Praful Saklani Of Pramata On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence

AI is not a magic box, it still requires a lot of work to make it really useful. It’s like buying a microwave — if you don’t know how to buy the right ingredients, and prep them in the right quantities, it won’t be able to make you nutritious or tasty food. In the case of Enterprise-Grade Contract AI, if you don’t cleanse and organize contract data into a Knowledge Base that allows AI to use it effectively, you will keep getting inaccurate results from AI, and claim that ‘AI doesn’t work’. That’s why we focus so much on organizing the knowledge from contracts, because it’s at the center of making Enterprise Grade Contract AI useful.

As part of our series about the future of Artificial Intelligence, I had the pleasure of interviewing Praful Saklani, CEO and Co-Founder of Pramata, the Enterprise-Grade Contract AI company.

Praful Saklani has deep expertise in the artificial intelligence technologies core to Pramata, and experience in delivering enterprise process solutions. Praful founded Pramata to leverage AI to unlock the value trapped inside their complex contracts with customers and vendors, by giving legal, sales, finance, and procurement leaders deep insights into their commercial relationships.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?

The most potent founding ideas come from deeply experiencing a pain point in your own life. Many years ago, I was the co-founder of a company that was being acquired by a public company, and during the M&A process, we had a parade of legal and finance professionals coming into our office to look through all of our contracts with our customers and vendors. I off-handedly said to one of the highly compensated lawyers, “This must be a lot easier at a large sophisticated company.” He laughed loudly and said, “Are you kidding, in those places, it can take months to even find all of the contracts!”

When I was looking to launch a new Enterprise SaaS company a few years later, I reached out to friends who were General Counsels and CFOs. All of them had the same message: Contracts were complicated and many relationships were informed by dozens or hundreds of documents that were executed over years or even decades. Because of the complexity, most companies couldn’t answer big questions like, “How many active contracts do I have”” or “Which things are coming up for renewal?” without massive brute force efforts which were difficult or impossible to undertake. Worst of all, I found out that the need for information from contracts was very broad. Legal, sales, finance, procurement, and operations teams needed to constantly refer to the information from these documents to do their jobs, and they were all relying on brute force to try to do it.

I knew then there was a real opportunity for a technology startup that could help bring order to something so critical to governing a business’ customer and vendor relationships. Honestly, at the time, it was shocking how very little visibility companies had into their contract data. When I had the chance to start a new company, this was a problem that I knew I could solve with the right technology. And thus, Pramata was born.

What lessons can others learn from your story?

That if you see a painful and puzzling problem that you know you can fix, go for it. Just because an organization or an industry has done something the same way for decades doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. There’s also a chance you do more than simply solve a problem — you could end up completely revolutionizing an antiquated and ineffective process, leading to meaningful change that has a lasting impact across industries. It’s the butterfly effect: One small positive action has the power to move mountains.

Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

We have been believers in the potential of Generative AI ever since GPT-3 was launched in 2020, but the speed at which LLMs and Foundation Models have evolved since 2023 has been awe-inspiring. With these leaps in AI technology, our mission is to leverage Generative AI to deliver Enterprise-Grade Contract AI to any company that wants to leverage information from their contracts to transform this business.

Enterprise-Grade Contract AI is focused on providing solutions that are useful, accurate, predictable, and secure. Our company’s biggest strength is our ability to cleanse and organize contract knowledge so that AI can use it to drive a wide range of solutions, including AI-driven search and reporting, deep insights to drive customer engagement and growth, analytics to power vendor negotiation and risk management, and, of course, speeding up the process of drafting, negotiating, and approving contracts.

A good example of the types of solutions we are delivering is our recently launched AI Design Studio. It allows our customers to use knowledge from their existing contracts to rapidly build customized contract playbooks for drafting and negotiation, and to use AI to instantly create new contracts based on things they have done before. Our AI Design Studio also allows people to use AI to create benchmarks and checklists to manage risk and compliance.

