Robert Ambrogi Blog
In an alliance announced today, KPMG and SirionLabs are teaming up to offer digital contract management to enterprises worldwide, combining KPMG’s consulting expertise in addressing complex business problems with SirionLabs’ AI-driven contract lifecycle management technology.
The alliance encompasses KPMG in the U.S., KPMG in the U.K., and member firms of the global professional services network KPMG. KPMG will both promote SirionLabs’ technology to its clients and use it internally.
“We see contract management as a strategic enterprise capability that delivers commercial value,” said Nicola Brooks, KPMG UK’s head of contract management transformation. “All too often we find that contracting is siloed and an administrative burden on sales, procurement and legal.
“We challenge leaders to think about contracting in a new way,” Brooks said. “We’re excited to announce that ‘there is a better way’ to approach managing contracting with our partnership with SirionLabs.”
In October, SirionLabs entered into a similar partnership with global managed services provider Integreon to deliver comprehensive contract management automation through the combination of Integreon’s consulting and services expertise with SirionLabs’ technology.
Last August, in my LawNext podcast, I interviewed the founder of SirionLabs, Ajay Agrawal, who formerly cofounded UnitedLex, one of the earliest legal process outsourcing companies. He spoke about his company’s mission as aiming to disrupt the field of enterprise contract lifecycle management through the use of artificial intelligence technology.
The news of this alliances comes as digitization of contracts and automation of contract lifecycles increasingly becomes a key priority for major enterprises, especially as a result of the global pandemic. In my LawNext interview with Agrawal, he estimated that companies’ failure to properly manage their contractual obligations could be costing them as much as $2-3 trillion in losses every year.
I spoke again yesterday with Agrawal, who said that this alliance means that KPMG’s clients will have access to the unique combination of Sirion’s best-in-breed contract lifecycle management technology and KPMG’s advisory and implementation expertise to digitize and manage their commercial relationships.
“The most business impact will be seen in reducing the legal and the operational risk, gaining tremendous efficiencies, with touchless audit reporting and accelerated contract negotiations, and, importantly, driving hard savings by eliminating leakage and building revenues,” Agrawal said.
Although Sirion started with a focus on post-signature contract management, it has steadily expanded to cover the full contract lifecycle, including contract authoring, auto-extraction to digitize legacy contracts, obligation management, invoice auditing, and analytics.
This range of capabilities, Agrawal said, enables SirionLabs to work with companies at any stage of contract digitization, whether they are crawling, walking or running — with those that are crawling at the early stages of identifying where there contracts are and digitizing them into a central repository, those that are walking having centralized them and now using technology to understand what’s in them, and those that are running using advanced features to manage contractual relationships and policies.
The research company Gartner, in its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Contract Life Cycle Management report in 2020, positioned SirionLabs as a “visionary,” citing its advanced contract authoring capabilities, advanced automation for obligation extraction and ongoing management, and innovative product roadmap and vision.
KPMG says that the pandemic has accelerated demand for digitization technology. In its 2020 Global CEO Outlook survey, 80 percent of CEOs said that more digital acceleration had occurred within the last few months than in the previous few years.
Going forward, Agrawal said that one of his top priorities is to make AI-driven contract technology more accessible to a broader market by developing technology that requires less up-front training, so that it can easily and affordably be used with small sets of contracts.
His UnitedLex Disrupted Legal Services, Now Ajay Agrawal Aims to Disrupt Contracts