Disruption has become the operating condition. For many, the commercial response is still designed for the exception.
On 1 July, Brent crude closed at $71.57 a barrel. On 23 July it settled at $100.69, gaining almost 7% in a single session and around 40% in three weeks.1 On the same day, the Office of the United States Trade Representative confirmed duties of 10% to 12.5% on imports from some 60 economies accounting for 99% of US imports, effective one minute after midnight.2 Iran-aligned Houthi forces struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, having declared a maritime embargo on Saudi shipping days earlier. Several loaded carriers turned around mid-voyage.3
The commercial machinery in many organisations still treats each occurrence as an aberration, or part of an increasingly tedious continuum. Force majeure is invoked, hardship provisions, suspension rights and delay terms are consulted, price adjustment is demanded and resisted, and legal teams are asked to review contract portfolios they cannot easily analyse. Then the event subsides, only for the next one to come piling in. Hence the phrase that keeps coming to mind, and the title of this piece.
What is actually new this time
Three features of the current escalation break the pattern of previous ones, and each has a specific contractual consequence.
The tariff is priced against a third government’s conduct. These are not product duties or trade-balance duties. They are Section 301 measures triggered by a trading partner’s alleged failure to legislate and enforce a ban on goods made with forced labour. The rate applied to your goods is therefore determined by the legislative behaviour of a state that is party neither to your contract nor to the dispute, assessed unilaterally by the importing state, and revisable at any point in the life of the agreement. India illustrates the mechanism: initially designated at 12.5%, it qualified for 10% after tightening enforcement between proposal and implementation.4 A change-in-law clause typically addresses the law of the place of performance or the law governing the parties. Almost none of them contemplate a trigger of this shape, which means the exposure sits in the gap between drafted risk and real risk – unallocated, and therefore litigated.
Trade policy has absorbed supply chain due diligence. Human rights diligence has been treated by most organisations as a reporting and reputational obligation, resourced accordingly and housed away from the commercial function. It now carries a direct price of up to 2.5 percentage points of landed cost, with product-level differentiation for several countries. At the same time, exemptions have been granted for oil, gas, fertilizer and goods qualifying under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.5 The commercial advantage moves to whoever can produce the evidence: origin documentation, classification records, visibility into the tiers below the direct supplier. Traceability clauses that have sat unexercised in supplier agreements for a decade have just become pricing instruments.
Diversification has produced concentration. Saudi Arabia responded to the disruption of Hormuz by redirecting more than 70% of affected exports through the Red Sea. The Red Sea route is now under declared blockade and active attack.6The resilience measure created the new single point of failure. This is the clearest evidence yet for a question we raised in our June research and could not then settle: whether organisations are overcorrecting in ways that generate hidden fragility. Alternate routes, second sources and backup ports offer protection only where the alternative is genuinely uncorrelated with the primary. Very few organisations test that correlation, and most contractual continuity provisions simply name the alternative without examining it.
There is a fourth development worth watching closely. Marine underwriters have signalled that cover can be withdrawn from vessels paying transit tolls at Hormuz.7 When insurance is withdrawn, the constraint moves from cost to availability, and a price adjustment mechanism becomes irrelevant. What follows is non-performance, and an argument about a clause that was drafted for something else.
So is this a fight about price?
Price is where the argument often surfaces, but it may not be where the problem originates.
Consider what an organisation must be able to do to respond well to the events of the past three weeks. It must identify, within hours, which live contracts are exposed to a 12.5% duty and which qualify for an exemption. It must locate the evidence supporting that qualification. It must know which delivery obligations depend on a single maritime corridor, and which of its alternates depend on the same corridor. It must know where its energy exposure is fixed, where it is indexed, and where the index resets. It must know which counterparties are carrying unhedged exposure severe enough to threaten their solvency, because a supplier’s failure will cost more than the price increase it was resisting.
Our June survey found that a substantial proportion of organisations cannot do the first of those things. Many require at least two weeks to assess contractual exposure to a new disruption event, and a significant group has no systematic process at all.8 Brent moved 40% in three weeks. The cycle time of disruption is now shorter than the cycle time of contractual response, which means the negotiation over price adjustment begins after the economics have already been decided elsewhere.
Price is the layer of the problem that is visible to everyone, which is why it absorbs the attention. Underneath it sit portfolio legibility, evidentiary capability, correlated dependency and insurability – none of which can be fixed once an event is underway.