Importantly, this is all being done in natural language — it’s not complex coding that requires an engineering degree. It’s easy for business users like lawyers and analysts to get “hands-on” and interact with AI Agents and prompts for their specific needs. Things that used to take an army of technologists months to configure or build (if it was possible at all) can now be accomplished within minutes or hours. AI-enabled solutions really need to be seen to be understood, it’s that big of a paradigm shift in capability. It’s a truly incredible piece of technology that can help organizations produce mind-blowing results in terms of managing and organizing their contracts and maximizing the value of their contract data.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I’ve had the honor of having some great mentors along the way as Pramata has gone through various stages of growth. I strongly suggest that all founders find an experienced fellow Founder-CEO as a mentor if possible because it’s a puzzling and somewhat lonely role that can only be fully understood by someone who has been there before.

In my case, one of my most influential mentors has been Richard Hodge. He is the Founder and former CEO of The Real Learning Company, a pioneer in the learning and development field that eventually merged with a larger company. Richard served on Pramata’s Board for many years, and he helped me and the Pramata management team to develop a very distinct culture early in the development of our company. Richard is a big believer in aligning company and individual values, and he helped us to develop a culture based on key values such as integrity, customer-centricity, and enjoyment. Over the years, those pillars have served us well as we have continued to add more and more team members who align with our core values. For any new entrepreneurs out there, I’d like to emphasize that culture is a superpower that powers you through the ups and downs, and it makes your workplace a lot more enjoyable too! Finding this compass and balance is something I’m very grateful for.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?

1. This is as bad as AI will ever be in terms of accuracy and usefulness. And it’s already pretty good. It’s like the internet in 1999. It was already useful, but only 5% of what it is today. The only limit is our imagination, and I’m excited to see what comes out of our collective creativity!
2. Throughout history, the ability to access technology has had very powerful gatekeepers. You needed the right training and the right specific machinery or access to computing. Particularly with broadly adopted Generative AI technologies like GPT and Claude, the medium of accessing and leveraging compute capacity is natural language, which we use every day. We can now build logic and undertake complex actions using our everyday language. It still will require nuance and training to be fully proficient, but the bar to success is being lowered rapidly.
3. User interfaces are about to get a lot easier. In our domain of Contract AI, you can ask an AI Agent, “Hey, draft me a sales contract for our product based on what I did with Acme Corp last month, with a 10% discount for year one, but make the termination clause tighter so they have only 30 days notice at the end of the year.” And it should give you a contract that is 99% there. Literally, 99%. And this will happen with every business process, everywhere.
4. Moving outside the realm of B2B SaaS, I think AI is going to radically change the way in which education works. There is no reason why every student in a classroom should move at the same pace and read the exact same curriculum. AI will allow for customized education for each and every student, with dynamic adjustments based on proficiency and challenges. It’s hard to explain how much more effective it can be, but there are some amazing prototypes and demos already out there.
5. We are just scratching the surface of the value of robotics in the real world. I’ve owned a car with sophisticated automated driving systems and, if that’s what an early version of the tech looks like, I can see robots being ubiquitous to empower a very wide range of things in the world, including assisting with driving, cooking, heavy labor, etc. This is good! It will open up all kinds of creative opportunities we haven’t even begun to think about yet.

What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?

