Agiloft’s new 600-company survey reveals a market under strain: tariff shocks are cascading through supply chains, contracts, and commercial systems faster than teams can absorb them. In a candid conversation, Prashant Dubey explains why only data-centric, interconnected CLM infrastructure can keep pace.
Tariff volatility is no longer an abstract policy shift—it’s an enterprise-wide stress test. And the organizations that stay upright aren’t necessarily the ones with the best clauses; they’re the ones with the strongest underlying systems. That distinction sits at the center of Agiloft’s new 600-respondent survey, which shows an overwhelming majority—92%—have now embedded tariff-related language into their contracts. Not as a trend, but as survival.
This is where Prashant Dubey, Agiloft’s Chief Strategy Officer, becomes essential reading. Dubey doesn’t describe tariff turbulence as a legal drafting challenge. He describes it as a systems challenge, where a single data point—a tariff change—moves through government affairs, supply chain, procurement, finance, and legal with a velocity most organizations were not built to handle.
“CLM is the glue that binds together all commercial processes in a company,” he tells me, not as branding, but as architecture. Tariff shifts don’t originate in a contract. They begin upstream, with trade-policy trackers and government updates. By the time the impact reaches legal or procurement, the organization needs a way to identify affected agreements, understand economic responsibility under INCO terms, evaluate remedies, and push changes through ERP, vendor management, and downstream financial systems.
Documents alone can’t carry that load. Infrastructure can.
This is the sharpest distinction Dubey makes: document-centric AI tools analyze the past; data-centric CLM orchestrates the present. A tariff trigger is a data event, not a drafting event. And because volatility in tariffs is inherently unpredictable—Dubey emphasizes volatility rather than variability—enterprises need systems that can cascade adjustments consistently, audibly, and at scale.
The survey reflects the strain. Nearly half of U.S. and U.K. respondents reported exiting longstanding supplier relationships; more than half entered new or unfamiliar markets. Dubey stresses that this is partly a reflection of respondent demographics. Smaller and mid-size organizations—who make up the bulk of the survey—can pivot faster, but at a cost. Vendor onboarding becomes overwhelmed. Compliance checks multiply. Entire risk models need recalibration. Large enterprises, by contrast, rarely rewire twenty-year supplier relationships overnight; integration depth makes abrupt switching nearly impossible.
The survey also surfaced a slowdown in contract reviews and approvals—40% of respondents. Dubey isn’t surprised. Once tariff language is under revision, entire clusters of provisions shift with it: remedies, liability allocation, pricing caps, escalation rights. What used to be a serial process—commercial terms, then legal terms—no longer holds. The volatility forces simultaneous negotiation across functions. Ironically, it forces better collaboration.
And then there’s the question that every leadership team privately asks: Who owns this?
With procurement, finance, supply chain, legal, and government affairs all entangled, where does accountability land?
Dubey has a clear view, grounded in years of watching these dynamics play out: the general counsel is increasingly the point of accountability. Not because GCs enjoy it, but because boards and executive teams expect legal leaders to interpret the volatility, guide the operational response, and ensure the organization can withstand repeated shocks. CLM is not a “legal system” anymore—it is an enterprise system that legal must steward.
It aligns with a broader shift Dubey has tracked for years. GCs have already become financially fluent. Now they’re becoming systems fluent. They are expected to understand supply-chain implications, pricing structures, ERP touchpoints, data flows, and commercial impacts—skills that would once have been viewed as outside the legal purview.
What tariff turbulence exposes is simple and stark: contracting is no longer paperwork. It is infrastructure.
Dubey’s metaphor lands because it’s true. AI tools may be the faucets, polished and configurable. But the CLM platform underneath—the PVC pipe—is what keeps the whole operation functioning when the pressure spikes.
And in this environment, the pressure isn’t easing.
Published November 14, 2025.