Why we stay tactical
The obvious response is to call for better anticipation and more strategic planning. We have made that call ourselves, repeatedly, and it has not worked. It is worth asking why.
Our research points to a structural explanation rather than a failure of will. Organisations cannot calculate the cost of disruption, because they cannot locate where it will land in their contract portfolio. They cannot build the economic case for resilience, because the costs sit in one function and the offsetting benefits in another, and no one holds both sets of numbers. And any unilateral move toward resilience meets resistance from counterparties under identical pressure, each seeking to transfer the same risk in the opposite direction. Investment in resilience therefore fails the business case test that the organisation itself applies. Inaction is the rational individual choice, and the aggregate outcome is a system that fights itself.9
This is why exhortation fails. Commercial teams are behaving sensibly within the constraints they face. The constraints are the problem.
When do we become strategic?
When the economics become visible. That is the whole of the answer, and it sets the agenda.
Four things follow.
Make the portfolio legible before the next event. Exposure mapping is a data exercise conducted in calm conditions. It cannot be performed during a crisis, which is precisely when every organisation attempts it. The organisations that responded well to this month’s tariff announcement had already tagged their contracts by origin, corridor and index.
Pre-agree the mechanism, then argue about the number. Disputes over price adjustment consume weeks because the parties are negotiating the principle and the quantum simultaneously, under time pressure, with both sides believing the other is opportunistic. Agreeing the trigger, the reference index, the sharing ratio and the review cadence in advance converts a negotiation into a calculation. The June research was unambiguous on the sequence: principles before mechanisms, and shared interest ahead of positional standoff.
Stop routing a permanent condition through force majeure. Force majeure allocates the unforeseeable. Annual geopolitical disruption is foreseeable, which is why these claims fail and why the resulting arguments are so bitter – both parties are reasoning under a clause designed for a different world. Recurring disruption belongs in the pricing and governance architecture, where it can be managed, rather than in the excuse architecture, where it can only be contested.
Connect governance to the commercial decision. Fewer than one organisation in six reports board-level oversight of geopolitical risk, and a substantial minority has no formal governance or only an ad hoc arrangement.10 Governance that meets quarterly to review a risk register has no bearing on a sourcing decision taken on a Tuesday afternoon. The connection has to be operational.
The uncomfortable part
Every organisation reading this has a supplier or customer who read the same headlines this week and reached the opposite conclusion about who should absorb the cost. That symmetry is the reason the tactical response keeps failing. Unilateral resilience is unavailable when the exposure is shared, and it is always shared.
The strategic move is therefore not a better clause. It is a conversation with the counterparty about an exposure both parties can see and neither can carry alone, conducted before the event rather than during it. That conversation is difficult, slow and unfamiliar. It is also the only version of this that works.
We will publish the next wave of disruption research in the autumn. On present evidence, the events will have moved again by then and the commercial response will not have. The question for members is a simple one: when the next headline arrives, will your organisation be reading it, or will it already have acted?
Sources
Footnotes
CNBC, 23 July 2026, reporting Brent settlement at $100.69, the first close above $100 since 26 May. Opening figure of $71.57 for 1 July reported by CNN, 23 July 2026. ↩
Office of the United States Trade Representative, announcement of 23 July 2026, reported by Reuters, Bloomberg and NPR. Duties imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, replacing temporary Section 122 levies introduced after the Supreme Court ruling of 20 February 2026. ↩
Saudi Press Agency, confirming the attack on the tanker Encelia; Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree, quoted by Al Jazeera; OilPrice.com and The National, 23 July 2026. ↩
Senior administration official, quoted by the Associated Press and NPR, 23 July 2026. ↩
Every business function wants to elevate its role, its influence, its status. So it is in this context that we should consider current conversations about the need for ‘licensed procurement professionals’. It’s an important conversation because it opens the opportunity to discuss our fast changing business environment and how commercial roles more broadly should evolve. And that’s where World Commerce & Contracting naturally tends to show its leadership through research – and that research certainly indicates the importance of upskilling to escape the limits of today’s procurement activities.
So should we embrace the idea of Licensed Procurement Professionals? Let’s set aside the immediate linguistic objection about the desination ‘professional’ – professions are nouns (lawyer, doctor, engineer, actuary) and there is no noun for someone who procures, unless it is ‘buyer’ or ‘procurer’, neither of which has much immediate appeal. But the more important questions are these: licensed to do what? Accountable for what? And to whom?
