One Third of Enterprises Have More Than $1.3 billion in Contract Value They Cannot Fully Explain Due to Lack of Access to Contract Intelligence, New Research Finds
● 79% of respondents cannot reliably explain the reasoning behind the terms of their own commercial contracts, including why clauses were agreed to and what was negotiated away ● 98% say their enterprise has experienced a financial or operational consequence as a result, including missed savings and rebates, repeated negotiating concessions and risks accepted without knowing their company’s prior position
● Only 26% have a quick and reliable way to query their entire contract portfolio, despite 71% of respondents having contract lifecycle management (CLM) software.
7 October, 2026 | London: New research commissioned by Luminance, the global leader in Contract Intelligence for the enterprise, and conducted by Censuswide for the report The Billion-Dollar Blind-Spot: The Untapped Value of Contract Intelligence Across Global Enterprises, has found that 79% of enterprise leaders cannot reliably explain the reasoning behind their own commercial contracts: why clauses were agreed to, what was negotiated away and what terms set in the past mean for the business today.
The findings, drawn from a survey of General Counsel, Chief Financial Officers, Heads of Procurement and other senior enterprise leaders across the US, UK, France and Germany, reveal a widespread gap between storing contracts and being able to use the intelligence within them and the value lost when companies are unable to act on commercially valuable information already held within their contracts.
Contract Storage Without Access to Intelligence
This latent value sits untapped because businesses cannot reliably locate the rationale behind why commercial terms were agreed, due to disconnected internal systems, displaced contracts, memory or time. Even where the information exists, it is trapped in silos.
While 71% of respondents said their enterprise has a formal system designed to preserve contract knowledge, 96% of the same respondents reported losing access to contract knowledge anyway. What’s more, only a fifth (21%) said they have immediate access to the information within their contracts when they need it.
More than half (53%) cannot get answers from their contracts without asking Legal (15%), contacting the contract owner (18%) or searching manually (20%). This means contractual knowledge remains fragmented across teams, systems, personal files and individual memory, rather than being available to the people responsible for managing risk, making decisions and capturing commercial value. The result is unnecessary cost and delay.
The Financial Impact of Inaccessible Contract Knowledge
The consequences are already being felt across the enterprise. Almost every respondent (98%) said their organization had experienced at least one financial or operational consequence in the past two years. One in three (33%) had repeated a negotiating concession without knowing why it was originally agreed. Nearly a third (31%) had accepted legal or commercial risk without knowing their company’s prior position, while the same proportion (31%) had missed or delayed a saving, rebate or entitlement because the relevant information was not available.
The value of this inaccessible knowledge is significant. Nearly one in three enterprises (31%) puts the value of contracts where the reasoning is undocumented above $1.3 billion, while one in ten (10%) puts it above $6.7 billion.
External Changes Expose the Gap
The problem becomes even more acute when external events require an urgent response. In the past year, 89% of enterprises faced a business-sensitive change, such as a new tariff, interest-rate movement or supplier failure, that required an urgent review of their contractual position.
Yet only 26% could obtain a fast, portfolio-wide answer. Nearly half (47%) could not get a complete view of their exposure, meaning they would check only their most important contracts, rely on whoever happened to remember the relevant terms or accept that they might miss something. A further 11% had no reliable way to answer at all.
From Contract Storage to Contract Intelligence
The findings point to the need for enterprises to move beyond storing contracts and extracting isolated data points. Contract Intelligence connects contractual terms with the context, history and relationships that give them meaning, then makes that intelligence accessible to the teams that need to act on it. By making contract knowledge searchable, explainable and available across the enterprise, Contract Intelligence can help Legal maintain oversight while enabling Finance, Procurement and other teams to answer routine questions, identify risk and act on commercial opportunities.
“Businesses are not short of contractual knowledge. They are short of access to it,” said Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance. “The decisions a company has made, the risks it has accepted and the commitments it has taken on are already captured in its contracts. But if that intelligence cannot be accessed at the point a decision is being made, its value is lost. Contract Intelligence is about turning that buried knowledge into something the whole enterprise can actually use.”
Read the full report here.
Media Contact:
Luminance@tancredigroup.com
About Luminance:
Luminance is the Contract Intelligence platform that turns the language that defines a business into the intelligence it runs on. Born out of the University of Cambridge and purpose-built by AI, legal and technology experts, Luminance understands the history and context of every contract. It acts on that intelligence, proactively surfacing risk, flagging obligations, accelerating negotiations and driving action across Legal, Finance, Procurement, Sales and the wider business. It enables enterprises to learn from their contracts, while contracts learn from the enterprise, helping businesses make better decisions and move forward with confidence.
Notes to Editors
The research was commissioned by Luminance and conducted by Censuswide among 538 enterprise-level leaders in large organizations, aged 30+, in the United Sates, United Kingdom, France and Germany between 27 August and 4 September 2026. It draws on responses from across financial services and banking, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and software and technology, and forms the basis of the whitepaper The State of Contract Intelligence Report: The Billion-Dollar Blind-Spot: The Untapped Value of Contract Intelligence Across Global Enterprises which explores how a lack of access to contract intelligence leads to financial consequences for enterprises.
Further details on the statistics:
98% of enterprise leaders have already suffered a financial or operational consequence of not fully knowing the terms of their commercial contracts, including missed savings and rebates or risks accepted blind.
In response to the question: In the past two years, which of the following has your organization experienced because commercial contract information or the reasoning behind agreed terms was not readily accessible? (Q9)
This is an addition of:
– N/A – this has not happened to us in the last two years / ever – 1%
– None of the above – 1%
Only 26% have a quick and reliable way to query their entire contract portfolio, despite 71% all of respondents having contract lifecycle management (CLM) software.
