seal-software.com

SIG (Sourcing Industry Group) is the global sourcing association that provides thought leadership, training and networking opportunities to executives in sourcing, procurement, outsourcing, shared services and risk from Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies. Seal has been a member and participant for many years and has found that the opportunity to network with procurement professionals around contract analytics has been extremely beneficial with the association stacked full of seasoned practitioners and industry experts. The discussion featured David Silbert, a practice lead, former attorney and expert in legal technology with a wealth of experience in procurement, and Dan Schneider, senior director of analytics and modelling, another former attorney and highly skilled in AI as it applies to contract extraction. We remain very committed to the procurement and sourcing industry and, as part of DocuSign now, our solutions for procurement continue to help Global 2000 companies further their contract management needs.

Throughout that time, Seal has been dedicated to helping enterprise procurement professionals, from contract managers through to the Chief Procurement Officer as well as the legal staff who support the function, derive insight into the obligations, risks and opportunities tied up in their vendor agreements and other buy-side contracts. This has proven to raise the efficacy and efficiency of the function by identifying revenue leakage, addressing regulatory requirements like GDPR and surfacing insight into core topics that procurement professionals care about like payment terms, auto-renewals and indemnifications. Beyond the obvious technical strengths that have made Seal a ‘Provider to Know’ year after year, we’re even more impressed with the provider’s vision for “democratizing” contract analytics. By making deep agreement insights and risk identification accessible to all users who touch contracts regardless of the source system or tools they rely on (e.g., Microsoft ® Word), Seal is extending the true value of its solutions across the enterprise —- a philosophy sure to gel with the provider

The second type of artificial intelligence is Narrow AI, designed for a specific use case like Google Translate, image processing, Self-driving cars, SIRI, question and answer systems. The primary methods for training machine learning are supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised: • “Semi-Supervised” learning is defined as pre-teaching the system from unlabeled data and then providing smaller numbers of labeled data to fine-tune the system Supervised learning requires high-quality training data, domain expertise, and potentially data scientists to train a model used by the software.

As the CEO of Seal, I was fully involved in the diligence and negotiations, but as DocuSign has been a partner to Seal for nearly two years and a customer for much longer, I have had regular contact with the company ever since I started at Seal 3 years ago. The week following the announcement I was due to present at the DocuSign Global Kick-Off (GKO) and a day later at their flagship user conference, Momentum in San Francisco. At the same time as DocuSign was taking their conferences digital, we made the decision to stop unnecessary travel and a week later to close our offices and ask our employees to work from home. Last week we built and trained models to find COVID-19 related language in contracts and these are being offered to our existing customers free of charge and we will endeavor to help them implement these analytics in short order so they can surface this business-critical information.