What if your next contract was a conversation?

AI is having a profound impact on our working lives, automating repetitive tasks and letting us work smarter and be more productive than ever before. The AI landscape is constantly expanding with models like GPT-4, Gemini, and the recently released DeepSeek-R1 continuing to innovate and drive us to what seemed impossible just a few years ago.

How we work with documents is one of the many areas to be radically changed by this transformation. More than just making document creation easier and faster, AI is totally redefining our relationship with them, from drafting to management. How we interact with the contracts and agreements that underpin much of our professional and personal lives is undergoing a change of the size of which we haven’t seen since the rise of digitization.

We're entering an era where documents are shaped through natural conversation, rather than templates, manual edits, and time-consuming back-and-forth revisions.

A shift to conversational creation

Right now we’re facing a paradigm shift in how we create documents. Natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) are well on their way to making the act of typing out text character by character redundant. Conversational document creation will soon be the new norm.

Need to draft a contract? Instead of starting from scratch or building on a template, you’ll describe what you need to an AI agent. This agent won’t only understand what you’re saying, but also what you’re trying to achieve and how to get there.

When drafting contracts or legal agreements, professionals will have intelligent, natural conversations with an AI that understands their intent and the context of their requests – "make the confidentiality clause stronger," "adapt this for international use," "add a section about intellectual property.” The technology won’t replace human expertise, but it will amplify it to make document creation far more intuitive and streamlined.

This is about much more than dictation or voice-to-text capabilities. These will be intelligent assistants that can take broad instructions and refine them with the user to create professional agreements in a fraction of the time.

Democratizing professional documentation

As revolutionary as this technology is for organizations of all sizes, I believe its effect will be most profound on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

For those working in SMBs, juggling multiple roles is standard. The head of HR might also be the de facto legal department; the marketing manager could oversee operations. For lots of companies, the CEO will wear all of these hats. As a result, they don’t have the dedicated resources to create and maintain the professional documents all businesses need.

With conversational document creation, SMBs will work with an AI-powered drafting assistant to create agreements, update policies, and maintain compliance documentation. If an update to employment law means changes to staff contracts are needed, they will simply ask the AI to review and update all relevant documents. If a new supplier agreement is required, they will just describe what they need to produce a professional draft in minutes.

These AI assistants won’t replace human lawyers. The need for expert legal advice isn’t going anywhere for many situations. But they will empower SMBs to handle routine contracts and agreements in a much simpler and more time (and cost) efficient way, leaving them to focus on managing and growing their business and serving their customers.

An evolution in document management

This shift to a conversational relationship won’t be limited to the creation of documents – it will also shape how we update and manage them.

Over time, the policies, laws, and standards that impact businesses change. This makes regular reviews and updates of contracts and agreements a necessary but time and resource-intensive task. But by employing an AI-powered assistant, a project like this that might take weeks could be completed in moments.

When new workplace legislation comes into force, HR teams will be able to ask an AI assistant to review all employee agreements, update them as required, and send them to staff for re-signing. If international regulations change, legal departments can ask the assistant to assess all existing contracts to ensure compliance. This entire workflow will be managed by a powerful conversational AI.

Professional agreements are changing

At Lumin, we’re building an easier and more cost-effective way to draft and manage agreements.

AgreementGen is our AI-powered drafting sidekick that can guide you from a blank page to a professional agreement through an intuitive, conversational interface.

Our new solution will also give you the power to upload existing PDF agreements and transform them from static files to fully editable documents that can be tailored to the precise needs of your business.

About Max:

Max Ferguson is the Founder and CEO of Lumin, guiding the company's growth into a leading document workflow solution since its inception in 2014. With a PhD in Civil Engineering & Computer Science from Stanford University, Max is passionate about delivering positive change through software innovation.