Workday’s 2026 Contract Intelligence Index Report, published August 6 and drawing on nearly 7,000 legal and enterprise professionals across ten countries, found that 77 percent of respondents say only a handful of people in their organization actually know who owns a given contract, a gap that lands directly on revenue teams when renewals and upsell moments go untracked.
The report found more than half of organizations lack a centralized, fully integrated contract management system, with 23 percent still storing contracts as paper records, 22 percent on personal hard drives, and 20 percent in email inboxes. Only 26 percent of respondents said contract obligations are tracked consistently, and a third of legal respondents said they are not even included in contract approval cycles despite 63 percent later being held responsible for enforcing terms they never signed off on. Nearly 90 percent of organizations that did adopt contract intelligence tools reported a return within a year.
This matters for revenue operations leaders because a contract nobody owns is a renewal, cross-sell, or auto-renewal date nobody is tracking either. The report frames this as a legal filing problem, but the financial exposure it describes, unmonitored auto-renewals and missed expansion windows, sits squarely inside the revenue forecast, not just the contract archive.
The original insight: RevOps teams have spent the past two years building forecast accuracy on top of CRM pipeline data while leaving the contract layer, where renewal and expansion revenue actually gets triggered, in a separate legal system nobody in revenue operations owns. That gap is exactly why one contract lifecycle vendor recently put its own revenue chief in charge of closing it, and it is the same disconnect behind the push to pull contract work directly onto the seller’s own opportunity record instead of a separate legal tool.
Source: Workday