Licences exist for a reason. Society grants them where unqualified practice causes harm, and in exchange it demands something: a duty that extends beyond the employer. The doctor answers to the patient. The lawyer answers to the court. The engineer answers to public safety. In each case, the licence creates personal accountability for outcomes affecting people who sit outside the employing organization.
So test procurement against that standard. If (as has been suggested) the licence is to be grounded in ethical practice, the profession’s record based on its current practices invites awkward questions. How many suppliers driven into insolvency by imposed terms and stretched payment? How many jobs destroyed in the process? How many disputes generated when buying power was used to walk away from commitments? How many start-ups relieved of their margins, their innovation, sometimes their existence, by customers who knew they had no choice?
These are not fringe behaviors. They are, in many organizations, measured and rewarded. Procurement becomes the vehicle for their implementation and is trained accordingly by many of the primary education providers.
And if the foundation is not ethics or widely acknowledged social benefit, what is it? Cost cutting? So what – any function can cut costs; the question is at whose expense and with what consequence. Securing supply? So what – that is an operational duty, not a professional one. Compliance with policies set by others? So what – executing rules you did not shape and cannot challenge is the definition of administration, not professionalism. Professions are distinguished precisely by independent judgment, exercised against a duty of care, with personal accountability when that judgment fails.
None of this means procurement cannot earn professional status – and I have long been at the forefront of those who suggest it should. But the route is not a licence bolted onto the current practice taught by conventional training programs. It runs through defining what the discipline is accountable for: perhaps things like supporting the health of the markets it operates in, the reliability of the commitments it makes, the economic value it creates, rather than merely the cost it extracts or the compliance it imposes.
Until the accountability question is answered, a licence is just an award in search of a purpose. And credentials without accountability do not create professionals – they create people with certificates.
Framed Professional Procurement Practitioner License for Sarah J. Anderson
Two weeks on, I reflect on Docusign’s Momentum events. These have become a barometer for where agreement management is heading, and London 2026 confirmed an important message: the process by which most organizations manage their agreements is broken.
In my conversations with delegates, the reasons for that were clear and consistent. Fragmentation across functions and systems means agreements are delayed, data sits in disconnected repositories and e-mails, multiple departmental hand-offs are required to gain approvals. In today’s demanding market conditions, the status-quo is simply unsustainable. One CPO told me: “It’s not just embarrassing, it’s career threatening when I really have no clue how the agreements I put in place are performing”.
I was impressed by the numbers attending Momentum in London and by their evident enthusiasm to transform how they manage agreements for the better. This was especially the case on the customer message board – always a risky proposition – yet here there was tremendous positivity about the impact Docusign has had. Right now that impact has been most obvious in efficiency: reduced workload, faster turnaround. But as the Docusign team were keen to explain, efficiency is only the beginning. AI-equipped solutions are shifting from efficiency to effectiveness and action, and that is where the real value lies, especially in post-award management.
It wasn’t the diagnosis that made the event compelling – many of us have been making it for years – but the evidence that things really are starting to change. Customers like Aon and Experian described their journeys from fragmented, manual agreement handling to something far more coherent, and in doing so demonstrated how a specialised AI is elevating contract lifecycle management to levels that simply weren’t achievable before. These are not early stage pilots; they are large-scale implementations in complex organizations and they show that there is now a cure.
Docusign itself brings a perspective few can match. With nearly 1.9 million customers, it has an extraordinary vantage point over how the world actually agrees, and its capabilities continue to develop at an impressive pace. This year’s introduction of the Iris AI assistant and agents, together with Agent Studio for building custom agreement workflows, signals a shift from managing documents to actively moving work forward.
Yet the message was tempered with realism. In my interview with Stéphane Barberet, head of Docusign in EMEA, he was careful with his advice to ‘aim big, start small’. Technology is not an immediate fix. Simply implementing new systems on top of poorly defined processes is not the answer and it never has been. Technology amplifies whatever it is applied to, including dysfunction. The organizations making genuine progress are those that treat AI as a catalyst for rethinking the process and the value it should be generating.
The prize that awaits us justifies the ambition. Globally, an estimated $2 trillion leaks away from contract value every year. This is a finding that builds on and confirms WorldCC’s work stretching back almost 15 years on the cost of poor contract and commercial management and the sources of that erosion. This is commercial policy failure hiding in plain sight.
