Using AI as a vendor-management analyst
Vendor decisions kept depending on a paper trail scattered across email, SharePoint, and PDFs that nobody had time to reassemble properly, until a discrepancy forced the issue: a vendor's published terms page turned out to postdate the signed agreement by about a year. Catching that meant treating every piece of evidence as exactly as solid as it actually was, no more.
Category
Vendor and contract research.
What I was trying to accomplish
Assemble the scattered paper trail behind vendor decisions, renewals, pricing history, confidentiality terms, billing disputes, quickly and with the evidence attached.
The data challenges
Parallel research across email, SharePoint, and PDFs; invoice numbers that only existed inside PDF attachments, never in subject lines; a vendor's current terms page that post-dated a signed agreement by about a year; and an oral commitment that didn't match the written order form.
The result
Memos, a contract portfolio, a confidentiality review, and draft vendor emails, all built on a consistent discipline: label evidence quality plainly rather than presenting everything as equally solid. An unconfirmed price stayed unconfirmed in the briefing, and a version gap got flagged as a version gap, not treated as governing text.
Technical details
Tools: Claude Cowork and claude.ai, Microsoft 365 email and SharePoint search, parallel research agents, Word
Vendor decisions at a law firm usually depend on a paper trail scattered across email threads, SharePoint folders, PDFs, and people's recollections. Several times that trail needed to be assembled quickly and accurately: before a subscription renewal, before a technology committee meeting, when a vendor's statement needed to be reconciled against what had been paid.
For a legal-research subscription renewal, Claude ran two research agents in parallel, one reading internal discussion for stated concerns and one reading the vendor negotiation trail for pricing and timeline history, then combined them into a recommendation memo. For a marketing agency, Claude searched multiple mailboxes and SharePoint and assembled about two years of agreements and proposals into one contract portfolio, then reviewed the vendor's published confidentiality terms. For a billing question, Claude matched a vendor's statement against invoices already forwarded, pulling invoice numbers out of PDF attachments because they never appeared in subject lines.
The consistent challenge was evidence quality, and the consistent discipline was to label it. An oral commitment did not match the order form word for word, so the memo said so before anyone signed. A pricing figure existed only in an informal recap, and the briefing treated it as unconfirmed. A vendor's current terms page post-dated the signature by about a year, which Claude flagged as a version gap rather than presenting it as the governing text.
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Let's talk through where things stand, and where they could go.