90 Percent of CEOs are Losing Money in Contract Negotiations, According to Icertis Survey
Insights Reveal C-Suite Blindness to Value Leakage and Identify AI as Financial Remedy
Icertis, the global leader in AI-powered contract intelligence, released its 2025 executive insights survey titled Powering Profitability: The new economics of customer and supplier relationships. Based on responses from more than 1,000 c-suite leaders, the survey found that 90 percent of CEOs and over 80 percent of CFOs are leaving money on the table during contract negotiations. After a contract is signed, businesses also lose an average of 9 percent of the agreement’s overall value, leading to substantial profitability erosion and millions in unrealized revenue across growing customer networks and complex supply chains.
“Millions of dollars flow in and out of the enterprise through commercial agreements with customers and suppliers. This survey from Icertis proves that c-suite leaders lack confidence when it comes to optimizing those agreements and are unknowingly overlooking critical areas of value leakage in their business relationships”
Contracts define every business relationship and form the foundation of global commerce, making commercial agreements one of the most powerful assets to catalyze – or hinder – revenue and risk in business landscape.
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Key findings of the survey point to a substantial gap between leadership perception and the realities of business contracting, including:
- CFOs are blind to value leakage. Nearly all CFOs are confident they are collecting everything their business is entitled to from customers and suppliers, but this confidence is unfounded based on how businesses are managing contracts. These same CFOs also cite missed opportunities to charge additional fees (44 percent), late or outstanding customer payments (40 percent), and unused discount opportunities with suppliers (40 percent) among their top sources of revenue leakage – all of which are governed and enforced through commercial agreements.
- Businesses are overlooking their foremost opportunity to combat inflation. Cost increases due to inflation are cited globally as the top source of revenue leakage by executives, including 70 percent of CFOs. Despite this concern, more than 40 percent of the c-suite says their business is not leveraging inflationary pricing protections in contracts.
- Overconfidence is the biggest threat to regulatory compliance. 70 percent of c-suite leaders feel “very prepared” to demonstrate compliance in 2025’s rapidly shifting regulatory landscape, yet nearly half of businesses have been fined for regulatory violations in the last five years. As global regulations and supply chains become increasingly complex, commercial agreements play a pivotal role in mitigating risk and safeguarding compliance.
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The survey also revealed that business leaders remain bullish on the bottom-line impact of AI across critical functions like finance:
- Confidence in AI held steady year-over-year. In 2023, 49 percent of c-suite executives believed that AI would impact their bottom line in the year ahead. That number remained largely the same in 2024, with 46 percent of leaders giving the same response again. More than half of leaders are planning to implement AI tools in 2025, including incorporating AI into contract management to optimize business relationships.
- Finance is the new “golden child” of AI. CEOs view finance as the no. 1 area of the business that could realize immediate cost savings through the effective use of AI, followed by IT and marketing. Despite early AI hype around legal, c-suite leaders ranked legal last in potential for AI-driven cost reductions, illustrating a missed area of opportunity to capture value in the department that negotiates contracts.
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is tangible in 2025. 55 percent of leaders believe AGI will change the way businesses work in the year ahead. An additional 27 percent believe it will change the way their enterprise works in the next two to five years.
- Looking ahead, AI will trump macro-economic factors in shaping the 2025 – 2035 business landscape. Executives believe that advancements in AI will be the most influential external factor on how their business evolves in 2025 and a major factor over the next decade. Respondents expect the influence of AI on businesses to supersede climate change, increased market competition, geopolitical shifts, and evolving supply chains.
“Millions of dollars flow in and out of the enterprise through commercial agreements with customers and suppliers. This survey from Icertis proves that c-suite leaders lack confidence when it comes to optimizing those agreements and are unknowingly overlooking critical areas of value leakage in their business relationships,” said Rajat Bahri, Chief Financial Officer, Icertis. “Executives in all industries want to increase revenue and improve profit margins in 2025, no matter what the economic landscape looks like. Turning contracts into strategic assets with the right AI technology is key to recapture revenue and ultimately get ahead as global commerce continues to evolve.”
Survey respondents included c-suite executives at companies with more than 5,000 employees across the US, UK, and India.