Docusign is not alone on its journey. Its close collaboration with market leaders such as Legora underlines a commitment to innovation driven by ecosystem engagement and customer outcomes rather than product features. The message from Momentum is clear. The question for every executive team is whether they continue to accept a broken process as just an unfortunate cost of doing business, or whether they recognise that, increasingly, broken is a choice.
If there had been a vote in the main hall, it’s clear that the sentiment would have been overwhelming: it’s time to change.
“The way agreements are handled today is fundamentally broken” – Allan Thygesen, CEO, Docusign
In truth, there never was a golden era of agreement management – but in an increasingly interconnected world, with increasingly complicated rights, obligations and regulations, the ability to manage performance has become a critical capability.
So why did anyone allow agreement management to become ‘broken’? It’s not new news – WorldCC has been researching and writing on this for more than 20 years. And people were listening, working to contain the value leakage, which back in 2013 WorldCC first evaluated as equivalent to an average 9.2% of revenue.
The answer is that no one wanted to own the problem. It was just too difficult. Contracts sat with legal. Performance sat with the business. Obligations sat wherever someone remembered to track them – a spreadsheet, a calendar reminder, a relationship manager’s memory. Each function optimised its own piece and protected itself from its own risks, with no one positioned to see or manage the agreement as a whole.
And when it came to technology, fragmented systems defeated efforts to deploy contract lifecycle platforms. At best, CLM offered a system of record, not a system of action. They tell you what you signed. They don’t tell you what’s happening.
AI changes that equation. For the first time, it’s possible to read across the silos – contract terms, performance data, regulatory change, counterparty behavior – and surface what matters. That’s what we mean by commercial intelligence: not a smarter repository, but an integrated function that continuously connects agreement to outcome and flags the gap before it becomes value leakage.
Docusign shares that same perspective. At its annual Momentum event in London, we heard from industry leaders like Experian and Aon about how they are tackling these challenges by deploying Docusign’s AI-native Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform to eliminate inefficiencies and turn contract management into a source of competitive advantage..
‘Broken’ is no longer inevitable: it’s a choice.
If you’re interested in what an AI-native intelligent agreement platform looks like in practice, Docusign’s overview of IAM is a good place to start:https://www.docusign.com/
“Finance professionals must become leaders who pair financial rigor with data literacy, business acumen, and strong communication.”
That’s the view of James Rivett, CFO of Deutsche Bank Americas, expressed in a recent Wall Street Journal interview. What he describes has similarities with the opinions of WorldCC when it talks about the emergence of the ‘commercial integrator’ – a role that orchestrates across functional silos to ensure speed and judgment in decision-making.
So are these views compatible, or in conflict?
Analysis suggests that the Rivett interview maps onto WorldCC thinking in some important ways, but also reveals some telling gaps that actually strengthen the case for the Commercial Integrator model.
Where it aligns well
The “multidisciplined athlete” framing is almost directly analogous to what WorldCC argues about the commercial professional – that technical craft (contracting, financial controls) is necessary but no longer sufficient. Rivett’s four disciplines (financial fluency, data literacy, business acumen, communication) closely mirror the blend WorldCC advocates: commercial rigour, intelligence capability, relationship management, and stakeholder influence. The architecture is similar even if the vocabulary differs.
James Rivett’s point about bottom-up AI adoption is also strongly consistent with WorldCC’s critique of enterprise transformation programs that impose tools without embedding them in workflow. The “daily pain points” argument is exactly what WorldCC’s Commercial Intelligence Office concept addresses. Intelligence has to be useful at the point of commercial decision-making, not aggregated upward into dashboards nobody acts on.
Where the gaps are revealing
The most significant gap is structural. Rivett describes a function becoming more capable – finance gets smarter, more data-literate, better at communication. But this is still a vertical transformation. WorldCC’s argument about the Commercial Integrator is that the problem isn’t any one function’s competence; it’s the absence of a horizontal integrating architecture that connects buy-side and sell-side commercial intelligence across functions. Rivett’s model doesn’t resolve that. A smarter finance function still operates in its own swim lane.