1. There’s a lot of snake oil and get-rich-quick schemes out there that are using the word ‘AI’. Putting a chatbot on your old software product is not AI. And if the chatbot doesn’t work or spews nonsense, it will reduce trust in the entire technology, so we need to be vigilant in calling out these things.
2. AI is not a magic box, it still requires a lot of work to make it really useful. It’s like buying a microwave — if you don’t know how to buy the right ingredients, and prep them in the right quantities, it won’t be able to make you nutritious or tasty food. In the case of Enterprise-Grade Contract AI, if you don’t cleanse and organize contract data into a Knowledge Base that allows AI to use it effectively, you will keep getting inaccurate results from AI, and claim that ‘AI doesn’t work’. That’s why we focus so much on organizing the knowledge from contracts, because it’s at the center of making Enterprise Grade Contract AI useful.
3. AI in the hands of a malicious actor is a very powerful and concerning tool. Whether we are talking about virtual or physical weapons, AI will enable new opportunities for fraud or worse, and we as a society will need to develop equally powerful counter-weapons. People will be able to call you and mimic the voice of a close relative asking for money. Scammers will figure out ways to make fake documents and photographs even more believable. We will need to get smart about this quickly. It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game.
4. AI will be disorienting for the workforce in many many fields, and this may cause some instability in the short run if adequate measures aren’t taken to enable an AI-driven workforce. What does an AI-enabled bookkeeper do if most of the work of cleaning and organizing accounting information is done via AI? What does an AI-enabled lawyer do if much of the work of legal research and contract/brief drafting is done via AI? There is actually a lot for these people to do, but it will be different than what they do today. The best analogy for this is that calculators and drafting software do a very large percent of what engineers and architects used to spend their time on in 1960, but those technologies did not destroy or eliminate the need for those professions. Quite the contrary, they actually enabled professionals to become more productive and proficient. The same dynamic will play out in pretty much every profession over the next decade, and we need to be intelligent about how we re-skill the workforce for this scenario.
5. People are worried about Superintelligence and Breakout (where the AI is so smart it creates increasingly smarter AIs on its own, to the point where it far surpasses what humans can control or understand). I personally am a little less worried about this in the short and medium term, and I think there are many ways to isolate AI or create fire-breaks to minimize potential damage from this. But far smarter people than me are very worried about this, so it’s something we need to be vigilant about.

As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI poses an existential danger to humanity. What is your position about this?

In theory almost any major technology managed incorrectly could pose an existential threat. So yes, we should be worried about it and keep endeavoring to develop protections and counter-measures. But nuclear technology is something that literally poses an existential threat to humanity and we have developed mechanisms to manage this threat over the past 80 years, even across countries and governments that are sworn enemies of one another (like the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the Cold War). I bet on humanity’s ability to create counter-measures and protections against the worst outcomes, and I’d like us, as a society, to lean into the positive things that can be enabled from AI technology.

What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?

With the speed at which AI innovation is occurring, and the pace at which information moves in today’s society, I don’t know that we can ever “assure the public” that there is nothing to be concerned about because there’s always a potential for dangerous scenarios. The question is how do we create the right regulatory and legal framework to protect against misuse without killing innovation. It’s the classic “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” situation. If we put too many restrictions on AI too quickly, we risk squandering our innovation advantage, and, as a country, we could fall behind in the AI-development race.

The good news is that, as a free society, there is a vigorous debate about these topics. Different viewpoints are being worked through by technologists, academics, legislators, corporate executives, etc.

I suspect, over the next three-to-five years, things will settle down into an imperfect but sustainable pattern. But in the interim there will be quite a bit of back-and-forth, and hopefully the public can be assured that’s part of the “sausage making” when you are deploying a fast moving transformative technology.

Opinions are good! People warning us of dangers are good! People telling us about the great things AI can do are good! Let the messy conversation play out so we end up in the right place.

As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?

I’m a firm believer of the principle that technology is at its most powerful when it is accessible and usable by the largest number of people. One of the great things about smartphones, for example, is that they are used by 80-year-olds and 15-year-olds equally. Recently I was in a remote part of rural India where I used my phone and digital currency to buy a $0.50 packet of potato chips from a small shop owner who received the funds on his smartphone! That’s called broad access! Age-blind, income-blind, race-blind, gender-blind. Technology needs to be accessible to all.

