A manual bottleneck at the heart of contract operations

‍

A global fintech company with thousands of employees handling contracts across multiple jurisdictions faced a persistent operational problem: determining the correct signing authority for each agreement required manual input from a central corporate legal team. When an employee needed a contract signed, they could not independently confirm whether a regional manager, department head, or executive was the appropriate signatory — and so the question went to legal.

The consequences compounded. Contract cycles stretched by days or weeks waiting for clarification. Regional teams, under time pressure, improvised their own interpretations of delegation policies, creating inconsistency and audit risk. The corporate legal team spent a growing share of its capacity on routine routing queries rather than substantive legal work. As the company scaled across new geographies and product lines, the problem intensified: more contract types, more delegation tiers, more edge cases.

The goal was an intelligent, policy-aware system that could answer "who needs to sign this?" in real time — based on contract type, monetary value, risk classification, and the organisation's live delegation structures — delivered directly within the existing contract workflow.

Agentic AI orchestration for policy-driven signing decisions

Kopenhagen Konsulting designed an agentic AI orchestration layer that integrates directly into the client's existing contract management workflow. When a contract is submitted, the agent automatically ingests its metadata — type, value, counterparty, jurisdiction, and risk flags — and cross-references it against the organisation's delegation-of-authority policies, live organisational hierarchy, and any active conditional thresholds. Within seconds, it returns a validated signatory recommendation within the contract workflow.

The orchestration logic was designed specifically to handle the edge cases where rule-based systems fail: contracts spanning multiple business units, agreements with conditional risk thresholds, and delegation chains where the primary authority is unavailable. In each case the agent escalates appropriately and logs its full reasoning — which policy rules applied, which data sources were consulted, and the confidence level assigned.

Governance is embedded throughout. Employees can override any recommendation and all overrides are captured for policy review. The system is a recommendation engine, not an autonomous decision-maker: final signing authority always rests with a human, and the AI's reasoning chain is always visible to the reviewer.

The solution is in production and delivering measurable impact across the organisation's contract operations.

• Reduced dependency on corporate legal teams for routine signing clarification and approval routing
• Accelerated contract handling through faster signatory identification
• Centralised authority-signing policies and decision logic across the organisation
• Enabled scalable automation across enterprise workflows with maintained oversight and auditability
• Created a foundation for broader agentic AI and workflow orchestration across legal and operational processes