly inform the next, creating a loop of collective intelligence that makes an organization smarter, faster, and more resilient with every deal.
Thank you for being a part of our journey and for trusting smartContract CLM. We look forward to continuing this journey together in the year ahead.