In the interview, Rivett reveals that when he took over the CFO role, he initiated a time-and-motion study and found that 40% of his team’s time was spent reconciling data. That figure is striking and very similar to WorldCC findings regarding contract management and procurement teams. His response to that discovery is characteristically finance-centric: automate the reconciliation. The WorldCC lens would ask a prior question – why is data so fragmented in the first place, and who owns the commercial data architecture that prevents reconciliation being needed at scale? That’s a Commercial Intelligence Office question, not a finance efficiency question.
James Rivett’s investor relations background shapes his definition of communication in a particular direction, towards external stakeholders, boards, regulators. WorldCC would push this further into the internal commercial relationship: how does the organisation communicate commercial intent and obligation across the delivery chain? That’s a contracting and relationship management question that finance leaders rarely own.
The net reading
Rivett’s vision is a sophisticated version of function improvement. WorldCC’s Commercial Integrator argument is about system design. The two aren’t incompatible and, in fact, a finance leader with Rivett’s profile would be a natural ally of a Commercial Integrator architecture because they’re answering different questions. Rivett is asking “what does a great finance professional look like?” WorldCC is asking “what organisational architecture lets commercial professionals of any discipline act on shared intelligence?” That’s the more fundamental and less commonly asked question, which is arguably where WorldCC’s distinctive contribution lies.
At its core, Procurement operates as a process discipline. It exists to bring rigour to the management of spend, to create structure around sourcing decisions, to enforce compliance, to manage supplier selection, and to ensure that the organisation buys at the right price, from the right sources, under approved terms. These are legitimate and necessary goals and the training frameworks that support procurement professionals have been designed to deliver them.
But process disciplines carry an inherent constraint: they are ultimately in service of others. Procurement executes on behalf of the business. It does not typically own the commercial strategy it is asked to implement and it rarely has – or seeks – final accountability for whether a relationship with a supplier generates the value originally envisioned. It often becomes involved when a need has already been defined by someone else, then works within risk and legal frameworks shaped by others, and often exits once a contract is signed.
This structural positioning matters because it means that even a highly capable procurement function, performing its process role with excellence, may be doing little more than efficiently executing a strategy it had limited influence in shaping, against a commercial model it had no hand in designing, with accountability for outcomes that largely sits elsewhere.
Procurement leaders are acutely aware of this tension. Talk of “expanding the function’s role,” of becoming a “strategic partner,” of moving “beyond transactional activity,” has been a constant refrain for at least two decades. The language of integration, of procurement as the connective tissue between supply markets and organisational strategy, is increasingly common. The aspiration is real and necessary
But aspiration is not architecture and architecture, in this case, requires something that pure procurement training and credentialing does not provide – a genuinely holistic view of the commercial lifecycle, grounded in theory, validated by research, and capable of withstanding the volatility of the environment organisations now face.
in Part 2, I’ll explore what this means for today’s practitioners.
An older man urgently warns a younger man not to sign the wrong contract.
One thing is agreed – organization’s are facing high levels of uncertainty. Most commentary then falls into one of two camps. Consultants describe the need for internal organizational change – new structures, new leadership models, new capabilities. Functional groups, meanwhile, interpret disruption through the lens of their own future relevance. Procurement, legal, finance, and IT each argue why their discipline will become more important. Both perspectives miss something fundamental.
The real challenge facing modern organizations is not primarily internal. It lies in how effectively they design and manage their commitments to the market – to customers, suppliers, partners, platforms, and regulators. Yet the mechanisms through which those commitments are defined and governed remain poorly understood. And this is where contracting should play a central role.
Disruption itself is not new. In the 1990s, the emergence of the worldwide web and the collapse of the Soviet system reshaped markets in ways that felt just as dramatic as today’s advances in AI and geopolitical uncertainty. At IBM, where I led the reengineering of the company’s global approach to contracting, we learned an important lesson. Transformation did not begin with internal restructuring. It began with understanding the commitments the market required us to make.
Customers expected consistent global availability, centralized ordering, coordinated demand management, integrated payment systems, and dependable service delivery. Those expectations defined the commitments we had to enable in our contracts – and they were the antithesis of the organizational capabilities at that time.
Only once those commitments were clear did internal redesign follow. Systems, policies, resource deployment, and management structures were aligned to support them. It was an outside-in redesign.
Contracting, properly understood, acts as a commercial integrator. Because every contract requires alignment across policies, processes, systems, risk management, and operational capability, defining what future contracts must contain becomes a practical catalyst for coordinated organizational change.
