Contract Negotiation Just Stepped Into the Future
AI is enhancing contract negotiation into a faster and clearer process. The companies that embrace it are gaining a major advantage.
For decades contract negotiation was treated as one of the last human domains inside business. It was the place where skill, nuance, instinct, and more pointedly ….long hours defined the outcome. The assumption was that machines could never replicate the judgment required to understand positions or navigate shifting leverage. That assumption no longer holds. AI is moving into the negotiations and it is changing the balance of power faster than most legal and commercial teams would want to admit.
The University of Chicago Law Review makes the point directly: once AI enters the negotiation process the traditional back-and-forth that used to define bargaining starts to disappear. Strategic pauses, bluffs, and long guessing games about each party’s other options are secondary to a process that is driven by data rather than theatre. When a system can analyze thousands of agreements, and forecast the most likely path to resolution, a negotiation begins to look less like a human interaction and more like a pre-disposed result. The result is faster outcomes, but also a new competitive advantage for companies that get on board early. Their systems see opportunities humans will miss.
At the center of this transformation are founders building the next generation of AI-first contract technology. One of them is Alston Walker, founder and CEO of Confida — a platform designed to bring autonomous negotiation and contract-review capabilities directly into workflows. As Walker frames it: “AI for contract negotiations is the best of both worlds. Your AI proxy does all the time-consuming advance work with the counterparty, so you only need to weigh in on the big issues. You stay in control while cutting down dramatically on time and redline cycles.” His view reflects a growing consensus across the sector: AI is a supplement to negotiators rather than replacing them. It elevates the entire process.
This is just the early stage. Every major signal points in the same direction: AI isn’t just stopping at redlines and supplier terms, it’s moving deeper into the negotiation process itself. Gartner projects that by 2026 more than 30 % of enterprise contract negotiations will be executed mostly by AI systems with humans acting as simply reviewers. As these systems improve they will begin to manage full negotiation loops from draft to counter to resolution. Human judgment will still matter but it will function more like oversight than authorship.
This shift will not only transform enterprise scale negotiations. It may help small and midsize businesses more than anyone expects. An SMB can now walk into a negotiation with the same quality of risk analysis, clause benchmarking, and market standard intelligence that a major corporation uses.
The message is straightforward. Negotiation is no longer a purely human capital contest. The future of negotiation will be defined by speed, clarity, and data. The organizations that adapt will negotiate from a position of strength.
-Taylor Howard Chief Marketing Officer, Blue Sky Compute Taking organizations from AI to ROI.
University of Chicago Law Review
Eidenmüller, Horst. “Game Over: Facing the AI Negotiator.” University of Chicago Law Review Online, 2024.
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/game-over-facing-ai-negotiator
Harvard Business Review
Revilla, Elena, and María Jesús Sáenz. “How AI Is Reshaping Supplier Negotiations.” Harvard Business Review, July 24, 2025.
https://hbr.org/2025/07/how-ai-is-reshaping-supplier-negotiations
Gartner
Gartner Research Board. “AI Will Execute a Significant Share of Enterprise Contract Negotiations by 2026.” Gartner Forecast Insight, 2024.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom (generic link unless you want a stylized citation with a paywalled reference)
Confida
Confida. “AI Proxy for Contract Negotiation.” Company Overview, 2025.
https://confida.ai
