Roundtable Discussion – “Navigating Commercial Contracts in the Age of AI and Automation”

The inaugural roundtable on “Navigating Commercial Contracts in the Age of AI and Automation,” held on 28th March 2026 at the Auditorium of IILM University, Gurugram, convened leading practitioners, corporate counsels, and academicians to deliberate on the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on commercial contracting practices, examining critical questions of accountability, human judgment, and institutional preparedness in an AI-augmented legal landscape.
Panel 1, moderated by Dr. Aratrika Deb and featuring Ms. Simran Brar Kapoor (Advocate, Chambers of Simran Brar Kapoor), Mr. Aditya Vikram Jalan (Partner, AZB & Partners), and Mr. Madhav Khosla (Counsel, Khaitan & Company), examined how AI is being used for document summarisation, chronology-building, research assistance, risk identification, and pattern recognition — reaching a consensus that AI is transitioning from a supplementary tool to a structural feature of contractual practice, but one that continues to require vigilant human oversight.
Panel 2, moderated by Dr. Astha Mehta and featuring Mr. Amar Sundaram (Senior Vice President, Legal General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer, NEC Corporation India), Mr. Rahul Kinra (Partner, J Sagar Associates), and Ms. Anshum Singh (Partner, Wadhwa Law Offices), examined AI integration from a corporate counsel perspective, highlighting that over-reliance on AI tools creates significant professional risk through fabricated citations, unverified outputs, and erosion of professional discipline — emphasising the imperative of sector-specific governance, internal verification systems, and meaningful human involvement in fiduciary legal work.
Cross-cutting themes across both panels included the unresolved question of accountability and liability where AI-generated errors could replicate across large volumes of contracts, the tension between efficiency and contextual judgment, and serious concerns regarding hallucinations, historical-data limitations, embedded bias, and jurisdictional variation in model outputs — collectively underscoring that AI integration in commercial contracting is a structural transformation rather than a temporary disruption.
The roundtable generated concrete recommendations for multiple stakeholder groups: legal practitioners were urged to adopt AI strategically with robust verification protocols; corporations were advised to institute internal governance frameworks and conduct rigorous vendor diligence; academic institutions were called upon to integrate AI literacy and ethical reasoning into curricula; and regulators were urged to establish clear standards of accountability, transparency, and oversight in the deployment of AI in legal practice.