Until now, however, there has been a fundamental limitation. The information embedded in contracts has been extraordinarily difficult to marshal – distributed across documents, systems, emails, and the experience of individuals. The commitments that actually governed the enterprise’s relationship with the market were fragmented and largely invisible. And this is where AI begins to change the equation.
That is not because it can redline documents faster (an application that risks reinforcing the outdated view of contracts as static paperwork). but because it can finally make the commercial data embedded in contracts usable at scale. Through appreciating the power of interconnected data, contracting becomes both the mechanism for designing market commitments and a powerful intelligence system for sensing how those commitments must evolve.
AI can connect and interpret the thousands of obligations, performance conditions, pricing mechanisms, service levels, governance provisions, and change mechanisms that exist across an organization’s agreements. Instead of sitting inside documents, these elements can become structured intelligence about how the enterprise actually operates in the market. Three capabilities start to emerge.
First, contracts become an operational map of commitments, showing what the organization has promised, to whom, and under what conditions.
Second, they become a real-time market sensing system, revealing changes in customer expectations, supplier capabilities, pricing dynamics, and risk exposure.
Third, they become a design tool, helping organizations shape new commercial models and commitments that better reflect evolving market realities.
Seen this way, AI elevates the strategic importance of the contracting process.
Now, for the first time, organizations have the opportunity to treat their commercial agreements not as static documents or isolated transactions, but as a dynamic, interconnected system describing how they engage with the market, and how that engagement must continually evolve. Those that continue to view contracts through a traditional lens will struggle to make sense of AI or operational redesign. The real opportunity is not simply faster contracting. It is contract intelligence as the foundation of a market-aligned operating model.
For decades organisations have understood that real value lies not in selling products, but in delivering performance over time. Aerospace introduced “power by the hour,” aligning payment with engine availability rather than spare parts. Industrial leaders such as SKF developed models focused on reliability and operational outcomes. Customers want to buy capability, not equipment.
So why didn’t outcome-based and lifecycle models become dominant long ago?
The limitation was capability. These approaches depend on trusted data, visibility into usage, operating conditions and performance. That data was incomplete, expensive or difficult to validate. Contracts linking payment to outcomes carried too much uncertainty, so commercial arrangements continued to operate with fixed pricing and rigid risk allocation.
This constraint both reflected and reinforced commercial fragmentation. Pricing, service delivery, finance and contracting operated separately, each holding part of the picture but none seeing the whole. Adaptive models were simply too risky to scale.
That constraint is now disappearing. Digital connectivity, sensors, analytics and AI are making performance visibility routine. Organisations can increasingly understand value creation as it happens rather than reconstruct it months later. The technical barriers that once limited lifecycle and outcome-based approaches are rapidly eroding.
Across industries, the aftermarket is becoming the primary engine of growth and margin. Revenue shifts toward long-term service relationships. Customers expect availability, efficiency and outcomes, not transactions.
But now, volatile markets mean that pricing and cost management must become dynamic – and contracting has become the constraint. Most agreements are still designed to create certainty at signature. Prices are fixed, risks allocated once, and governance assumes stability. Yet the environments those contracts govern are defined by continuous change. Renegotiations increase, change orders multiply and commercial friction grows. Organisations generate better insight but are struggling to act on it.
The barrier is no longer technology. It is commercial design. Organisations possess increasing commercial intelligence but lack integrated mechanisms to use it. Pricing teams see signals contracts cannot accommodate. Service teams understand performance realities without authority to adjust terms. Finance models remain disconnected from operational variability. Legal and contract management focus on compliance rather than the value that’s created during execution.
This fragmentation is structural and it is why the contracting process and contracts themselves must become governance frameworks. Through a streamlined process, contracts must define how pricing adapts, how performance is measured, how data is shared and how decisions evolve over time. The purpose of contracting shifts from locking terms to enabling controlled change.
Markets have already changed and technology has already changed. Contracting capability and capacity now determine whether organisations can keep up.
“I’m so excited about what Copilot is doing for us”, gushed an attendee at a recent contract management event. “We are serving the business so much faster and soon the quality of output will mean we can avoid many of the traditional reviews and approvals.”
I don’t disagree with those observations, though I do wonder why that individual wasn’t recognizing that they may rapidly become one of those eliminated ‘review and approval’ steps. WorldCC’s recent executive dialogues reveal a striking convergence across buy-side and sell-side leaders. Regardless of role or sector, participants described the same pressures: the need for faster decision cycles, clearer accountability, stronger data visibility, adaptive contract structures, and earlier commercial involvement in strategic initiatives. This alignment signals something important – the challenge and the opportunity created by AI is no longer functional; it is systemic.
