Career attorney, engineer, and legal operations leader steps into CPO role, a deliberate signal about what it takes to build AI that actually works for enterprise contracting
Agiloft, the global leader in data-first contract lifecycle management (CLM), named Jason Barnwell as Chief Product Officer. Barnwell is a mechanical engineering graduate of MIT who spent years as a software engineer before earning his law degree from USC, then built a 15-year career at Microsoft where he led the legal operations team responsible for running the CLM platform that powered Microsoft’s global procurement operations – a system tied to billions of dollars in procurement spend across one of the world’s most complex supply chains. He joins the product seat with a perspective that is rare in enterprise software: he has been the buyer, the builder, and the practitioner.
At Microsoft, Barnwell served most recently as General Manager and Associate General Counsel for Monetization and Business Planning within the company’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs organization. He drove the digital transformation of legal work, building systems to keep contract deviations minimal, rationalize resource pyramids, and make legal work scalable and data-driven. Prior to Microsoft, he practiced law at Cooley LLP in the Emerging Companies group, advising startups and venture-backed businesses at the intersection of technology and law. He previously served on the board of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), the leading global community for legal operations professionals.
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Barnwell joined Agiloft as Chief Legal Officer in December 2024, a role in which he quickly moved beyond the legal function to help shape the company’s product direction, describing himself as “customer zero” and holding the platform to the same standards he would demand as a practitioner. Agiloft will not backfill the CLO role.
Andy Wishart, who built Agiloft’s product foundation as Chief Product Officer, will conclude his tenure on July 3, 2026, to step back, recharge, and spend more time with his family.
“Contracts are the operating layer of every commercial relationship, and the organizations that can manage them intelligently at scale, with clean data, are going to have a material advantage,” said Jason Barnwell, Chief Product Officer at Agiloft. “I’ve spent my career inside that problem. As an engineer, as an attorney, and as someone who ran contracting infrastructure for a multi-billion-dollar organization, I have a clear picture of what the work actually requires and where the current generation of tools falls short. That’s the lens I’m bringing to Agiloft’s product, and I intend to hold us to it.”
Barnwell has been outspoken about the gap between what legal technology promises and what practitioners need. In his view, CLM gives legal and operations leaders a control-and-management plane for their commitments as an organization, and the value of AI in contracting depends entirely on what sits underneath it: structured, reliable contract data that makes analysis, simulation, and operational insight possible.
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That thesis is central to Agiloft Astra, the company’s AI-native contract intelligence platform, designed to make contract data searchable, analyzable, and actionable across legal, procurement, finance, and operations, the same interconnected functions Barnwell managed at Microsoft scale.
“When Jason described what he wanted to accomplish at Agiloft, he said he felt like he was built in a lab for this role,” said Eric Laughlin, Chief Executive Officer at Agiloft. “Having watched him work, he is absolutely right. He is a tinkerer and a builder at heart – someone who still codes, who has been at the forefront of applying AI to legal and contracting work long before it became an industry talking point, and who has practiced law and run a contracting operation at scale most people never see. That combination is exactly what our product organization needs, and it is going to show in what we build.”
Agiloft works with enterprise customers in financial services, healthcare, procurement, and manufacturing, helping them manage contracts as a strategic business asset across the full contract lifecycle.