In response to the question: When an external change means you need to understand how your commercial contracts are affected across your entire portfolio, how would your organization get that answer today? (Q5)
– 26% responded “we would query all our contracts and get a portfolio-wide answer, but this would take a short time period / small amounts of manual work”
In response to the question: Does your organization have a formal system or process in place, including any AI or technology tools, specifically designed to capture and preserve the knowledge held in its commercial contracts? (Q8)
– 71% responded yes
In response to the question: When your organization renews or renegotiates a significant commercial contract, how often is the reasoning behind the existing terms (i.e. why they were originally agreed, what was conceded and the commercial context of the time) immediately available? (Q2) – 21% said always – e.g. it is recorded and can be accessed immediately.
New research from Luminance has revealed that 79% of large companies cannot reliably explain the reasoning behind their own commercial contracts.
In response to the question: When your organisation renews or renegotiates a significant commercial contract, how often is the reasoning behind the existing terms immediately available? (Q2) This is an addition of:
– 35% responded often… but takes some time and effort to locate or piece together – 36% responded sometimes… the information exists but it is scattered
– 7% responded rarely
– 1% responded never
– (=79%)
When a tariff, sanction or rate change hits, nearly half (47%) cannot get a complete view of their exposure across the portfolio.
In response to the question: When an external change (e.g. a new tariff, a regulatory shift, a movement in interest rates, a major supplier or customer event) means you need to understand how your commercial contracts are affected across your entire portfolio, how would your organisation most likely get that answer today?
– Addition of: We would review the most important contracts individually and accept we might miss some (21%), we would depend on the specific people who happen to know those contracts (15%), and we would have no reliable way to answer this across the whole portfolio (11%).
53% of big businesses can’t get answers from their own contracts without asking Legal, the contract owner or searching by hand, and this coincides with 31% that have missed or delayed a commercial decision, saving or rebate because the information wasn’t to hand.
In response to the question: When business teams in your organisation need information from a commercial contract, how do they typically obtain it? (Q10)
– Ask our Legal Team (15%)
– Ask the contract owner (18%)
– Search contract repositories manually themselves (20%)
In response to the question: In the past two years, which of the following has your organisation experienced because commercial contract information or the reasoning behind terms was not readily accessible? (Q9)
– 31% had entirely missed or delayed a saving, rebate or entitlement
71% of respondents said their enterprises have a formal system in place designed to preserve contract knowledge, but 96% of the same respondents reported losing access to contract knowledge anyway.
In response to the question: Does your organisation have a formal system or process in place, including any AI or technology tools, specifically designed to capture and preserve the knowledge held in its commercial contracts? (Q8)
– 71% responded yes
In response to the question: In the past two years, to what extent have you or a colleague been unable to locate or explain the details of a commercial contract when you needed the information, or been unable to readily access information on the strategic rationale underpinning agreed terms? (Q1) – 4% responded never
75% of teams spend six or more hours a month locating information buried inside their own commercial contracts, with the average enterprise losing roughly 12 working days a year to that search – the equivalent of nearly two and a half weeks. For almost one in five teams (18%), the loss runs to between three and six working weeks a year.
In response to the question: Thinking about your own team, roughly how much time in a typical month goes into locating information held inside existing commercial contracts? (Q7)
– 75% = 57% lose 6-10 hours, 22% lose 2-5 hours and 1% more than 20 hours
– 18% of teams lose 11-20 hours (three-six weeks yearly)
One in three (33%) had repeated a negotiating concession without knowing why it was originally agreed, nearly a third (31%) had accepted legal or commercial risk without knowing their company’s prior position, and almost a third (31%) had entirely missed or delayed a saving, rebate or entitlement.
In response to the question: In the past two years, which of the following has your organisation experienced because commercial contract information or the reasoning behind terms was not readily accessible? (Q9)
– 33% had repeated a negotiating concession without knowing why it was initially agreed – 31% had accepted legal or commercial risk without knowing their company’s prior position – 31% had entirely missed or delayed a saving, rebate or entitlement
Nearly one in three enterprises (31%) puts the value of contracts whose underlying reasoning is undocumented above $1.3 billion, and one in ten (10%) puts it above $6.7 billion. Almost all (97%) carry at least some contract value where the reasoning lives only in an employee’s memory, personal files or old email threads, and 73% put that figure at $334 million or more.
In response to the question: Approximately what is the combined annual value of the commercial contracts your organisation currently holds for which the reasoning behind agreed terms resides solely with individuals. (Q4)
– 31% is the addition of 21% who responded £1.01bn – £5bn and 10% who responded more than £5bn
– 97% is the addition of all who answered the question affirmatively
(Note: All figures were originally GBP and have been converted at current exchange rates)
89% of enterprises faced an external shock in the past year – a tariff change, a rate move, a supplier failure – that required an urgent check of their contract positions. Yet only a quarter (26%) could get a fast, portfolio-wide answer, and 11% had no reliable way to answer at all.
In response to the question: In the past 12 months, approximately how many times has an external change (e.g. a tariff, a regulatory shift, an interest rate movement, a major supplier or customer event) meant you urgently needed to know how your commercial contracts were affected? (Q6)
An addition of:
– 62% said 1-2 times
– 26% said 3-5 times
– 1% said so often that it is now a routine part of how [they] operate
In response to the question: When an external change means you need to understand how your commercial contracts are affected across your entire portfolio, how would your organisation get that answer today?
– 26% responded “we would query all our contracts and get a portfolio-wide answer, but this would take a short time period / small amounts of manual work”
– 11% responded “we would have no reliable way to answer this across the whole portfolio”
