Three months after announcing its acquisition of Screens, Agiloft has completed the integration of the AI-powered contract review and no-code playbook technology into its contract lifecycle management platform, the company says. In an interview last week, Screens founder Otto Hanson, who joined Agiloft as part of the December acquisition as vice president and general manager […]
Three months after announcing its acquisition of Screens, Agiloft has completed the integration of the AI-powered contract review and no-code playbook technology into its contract lifecycle management platform, the company says.
In an interview last week, Screens founder Otto Hanson, who joined Agiloft as part of the December acquisition as vice president and general manager of Screens, said that the integration is part of Agiloft’s broader vision of providing “AI on the Inside” – its strategy to embed expert-crafted AI throughout every stage of the contract lifecycle.
“What Screens is at its core is an ability for companies to get any data they want out of their contracts very easily,” Hanson told me. “Screens is a no-code playbook builder [in which] it’s very easy to create a playbook.”
What excites him about the combination of Screens and Agiloft, he says, is that it unlocks a tremendous amount of additional value for both products.
“At its core, it’s playbook-based contract review with a core theory that AI is best when driven by experts, when programmed by experts,” Hanson said. “We live in a world where people trust experts more than they trust AI.”
Agiloft calls its approach “white box AI” in contrast to “black box AI” – the difference being that users should not simply upload a contract to an AI and ask it to negotiate without expert guidance. It is an approach, Hanson believes, that is fundamentally different from much of what is currently available on the market.
Even with the best language models and prompts, the results from such an approach aren’t particularly effective, Hanson said, “unless those prompts are by experts who actually know what they’re looking for.”
Started As A Marketplace
Acquired by Agiloft in January, Screens is a generative AI contract review and redlining product that uses expert-created and auto-generated playbooks to “screen” and redline contracts.
The product was originally launched in January 2024 by TermScout, an AI contract review company, as a first-of-its-kind AI marketplace where lawyers and other contracting experts could build and sell their own contract review AIs, developed based on their unique expertise.
Otto Hanson
The idea, Hanson told me at the time, was to provide lawyers with an opportunity to turn their expertise from a service into a product, while enabling those reviewing contracts to get a contract review AI tailored to their specific use case.
Subsequently, Screens moved away from that marketplace model, finding that customers preferred a subscription-pricing model.
“What we heard from customers overwhelmingly was, ‘We want Netflix – we want a monthly subscription that’s simple,’” Hanson said. “We don’t want Blockbuster, we want Netflix.”
Now, with the Agiloft acquisition and the integration into Agiloft’s CLM platform, the model is evolving further. As of last week, Screens is included for all Agiloft customers as part of their standard package, rather than requiring an add-on or separate purchase.
At the same time, Screens will also continue as a standalone product. “Screens will continue and is continuing as a standalone business as well, at a very reasonable price point.” Hanson said. “It’s very simple, very easy for companies to get on board with just Screens.”
(Meanwhile, as I reported here last week, Hanson’s former company TermScout is continuing with a new CEO, Olga V. Mack, and a renewed focus on its original mission of certifying contracts as fair against market standards.)
An Example of the Integration
As an example of the integration can work, Hanson showed me a custom dashboard, created within Agiloft, visualizing contract data extracted through Screens.
The user – in this case a hypothetical corporate legal department – ran 322 contracts through several different Screens playbooks and then mapped the company’s vendors based on how well their contracts matched the company’s standards.
“You could see that, for this theoretical vendor, we have the worst contract with them,” Hanson explained, showing how a user could identify at a glance which vendors had contracts that aligned poorly with company standards.
“[This is] really valuable when thinking about your vendor relationships, the health of your vendor relationships, how you want to think about renewals when renewals come up.”
The example also provided visibility into which standards might be failing across an organization’s contract portfolio. In the demonstration, Hanson showed how the system identified confidential information provisions as a particular problem area, with 756 standards not met across the vendor profile.
“You’ve got this incredibly deep level of insight into your contracts,” Hanson said. “And you can build virtually any dashboard workflow approval process off of those data.”
Value Proposition
The value of the combined offering, Hanson said, comes from the alignment between Screens’ data extraction capabilities and Agiloft’s “data first” philosophy of contract management.
“Agiloft has this really important theory of data first,” he said. “It’s a belief that contracts at their core really are just data that drives the business. It’s our assets, it’s our liabilities, our obligations, but it’s data.”
The integration allows customers to extract granular contract data and then use Agiloft’s flexible platform to process and analyze that data.
For example, Hanson described working with a client to set up a Screen for a contract review workflow which would be able to trigger different approval processes based off granular standards. If, for example, the company’s payment terms are not met, it gets routed to finance for approval.
Community Focus
Hanson said that one of the reasons he was excited to join Agiloft was that the company’s leadership shared his focus on the importance of community-driven expertise.
“If people are out there building really good playbooks or really good applications within a platform, why not create the environment and the mechanism and the systems for them to share that expertise with the community at large?”
While both companies had that focus prior to the acquisition, it is growing even stronger since, Hanson said.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest right now from Agiloft customers and Agiloft partners. A lot of those partners and customers are raising their hands saying we want to drive more standardization in our industry, we want to share our expertise with the community.”
Future Plans
When he first launched Screens, Hanson said, its adoption grew rapidly. “Screens was the fastest growing product I ever built,” he said. “It was really exciting to put it on the market and just see customers not just buy it but use it a lot.”
That told him that the product was addressing a significant need. “We had an astonishing number of daily active users on Screens that we just had never seen before, where it was really clear that we were hitting a nerve on something that was really adding value, enough value in lawyers’ lives that they were investing the time needed to actually learn how to use it.”
But now moving forward, Hanson said his priority is to improve the integration to make it more seamless.
Currently, Agiloft users need to port contracts into Screens for analysis, with the data then automatically mapping back to their Agiloft knowledge base. In the next version, Hanson said they are working toward allowing users to run Screens directly from within Agiloft.
“That’s the next big roadmap item for us,” he said, essentially allowing a user to run Screens with the click of a button within Agiloft and have the data populate automatically into the user’s dashboards.
The company is also continuing to make major investments in AI generally and is planning significant research and development around agentic AI.
“We’re doing a lot of R&D right now on agentic AI and trying to look forward to how can we continue to leverage AI to level up us as a company and to level up the experience for our customers,” Hanson said.