Core AI capability is rapidly becoming a great equalizer. Large language models and agentic tools are making sophisticated analysis, drafting, and pattern recognition widely accessible. These technologies will transform productivity, but they are unlikely to provide lasting differentiation. When everyone has access to similar tools, advantage shifts elsewhere.
For professionals in legal, procurement, and contract management, the question therefore becomes “what is the source of sustainable value?” It cannot be the technology itself. It must lie in the judgment, commercial insight, relational intelligence, governance design, and strategic framing that technology alone cannot provide. Tools can generate options; only skilled practitioners determine which commitments are worth making and how they should be structured to deliver performance. Unless they are bringing insights and intelligence that go beyond those delivered through AI, they become irrelevant.
This is precisely why institutions such as World Commerce & Contracting, NCMA and the CCM Institute matter. In a landscape where baseline capability is increasingly automated, differentiation comes from building and maintaining shared and adaptive standards, advanced practice, research-driven insight, and the continuous development of evolving professional judgment. Sustainable advantage will belong to organizations that are engaged with the formation of thought leadership, cultivating these capabilities deliberately, not those that assume technology is a substitute for them.
High-performing organizations are already responding. As we saw in our 2025 Global Benchmark Report, the leaders embed commercial expertise early, pre-align baseline terms with key partners, and design governance pathways that accelerate execution. Speed, in this context, is not a trade-off against control; it is the result of intelligent design.
Technology is reshaping expectations in other ways as well. Contracts contain vast stores of operational and financial data, much of it historically inaccessible. Modern tools can surface obligations, detect performance risks, and generate insight, but only if organizations resist the temptation to automate broken processes. Technology should inform decisions, not scale inefficiency.
Meanwhile, the one-size-fits-all contract is becoming obsolete. Regulatory divergence, geopolitical tension, and cultural variation demand adaptive agreements engineered for execution, not uniformity. Resilience must be designed into contract structures through mechanisms such as clause libraries, review triggers, and structured amendment processes.
Perhaps most encouraging is that the capability gap is less about skills than deployment. Many commercial professionals already possess strong analytical abilities, yet too much effort is spent resolving problems after they occur. The future belongs to organizations that position commercial teams earlier — shaping deals, preventing friction, and aligning stakeholders before value leaks away.
Taken together, these signals point to a deeper shift: contracting is evolving from document creation to intelligence generation to operating model design.
Organizations that fail to modernize – or simply think that using Copilot and agentic AI provides competitive advantage – are missing a key point. Speed, control and access to data are features of a process. The future advantage will not belong to those who manage contracts most efficiently. It will belong to those who design and execute distinctive commercial capability.
When uncertainty spikes, people do not behave rationally, they behave defensively. The panic buying of toilet paper during the pandemic was not about hygiene. It was about control, reassurance, and fear of being exposed if systems failed.
The same dynamics play out inside organisations.
When markets become volatile, organisations retreat to what feels safe: rigid templates, maximum liability, prescriptive SLAs, and heavy approval gates. Like stockpiling toilet paper, these actions offer psychological comfort, not real protection. Individually, they seem prudent. Collectively, they create friction, delay, and value loss.
Panic buying accelerates because people observe others doing it. Empty shelves become proof that “someone knows something I don’t.” In contracting, the equivalent is defensive escalation—legal tightening terms because procurement is nervous, finance imposing controls because risk feels opaque, operations bypassing governance because it is too slow. Fragmentation amplifies fear.
The deeper issue is not behaviour; it is system design. Retail supply chains optimised for efficiency lacked shock absorbers. Many contracts are the same: designed for stability, not disruption. When change occurs, every issue feels existential because contracts lack tolerance bands, graduated responses, or clear authority to adapt.
This is where contract and commercial management proves its value. CCM is not an administrative function—it is a stabilising discipline. Its purpose is to create confidence under stress: confidence to act without escalation, to collaborate without hoarding rights, and to absorb change without triggering conflict.
Panic buying stops when people trust the system will still work tomorrow. Poor contracting persists when organisations do not trust their relationships to survive change. Mature CCM exists to prevent both
Commitment Matters 