A contract comes back with three things in it that are not standard, and each one belongs to a different department. The usual next step is to send the whole contract to all three and ask them to have a look. Then chase. Then chase again.
The request is the problem. Nobody can answer "have a look at this contract" — there is no question in it.
Ask your agent to cut it into three questions that each have an answer.
What the agent starts with
One card on the Sales pipeline board in Timestripe, sitting in the Negotiation column — thirty-five seats, six thousand three hundred a year. Its notes hold the three things the customer asked for:
- Payment terms. They want to be invoiced quarterly rather than annually, because their finance year closes in March and they cannot commit twelve months from August.
- Data residency. They want their data held in the EU. This comes from a customer of theirs rather than a regulator, but they have asked for it in writing.
- Service levels. They want 99.9% uptime in the contract and a four-hour response on anything they raise as a security incident.
And a date: answers are needed by 21 August, because that is when their legal team next meets.
The prompt
"Nobody gets the whole contract" is doing most of the work. Finance does not need the uptime commitment to decide about quarterly invoicing, and sending it to them anyway is how a five-minute decision becomes a document nobody opens.
What comes back
Three tasks, three people, one clause each — plus the deal value and the date, because both change the answer. Whether quarterly invoicing is acceptable depends on the size of the deal, and whether the question is urgent depends on when the answer is due.
The parent task belongs to the person who is waiting. It is the only place all three are visible at once, and it is not on anyone else's plate.
Asking where it stands
Approvals land at their own pace, and checking three tasks one at a time is a smaller version of the same chore. So ask again:
The agent reads the three, sees which are ticked, and writes it on the parent: two signed off, data residency still with legal, and the number of days left before the answer is due.
There is nothing running in the background between the two prompts. The agent checks the tasks when you ask it to, and not before.
