Icertis 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 95 percent of Indian executives believe they 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 unrealised revenue across growing customer networks and complex supply chains.
Contracts define every business relationship and form the foundation of global commerce, making commercial agreements one of the most powerful assets to catalyse – or hinder – revenue and risk in today’s business landscape.
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 their business is 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 intricate, commercial agreements play a pivotal role in mitigating risk and safeguarding compliance.
The survey also revealed advanced perspectives on the transformative future of AI in business among India’s c-suite, in comparison to their global counterparts:
- India’s c-suite remains bullish on the bottom-line impact of AI. 57 percent of leaders in India and the US believe AI will impact their bottom line in the year ahead, in comparison to only 28 percent in the UK. 66 percent of India’s leaders plan to implement AI tools in 2025, including AI in contracting, versus 53 percent in the UK and 45 percent in the US.
- India’s executives grasp the potential for AI in legal. While leaders globally agree that finance is the no. 1 area of the business that could realise immediate cost savings through the effective use of AI, India was the only market to rank legal in the top five departments for AI-driven cost reductions, alongside marketing, IT, and HR.
- India believes Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is tangible in 2025. 77 percent of India’s leaders believe AGI will change the way their business works in the year ahead, compared to 60 percent in the US and 34 percent in the UK.
“India’s economy remains one of the fastest growing in the world because our leaders are forward-thinking and understand the opportunity that AI presents to revolutionise the way they do business. Optimising customer and supplier contracts to stop value leakage with AI is critical for India to maintain momentum in commerce while positioning our businesses to compete – and win – across global markets,” said Monish Darda, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Icertis. “Millions of dollars flow in and out of the enterprise through commercial agreements, and this survey from Icertis proves that AI is the key to turn contracts into strategic assets and recapture revenue in 2025 and beyond.”