2026 Top 10 CLM Trends Transforming the Contract Management
- Last Updated: Dec 26, 2025
- 15 min read
- Sirion
As enterprises move into 2025, the CLM market continues to evolve rapidly, driven by advancements in generative AI (GenAI), the integration of multiple AI models, and the rising demand for intelligent automation. This shift reflects a broader trend, with organizations increasingly adopting GenAI-powered CLM systems for more complex tasks, surpassing traditional AI capabilities. Even legal professionals, who were initially cautious about GenAI, are beginning to embrace its potential. A report found that 41 out of 100 surveyed law firms have already adopted GenAI tools, signaling a shift toward broader, more sophisticated applications in contract management.
Here’s a closer look at the key trends shaping the future of CLM solutions as enterprises navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.
1. Contracting, will Now be as Easy as Conversation with AI-Driven Conversational Agents
In the evolving CLM landscape, user experience has become a crucial differentiator. Traditional search functions, which rely on filters and keyword-based queries, are being replaced by conversational search capabilities that offer a more intuitive and efficient approach.
With conversational search, users can instantly surface insights from individual contracts or an entire repository using pre-trained AI models. Legal teams can seamlessly ask the system specific questions, generate custom dashboards, configure alerts, or explore related follow-up queries—all in plain language. This shift enhances productivity, making contract management processes faster and more accessible, while reducing the complexity of manual searches.
2. Growing Ability of CLM Agents in Intelligent Contract Extraction
The future of CLM systems will be driven by advanced AI “agents” that can instantly extract and analyze critical contract data. These agents will automatically pull information like clauses, obligations, service level agreements, and pricing tables from contracts across various sources, such as ERPs, CRMs, and P2P systems. With small data models and customizable AI, these agents will offer insights tailored to specific business needs, enabling efficient data extraction and offering precise intelligence that was previously time-consuming and error-prone. Contracting will become a seamless, intelligent process.
3. AI Agents Redefining Contract Review: From Redlining to Issue-Level Precision
The next frontier in CLM solutions introduces AI that goes beyond basic redlining to deliver precise, context-aware edits. These AI-driven systems not only recommend changes but also provide plain-language explanations, mimicking the legal expertise needed for accurate contract management.
In addition to enhanced redlining, AI now enables issue detection at the contract level. By automatically flagging deviations from preferred terms, AI groups related issues together, helping legal teams prioritize remediation without combing through multiple clauses. This shift to issue-level contract review, supported by pre-trained AI models, significantly reduces manual review time, increases accuracy, and ensures that organizational policies and best practices are adhered to throughout the contract lifecycle.
4. AI will Speak Your Language: Contract Summarization Advantage
Generative AI is enhancing legal contract reviews by providing concise, easy-to-understand summaries in natural language. By extracting key points and eliminating confusing jargon, it empowers legal teams to review complex contracts more efficiently. This capability not only aids legal professionals but also supports teams across other departments, making the process more transparent and accessible.
5. Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: The Future of CLM Lies in Multi-Model GenAI
The CLM market is witnessing a deeper integration of generative AI to streamline contract management processes. However, the future isn’t just about leveraging a single large language model (LLM); it’s about integrating multiple LLMs to achieve precision, flexibility, and efficiency. Enterprises are recognizing that relying on one LLM limits their ability to address varied contract needs, such as summarization, risk assessment, and clause remediation.
6. Not just Multi Model but Multi Modal Systems; Small Data Models Will Drive Big Impact
While LLMs are powerful tools, they are not sufficient for comprehensive contract analysis. They excel at generating text and handling shorter prompts but struggle with processing long contracts and retrieving precise data points. This gap is where small data models come into play.
Small data models are task-specific and tailored for accuracy in extraction, classification, and risk identification. A multi-modal approach, combining LLMs for summarization and small data models for precision tasks, ensures that contract management solutions deliver consistent, reliable results across use cases.
7. From Hype to Trust: GenAI to Become a Verified Legal Ally
As AI-generated content grows, so does apprehension among legal professionals regarding the accuracy and defensibility of AI-driven outputs. To overcome these concerns, CLM solutions must prioritize providing citations and sources for AI-generated insights.
Legal professionals need transparency and accountability in contract redlining and analysis. Trusted AI outputs with clear, cited references help build confidence in the technology, making it easier for legal teams to adopt and rely on AI-driven CLM tools.
8. Adaptive AI CLM: Scaling Solutions to Match Enterprise Complexity
For generative AI to truly meet enterprise needs, it must be flexible to deploy, similar to how adaptive AI CLM can scale across the organization. It’s not just about offering a robust feature set but also about how well the AI solution adapts to and integrates with various enterprise systems and workflows. A scalable, adaptable solution that blends well with diverse business needs ensures long-term success and ease of implementation across departments.
9. The Integration Imperative: Connecting CLM to Enterprise Ecosystems
While GenAI-driven CLMs are becoming more sophisticated—delivering precise contract insights, automated workflows, and intelligent recommendations—their ability to integrate with existing enterprise systems must remain a priority.
The true value of a GenAI-powered CLM lies in its ability to connect seamlessly with upstream systems like CRM, ERP, and sourcing tools, and downstream systems such as finance, compliance, and procurement platforms. Without such integrations, even the most advanced CLM will create data silos and disrupt workflows.
10. Ethics in AI will Remain Crucial: Protecting Customer Data in the GenAI Era
As the use of LLMs increases, there are concerns about customer data being used to train these models. It is crucial that AI solutions for contract management are pre-trained on curated, proprietary datasets rather than relying on sensitive customer data. Ensuring that the AI does not cross ethical boundaries and respects data privacy is essential for gaining trust. CLM solutions must provide transparency around how data is handled and ensure that no customer data is used to train models, offering peace of mind regarding confidentiality and compliance with data protection regulations.
Transforming Contract Management Software Market for 2025 and Beyond: A Future-Ready Approach
As enterprises head into 2025, the CLM landscape is being reshaped by GenAI-driven innovations that promise greater automation, smarter insights, and seamless integration. However, true transformation lies in balancing sophistication with practicality. Enterprises need contract management software that offers zero-touch contracting, conversational search, and surgical redlining while maintaining flexibility, scalability, and ethical AI practices.
The future of contract management is not just about adopting advanced AI models—it’s about ensuring these solutions align with enterprise workflows and integrate seamlessly with upstream and downstream systems. As organizations demand faster time to contracting, better risk management, and stronger compliance, the focus will remain on delivering trusted, efficient, and user-centric CLM experiences.
By embracing these evolving trends, enterprises can future-proof their contract processes, unlock untapped value from contracts, and achieve long-term success in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.
