New Workday data from 7K global professionals across 10 countries shows how unclear contract ownership harms enterprise-wide performance.
Amine Anoun
Vice President, Machine Learning
Workday
Contracts govern nearly every important business relationship, drive revenue, and provide the core context that powers enterprise AI. In leading machine learning and contract intelligence at Workday, and previously co-founding Evisort, I have spent years helping organizations extract real value from their agreements. One thing is clear: AI cannot deliver on its promise if no one actually owns the underlying commitments.
Yet, our new research shows this lack of clear ownership is creating a global performance gap and an intelligence divide across enterprises.
In Workday’s 2026 Contract Intelligence Index Report, we surveyed nearly 7,000 Legal and enterprise professionals across 10 countries. A striking 77% of respondents say no more than a few people in their organization know who owns contracts. From North America and Europe to APAC, these challenges are remarkably consistent across markets.
And the impact extends well beyond Legal. When contractual commitments are disconnected from the people and AI responsible for fulfilling them, enterprises risk losing revenue, increasing costs, and weakening operational execution.
77% of enterprise employees say only a few people in their organization know who owns contracts.
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Contract ownership is an end-to-end responsibility that includes approving its terms, maintaining an authoritative record, monitoring obligations, and taking swift action whenever a deadline, risk, or opportunity arises.
Those responsibilities extend across the organization. Sales teams rely on customer terms, pricing provisions, service commitments, and renewal dates. Procurement and Finance teams need visibility into supplier obligations, payment terms, and automatic renewals. HR teams manage agreements related to employees, contingent workers, benefits, and service providers. Operations teams must understand delivery requirements and performance expectations.
When contract ownership is unclear, the organization can successfully execute an agreement and yet be completely unprepared for the demands of managing it long-term. Our findings highlight how widely this clarity varies around the world: while 36% of Legal respondents in Germany say employees understand contract ownership, only 11% in Japan report the same.
Individually, these breakdowns may show up as an unexpected charge, a single missed deadline, one delayed renewal, or an unfulfilled commitment. Across hundreds or thousands of agreements, they become a recurring source of financial and operational drag.
These issues can also be difficult to trace back to contract management. A missed customer commitment may surface as a sales or service issue. An unnoticed renewal may look like a procurement expense. An unclear workforce term may create challenges that appear confined to HR.
Over time, enterprise-wide contract confusion remains hidden while its consequences multiply across the business.
Contracts naturally move through a series of handoffs. A business team initiates an agreement, Legal may review or negotiate it, an executive or functional leader approves it, and another person or system stores the final version. After signature, responsibility may return to the originating team or move to another function.
Each handoff creates an opportunity for accountability and context to weaken. Workday research identifies four points where ownership commonly breaks down across organizations worldwide:
Nearly two-thirds of Legal professionals say they are responsible for enforcing contracts, including agreements they never approved.
These gaps compound as a contract moves through its lifecycle. Missing approval context makes terms harder to interpret, fragmented storage limits access, and inconsistent tracking allows obligations to go unnoticed. When a dispute or unmet obligation eventually surfaces, Legal teams may inherit the consequences of an agreement they had limited ability to influence.
Responsibility will naturally move across functions. Effective contract management requires explicit ownership at every stage, with each obligation connected to someone who has the information and authority required to act.
Legal doesn’t simply manage risk after a contract is signed—they drive material business outcomes.
Image Source: Workday
In fact, across all countries surveyed, 50% of Legal respondents and 43% of enterprise employees say Legal impacts profitability more than any other business metric—a sentiment that spans the globe, peaking in markets like Australia (59%) and Germany (56%). While more than a third point to its influence on revenue generation, annual growth, and quarterly earnings.
Contracts are one of the primary ways Legal teams contribute to those outcomes. They define critical details behind the organization’s business relationships. Visibility throughout the contract lifecycle allows Legal teams to identify risks early, prevent avoidable costs, support revenue-generating activity, and provide more informed guidance to business leaders.
The data speaks for itself, with 43% saying contract intelligence improves profitability, 36% reporting revenue growth and 30% noting productivity gains across the business.
43% of enterprise employees say Legal impacts profitability more than any other business metric.
Realizing business impact requires accountability throughout the entire contract lifecycle. Enterprise leaders need to establish:
These decisions create the foundation for contract intelligence—the ability to extract, organize, and apply information from agreements across the business.
True enterprise-wide, AI-enabled contract intelligence depends on connecting each insight to a defined workflow, decision, and owner. A renewal alert, for example, only creates value when it reaches someone with the authority to evaluate the agreement before the deadline.
Organizations that get it right see the impact quickly; 60% of survey respondents say their organizations realized value from contract intelligence in days, weeks, or months. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents report returns within a year.
60% of survey respondents say their organizations realized value from contract intelligence in days, weeks, or months.
AI is only as valuable as the business context it can access. When contracts are connected, governed, and made actionable, organizations can turn the commitments they have already made into faster, more confident decisions across the enterprise.
In other words, contracts are much more than Legal documents—they are the core source material required to unlock the full potential of AI.
Contracts are a source of enterprise intelligence that can help organizations anticipate risk, protect value, and act on opportunities with greater confidence. With AI grounded in the right business context and controls, teams can turn contract information into decisions that strengthen performance across the enterprise.
Our global findings underscore how contract accountability is an enterprise priority. Clear ownership helps Legal and business teams manage commitments consistently, surface opportunities and risks earlier, and unlock the full value of AI.
Creating ongoing clarity means connecting every agreement, obligation, and deadline to a defined owner and workflow. Legal teams gain the visibility to provide proactive guidance, while business teams across the enterprise can act on the commitments within their functions.
Contract intelligence turns the information within agreements into business value felt across the enterprise. Shared accountability puts that intelligence in the hands of people who can act on it—helping the enterprise protect revenue, control costs, and capture more value from every agreement.
I invite you to explore the full findings in Chapter 1 of our 2026 Contract Intelligence Index Report—and stay tuned for Chapter 2 to see how leading organizations worldwide are bridging the Contract Intelligence Divide.
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