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42 where AI agents can complete more and more steps of a legal workflow. Here is what this shift might look like. Many organizations today have channels that enable employees to interact with the legal department and ask questions, such as Slack channels, online forms, or dedicated email aliases. Regardless of the channel, the process is the same: a legal question is submitted, and a human being responds. Taking that process one step further involves layering in an AI chatbot that can answer questions. The AI engine has been seeded with all the appropriate policies, contracts, and other high-quality content, enabling it to provide intelligent responses to people when they ask legal questions. Moreover, a human stays in the loop. The AI routes the answer to a human in the legal department for validation and approval before sending it. That is an agentic workflow because of its multi-step nature. The AI consults a knowledge source, receives an answer, and routes it to a human in the loop for validation. This relatively simple use case makes it easy to envision the far more sophisticated agentic workflows that could emerge. AGENTIC AI CREATES STELLAR CONTRACTS One of the most near-term applications of an AI agent – primarily when used within the framework of a knowledge vault or repository – is monitoring contracts and tracking the obligations they contain. This process starts in a familiar enough manner: a legal professional interacts with the AI agent/chatbot and asks it to monitor a pile of contracts and look for specific items, such as certain kinds of problems, specific dates, or eventualities. Maybe they want to look for currency exchange fluctuations that might affect the organization's supply chain, or termination terms and conditions that are far outside of the normal range. Or maybe they want the AI agent to monitor things like expiry and take action as those expiries approach. Before, AI might have been able to identify that an expiry was approaching and notify the human in the loop. Agentic AI can go several steps further down the workflow path. It knows that an expiry is approaching, then drafts an email that serves as a starting point for negotiating a renewal, routes it to a human for approval, and sends it to the counterparty. AI agents can draft a new contract and route it to a lawyer for a

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