Transforming commercial contracts through computable contracting

Abstract

Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society, serving to clarify agreements between multiple parties. While digital technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with contracting, the contracts themselves continue, in the main, to be in the form of unstructured, natural language text. This limits the scope for improvements in productivity and automation, as well as the emergence of new business models. To this end, this paper examines the concept of “computable contracts” as objects that are understandable by both humans and computers, and goes on to present a framework that unifies a range of technologies and approaches that collectively will help to make computable contracting a reality.