The clay tablet had a good run. The contract is one of humanity’s oldest technologies. Four thousand years before anyone wrote a SaaS agreement, Sumerian scribes were pressing sales terms into clay.
That instinct never left us. A contract is supposed to be a thing that doesn’t move. Today, however, contracts are far from static. In fact, they’re getting downright kinetic. And most companies don’t have the right systems to handle all this complexity.
I was talking recently with a customer who is currently rolling out lots of new AI functionality. They’re also handing out lots of free credits to drive adoption, which is a smart approach. The only problem? The roll-out touches every customer, which means amending two to three hundred thousand contracts.
Prior to 2026, this company changed their pricing twice in five years. In the last six months, they’ve changed it around a dozen times. AI is creating massive amounts of volatility in pricing agreements because nobody knows their unit economics yet.
But wait, all you sharp legal minds are now telling me, incorporation by reference should solve this problem! The modern software agreement is deliberately layered: a master contract holding the terms that shouldn’t move, an order form holding quantities and dates, and a set of policies living at a URL that can be updated with notice.
Point taken. But if AI hasn’t broken this contract format completely, it’s certainly stress-testing the architecture. AI is pulling contracts in two directions.
Faced with all this new complexity, today’s procurement teams want more specificity in deals, not less: defined service descriptions, performance warranties, audit rights, liability tied to outcomes. That’s the hardware.
But everything underneath the signature line, from entitlements to quotas to credit pools and spending ceilings, is getting more liquid. This material is machine-readable and continuously adjustable inside a set of agreed guardrails. It behaves much more like software.
This all raises some interesting questions:
- What happens the first time an AI agent adjusts a customer’s quota inside the guardrails and the customer says they never agreed to the guardrails?
- If terms move continuously, does “renewal” still mean anything? Or is every day a small renegotiation?
- If nobody signs the moving half, who approves it? Sales? Finance? A policy engine? And who’s accountable when it’s wrong?
- What does a QBR look like when half the agreement has changed since the last one?
A set of rules that changes continuously and executes automatically is not a document. It’s a system. Which means the moving half of your contract now needs the things software needs: version control, effective dating, way to test changes, and a way to roll things back when everything goes pear-shaped.
The problem is that at most companies, the system of record for the half that changes daily is a CPQ tool, a spreadsheet, and three people’s memory. That was survivable when pricing moved twice in five years. It is not survivable now.
Which reminds me – does your legal team have a dedicated developer?