In terms of ensuring that women become key players in the AI industry, I believe it all starts with ensuring that there are fewer barriers to women being involved in STEM programs at the elementary, high school, and college levels. If only 30% of STEM degrees are earned by women (while 55% of overall college degrees are earned by women), that’s a fundamental distortion that essentially ratchets through the entire industry. I personally believe that there are all of these subtle, but important, signals that start early on that “women can’t succeed in tech” or “tech is fundamentally unfriendly for women” or “there are better careers for women than STEM.” We need to eradicate these signals and pull more women into STEM from an early age.

So there are a few things we can do to encourage more female representation in my opinion. One is to highlight women who have been successful in the technology industry, to create clear role models. Sheryl Sandberg really pushed a message along these lines with her “Lean In” message a few years ago. We need to make it clear that it is possible, and indeed necessary, that women will play an equal and important role in the evolution of technology in the world.

Within AI specifically, we need to highlight the fundamental role played by women scientists in the development and deployment of the next gen of AI. Aspiring women AI scientists should know the story of Mira Murati, who has been at the core of OpenAI almost since its inception and for a brief time was the CEO of the company. Without her there would be no GPT!! Women ARE at the center of the technology industry already and we need to get that message out to pull more women into the industry.

Last but not least, there is an extreme scarcity of available talent that truly knows how to work with AI. I would encourage women interested in the field to get hands on with applied AI, using one of the hundreds of online tutorials or even taking classes. Any smart company should be running to hire them.

What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?

My family background is Indian. Growing up, one of the texts I was introduced to was the Bhagavad Gita. It’s a remarkable conversation on how to live in a world of uncertainty and difficult decisions. A key life lesson of the Gita is (paraphrasing), “Do your actions to the best of your knowledge and ability, but know that you do not have control over the results.” For someone who manages a business, this would seem to be contradictory, but it’s actually liberating.

Why is that? It’s because there are so many external factors that go into making something work or not work, and there is no way to control all of them . All you can do is take action based on what you know right now. If that action creates the results that you anticipate and want, that’s great. But if not, then you just need to reassess what you have learned and take action again. And repeat that same process over and over again.

This is what startup entrepreneurs mean when they say “iterate iterate iterate” or “fail fast.” All of the great entrepreneurs seem to have an intuitive grasp of this. They don’t get stymied when things don’t go according to plan. In fact they view each situation as an opportunity to learn something new and improve.

So to those reading this, take action boldly, and be freed from the tyranny of having to know everything and always having to be right!

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?

There are two main ways in which I strive to bring goodness into the world on a daily basis.

1. I work to create a highly ethical and goal-oriented company that is a great place to work. We spend more time working on our jobs than almost any other activity in our lives. We spend a huge amount of time with our colleagues and our customers. Life is too short to create a work culture and environment that is miserable. That misery radiates into everything else that people do, whether it is their personal lives, their family, and their communities. I want to make sure that work is not a burden or an anchor, and instead feels like an accomplishment and a shared journey with a great team. This is a way in which any business can bring a lot of goodness to the world.
2. There is an old saying: “You cannot give something which you yourself do not have.” I have a daily meditation practice. Every day I strive to let go of the stresses of the world and learn from what has happened to inform my actions the following day. I look to re-connect with my own humanity and inherent love of life. The way I see it, if I can find peace and joy within myself, then I have a chance of perhaps connecting with others in the same way, and increasing the presence of those things in the larger world around me.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I really believe that in our busy information-rich world, there is a scarcity of mental peace. We are constantly bombarded with ideas, images, sensations that are pulling us in every direction. If I could start a movement it would basically be a movement to teach everyone to let go of everything and just breathe. Yes, that’s right, something that everyone has access to. Close your eyes, feel your breath come in and out through your nostrils, and see if you can luxuriate in the feeling of the air rejuvenating and cleansing you. If everyone could do that for even three-to-five minutes a day, I believe the ripple effect would probably be even more transformative than AI …

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can reach out to me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/prafulsaklani, and I’m on X at https://x.com/Praful_Saklani (but I don’t post there often).

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!