Many organisations have lost sight of the ‘why’ behind their contracts. These complex documents are the result of multiple business functions coming together to form an agreement. However, when each area of an organisation has different goals and requirements, it can be challenging to monitor how each contract performs.
To manage the vast quantity of contracts in a modern business, there has been a rise in digital contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools. However, these only store and manage contracts. To solve the problem of value leakage, Digital Mirror’s contract performance management (CPM) platform enables organisations of all sizes to get back to the ‘why’ behind their contracts.
We sat down with Digital Mirror’s co-founders, Ulf Zetterberg and Kevin Gidney, at this year’s DPW New York conference to find out more about why contracts should perform and not just exist.
Zetterberg and Gidney came together at Seal Software, a pioneer in contract analytics that introduced machine learning for extracting data from contracts at scale. After Seal Software was acquired by DocuSign in 2020, the company launched Digital Mirror to take that vision further, helping businesses actively manage performance to prevent value loss.
Disconnection from outcomes
Without proper tracking, it’s possible to lose some of the originally agreed-upon benefits from a contract. “Businesses have lost the connection to why they needed the contract in the first place,” explains Zetterberg. “How do you measure to make sure that you get what you sign up for? That’s what we do.”
If these organisations aren’t monitoring the performance of their contracts, they could end up paying for services they no longer need or miss out on discounts and other benefits. While CLM tools might make accessing contracts more straightforward, that’s often not enough.
“CLM tools allow you to create contracts and look what’s in them,” says Gidney. “What they don’t tell you is what’s actually happening in the business itself.” This means there’s a gap between what’s in the contract and real-world events affecting the business.
Bridging that gap
Digital Mirror’s contract performance management platform brings the intent back into the contract lifecycle. Using real-time insights, benchmarking, and workflow triggers, the CPM can identify issues and recommend actions. This reduces the risk of value leakage.
“There are many types of value leakage,” says Zetterberg. “Things like payment terms, price adjustments, missed credits, or even contractual rights you’re entitled to, like the right to terminate. But where is that right documented? Is anyone tracking it? It’s not just about identifying these issues; it’s about acting on them. That’s where contract performance management comes in. It doesn’t just surface leakages; it helps you take action to fix them so they don’t occur again.”
The right approach is also key, as Gidney explains: “You need to have quality in the actions you’re doing, which means you need to start from a point of quality. So you need to have quality questions and quality answers to drive the actions afterwards.”
For example, an organisation that wants to find out if they have any unused discounts might ask: How many contracts have opportunities for negotiating additional discounts? Or for overpayments, the question might be: Are there any contracts with automatic (or tiered) price increases or decreases?
Digital Mirror supports organisations across all functions, from procurement to finance to operations, in creating and leveraging contract performance insights. This means helping guide those departments on the things that matter most to them. “We’ve worked with industry experts to help us generate these questions and help us then work out how to best interpret the results,” explains Gidney.
This goes beyond analytics. Digital Mirror’s approach involves benchmarking, applying quality metrics, and then working with the insights to generate actions. “In recognising what’s in a contract,” adds Gidney, “it’s possible to see where value is leaking. That’s what we do differently.”
Leveraging artificial intelligence
Digital Mirror has a long history of using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). “We founded and sold a company that used AI. It’s not just about trends that are with us today,” says Gidney. “It’s knowing what to use as well as when and how to use it. For example, using a large language model when required and smaller ones when necessary.”
Zetterberg echoes this with advice to any company looking to use AI tools. “AI is powerful, but you need to know why you’re using it. What’s the purpose? If you had badly aligned workflows and processes before, AI isn’t going to magically fix it for you.”
While AI is a valuable tool for extracting insights and improving workflows, simplicity is key. Rather than building AI into every platform and feature, businesses need to understand where AI can be best used and, as both Zetterberg and Gidney say, it’s essential to start with the why.
When it comes to contracts and confidential deals, security is paramount, and this is something Digital Mirror takes into consideration when using AI. “It’s important to make sure the customer’s data is secure in your platform,” explains Gidney. “Also, when using external systems such as LLMs, we only send the information required to do the task.”
Strategic impact
Once contracts are tied to real-world outcomes, such as service delivery, supplier reliability, and pricing accuracy, they cease being static documents. Instead, they can be queried and tracked to minimise the risk of value leakage.
In many organisations, contract knowledge is fragmented. The details that matter most — how a supplier operates in practice, which clauses are routinely bypassed, what exceptions have been agreed on, for example — often live in individual inboxes or people’s heads. When team members move on, that context is lost.
Digital Mirror aims to make that kind of knowledge visible and durable. By surfacing patterns in performance data and linking them back to contractual terms, the system helps teams spot where things aren’t working as expected.
This insight changes the nature of procurement and contract oversight. Instead of reacting to problems after the fact, teams can take a more informed and forward-looking role. This helps them identify early renegotiation opportunities, flag compliance risks, or even advise on whether a supplier is still the right fit.
When everyone, from finance to operations, can see the same data and understand the same risks, it becomes easier to make decisions, resolve disputes, and stay focused on outcomes.
“You can also collaborate inside the platform on any answers,” says Gidney. “Because once you have a quality set of answers, you can drive performance increases across other areas of the organisation.”
For too long, contracts have been treated as paperwork. To many, they are final steps in a negotiation, filed away and forgotten. But as Zetterberg and Gidney argue, the real value of a contract lies not in what it promises on paper, but in how it performs over time. AI can be a useful tool here, but it’s important to remember: “AI can be very powerful, but it’s not a magic wand,” as Zetterberg says.
Digital Mirror’s approach challenges the idea that contract management ends at storage or compliance. By reconnecting contracts to outcomes, it becomes possible to make smarter decisions, protect value, and build more resilient supplier relationships.
Supplier complexity is increasing, making clarity and efficiency more important than ever. Understanding whether you’re getting what you signed up for is more than a procurement concern; it’s a business imperative.