Soft benefits are real, but now is the time for something a little more tangible.

This past week in London we hit 34 degrees Celsius (93 Fahrenheit for my American friends).  I realise – especially as an East Coast kid – this is not particularly hot, but when most of the time your weather answers the question, “what would it be like if it were March all year?”, coupled with the dearth of air-conditioning, 34 can feel quite uncomfortable.  Besides the realisation that apparently after a decade or so of being here, I have acclimatised to the weather, I noticed something else. A lot of people were going to the office – and not just my office, but all offices across London. Since 2021, many companies have been trying to coax workers back to the office to some, but perhaps not uniform, success. Putting aside the mandated attendance edicts, the arguments to get people back in generally have been about “team dynamics”, “learning experiences”, “apprenticeship”, “community” or similar strands. And despite these all being legitimate reasons, it hasn’t quite hit the mark and thus we have 1000 other “think” pieces about “ways of working have changed”, “the genie is out of the bottle” or “this generation is different than the other generation”, etc. And those all may be right, but what I do know to be true based upon the empirical evidence I just saw was this simple logical outcome.

• People don’t like it when it’s hot and very few have AC in their house.
• Offices in London have AC.

Therefore

• People went back to the office to experience AC and get out of the heat. 

Now you can disagree if you like. But looking at this little social observation so close to a recent week of “Legaltech” in London, I think a lot of these new AI companies can learn a lot about tangible (or hard) benefits, vs soft (or sometime illusory) benefits. By the way – still hate the term “legaltech”. Does that mean everything else in the company is “non-legaltech” or “businesstech”?  Unless things have changed since I was there, the in-house legal team’s pay cheques come from the same company as everyone else’s pay cheques. But I digress. 

Let me just say this upfront so that no one is confused. I think AI is cool in the legal and contracts world. Whether its Generative, Agentic, or the old school tools that were just really “Control F” at scale (you know who you are), I think it’s great, should make life easier and if you pair it nicely with the process, people and discipline (emphasis on IF), it can and will be transformative. But what I don’t like are the parlour tricks a lot of companies try to show off as value add or anything that would get to hard dollar savings. I think using AI tools to help craft an email in a language that is not your native tongue is fantastic. But I went to four years of undergraduate university and three years of law school. I don’t need Mr. Clippy to tell me how to write in English. 

Let’s be more concrete. All my analogies and allusions above relate to the simple fact that in 2025 (and I suspect in the foreseeable future), buyers and users of tech are much more driven by hard savings or benefits than interesting, but ultimately difficult to quantify to your CFO, benefits.   Let’s use real examples: 

Hard (quantifiable) benefits: 

• Reducing cycle times on sales contracts from 90 days to 45 days; 
• Using AI to match up a vendor invoice to the rates in the contract (including latest SOW, change order or amendment) while also highlighting any discounts earned; or
• “Touchless” procurement contracting, where low risk vendors negotiate against your intelligent template (guarded by strict rules) without need for your buyers or contracts team to spend time on it.

Soft (won’t see this in excel) benefits:

• Enhanced collaboration
• Internal user experience (or satisfaction)
• Anything around NDAs (or other low-level, not just why are humans involved, but why are you even still doing this, type contracts)

Now of course, companies want to show more collaboration, better vendor experience, better internal experience and the like. But the point here is that most companies today are feeling the pressure of competition, regulation, geopolitical unrest, supply chain disruption, you name it.  This means that finding those quantifiable benefits are key. And the thing is, those examples of hard benefits are real. I (and I am sure others) have seen these in action and they make for a great business case in front of the C-suite. And they are AI centric but with good people, process and discipline too.

In conclusion, I believe that AI is important and will do great things. But I really do implore the companies pushing it to take this advice:

1. Focus on the use cases that affect (or impact) the bottom-line over those that look “interesting.”
2. There have been many bubbles and many PE-infused flurries in this space.  The companies that focus on #1 generally do better than the others.
3. When you are selling to a bunch of lawyers at a lawyer-centric conference, don’t have your sales pitch focus on “this can replace lawyers.” I’ll leave it to others to argue whether it is true or not, but it really kills the vibe of the sale when you tell someone they are unnecessary. 

Other than that – invest in air conditioning.