Malbek Envision 2026 ran October 12 through 14 at the Hotel Van Zandt in Austin. Jennifer Harrold and the Resophonics opened the week. Mike Massimino spoke on leading through the unknown. Christine Cashen spoke on staying fully human in an AI world. I closed the main stage with a talk on proving AI ROI when the CFO has heard it all before. The practical sessions covered implementation readiness, adoption, support, and value realization. The closing night was a private Smash Mouth show at Stubb’s.
On October 13 Malbek announced Composable CLM, an open, connected, and headless architecture. Contract intelligence is meant to appear inside Word, the CRM, Slack, ChatGPT, Claude, or a custom agent. The company said people should not have to leave the tools where the decision is already being made (Malbek, 2026).
Sense turns obligations into tasks owned by a person
Malbek Sense surfaces obligations from signed contracts by time, criticality, and owner. Teams can drill in and act on tasks that external market signals can drive. On stage the examples included CPI-linked pricing, fuel-surcharge provisions, FDA recalls on medical devices, and SLA performance reports that arrive by email and are reconciled against the contractual obligation. The system creates the task only when action is required.
Hemanth Puttaswamy described the vision as linking what happens outside the company to the commitments inside the contracts. A fuel surcharge or a recall notice should trigger a task for the person who owns the commercial outcome rather than remaining unread in the repository. Sense is generally available, starting with its obligations view.
Drift Detective checks the draft against signed deals
Drift Detective works inside Malbek for Word. It benchmarks a draft against a selectable set of already-executed agreements. Users can filter by value, counterparty, recency, or other criteria. The tool flags provisions as favorable, unfavorable, or balanced relative to the peer group and provides a path back to the underlying clauses. The more contracts are executed, the system continues to learn.
Multiple sessions raised the playbook problem. Organizations end up with hundreds of playbooks. Rules change faster than the playbooks are updated. The documents people actually sign diverge from the rules that were supposed to govern them. Drift Detective is available to customers with Bek and BusinessIQ.
The MCP Server keeps agent actions inside the audit trail
The Malbek MCP Server lets any AI assistant that speaks the Model Context Protocol discover contracts, retrieve metadata, check a document out for work in a third-party tool, and check it back in. The action is tied to an authenticated user. Permissions are respected. Everything is written into the audit trail inside the platform.
The CLM remains the system of record and the governance layer. Specialized agents or research tools can handle specific tasks such as deeper legal research under a particular jurisdiction or modeling of rebate structures. The document returns with the action recorded.
Malbek also formed a strategic partnership with World Commerce & Contracting on research framed as the Office of the CFO. Sally Guyer, Global CEO of WorldCC, said contracts contain signals about future financial performance and that most organizations are not reading them. Closing that gap belongs in the office of the CFO (WorldCC, 2026).
Customers described where the work actually moves
Caitlin DeCandia, associate director of legal operations and contracts management at Kailera Therapeutics, said she used to accept that legal was always the bottleneck. With visibility into where contracts are stuck, she no longer believes that. The constraint is more often end-user education and process clarity. The company has Malbek integrated with Coupa so that a purchase order cannot be issued without a signed contract.
David Chiodo, manager of legal operations at a high-velocity sales company based in Atlanta, described sitting down with sales leadership to map pain points. They simplified order forms and moved terms online so more deals move with less legal intervention. Trust between the groups improved once both sides could see the same workflow.
Carolina Castro, associate director of business intelligence and continuous improvement at EDF Power Solutions, described expanding the same system beyond traditional legal agreements into land contracts and banking documents. The flexibility and speed of deployment mattered. They formed governance committees of power users from each business unit who provide ongoing feedback. Lessons learned from one rollout speed the next. She noted that measuring outcomes three, six, and twelve months later is what makes the value credible to finance.
Several speakers said change management is the majority of the work. Champions support users on process questions as well as product questions. AI can take a first pass. Human judgment on risk and relationship still sits with the attorneys and commercial owners.
Malbek. “Malbek Launches Composable CLM, the Contract Layer for the Agentic Enterprise.” GlobeNewswire, 13 Oct. 2026, https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/10/13/3379764/0/en/malbek-launches-composable-clm-the-contract-layer-for-the-agentic-enterprise.html.
World Commerce & Contracting. Office of the CFO research series. https://go.malbek.io/cfo.
Sessions at Malbek Envision 2026, Austin, 12–14 Oct. 2026.
