AI-Powered Contract Intelligence
for Navy Pier, a leading Chicago waterfront destination
- Client
- Navy Pier
- Service
- Generative AI|Data Engineering|Enterprise Architecture
A contract library that could not answer operational questions
Navy Pier manages a diverse portfolio of tenant relationships across shops, kiosks, dining venues, attractions, and marine facilities. The governing leases, licenses, boat licenses, marina licenses, exhibits, and amendments were held in SharePoint, but business users still had to locate the right agreement, find the latest amendment, interpret legal language, and determine which terms remained enforceable.
Sphere was engaged to turn that fragmented document environment into a trustworthy, searchable, continuously updated contract intelligence capability. The goal was a shared source of truth for operations, leasing, finance, legal, and leadership—one that could answer plain-language questions with the exact supporting contract clause.
Why manual contract research was becoming a business risk
The challenge was not document storage. It was obtaining a reliable, current answer across many long, customised agreements and amendments.
Slow access to critical information
Teams could spend hours locating documents and reviewing clauses before answering routine operational or financial questions.
Amendments obscured the current state
Users had to reconcile original clauses, exhibits, and later amendments to establish what was currently applicable.
Interpretation risk crossed departments
Operations, leasing, finance, legal, and leadership could rely on different files or interpretations of the same agreement.
A version-aware contract intelligence platform
Sphere designed and deployed an Azure-based platform around Navy Pier’s existing SharePoint environment, contract structures, and operational workflows. It was built to preserve the historical lineage of agreements while exposing the current contractual position through structured profiles, summaries, and clause-backed answers.
1. Ingest and structure the existing contract estate
The platform ingests leases, licenses, boat and marina licenses, exhibits, and amendments from SharePoint. AI-powered processing structures parties, tenant and premises details, dates, fees, deposits, insurance limits, maintenance responsibilities, operating hours, penalties, reporting obligations, and negotiated clauses into a reviewable tenant contract profile.
2. Preserve the relationship between agreements and amendments
Rather than treating each PDF as isolated, the system identifies how amendments affect prior terms. Users can distinguish original language, amended language, superseded clauses, currently applicable terms, and the historical context behind a decision.
3. Answer business questions with source traceability
A natural-language experience lets users ask questions such as who is responsible for repairs, required operating hours, tenant fees, insurance limits, and whether the latest amendment changed termination terms. Material answers point back to the relevant section, subsection, exhibit, or amendment.
4. Give each audience the right level of context
Executive summaries focus on financial commitments, risks, unusual terms, renewal provisions, penalties, and negotiation considerations. Operational summaries translate legal language into actionable information for leasing, finance, and operations teams.
Designed and validated in structured delivery cycles
The multidisciplinary Sphere team worked through stakeholder discovery, document assessment, architecture, ingestion design, AI workflow development, testing, user acceptance, phased rollout, training, and stabilisation. Three-week delivery cycles, weekly updates, and leadership demonstrations kept business terminology, citations, workflows, and AI outputs under continuous review.
Estimated improvement in day-to-day contract work
Estimated 70–80% faster contract research
Questions that previously required extended document searches and manual clause review could often be resolved in minutes.
Estimated 40–50% less manual review effort
Teams spent less time locating files, searching PDFs, comparing amendments, and preparing initial summaries.
Estimated 25–35% fewer interpretation errors
Structured summaries, amendment awareness, and clause-backed answers reduced reliance on outdated or incomplete provisions.
Estimated 30–40% faster preparation for key discussions
Tenant negotiations, operational reviews, financial discussions, renewals, disputes, and leadership meetings began with clearer context.
Enterprise platform foundation
Cloud & Integration:
Intelligence Layer:
Cloud & Integration:
Intelligence Layer:
From a document repository to a usable enterprise capability
At the end of the engagement, Navy Pier had a production-ready contract intelligence platform integrated with its existing SharePoint environment. It provided automated ingestion of contracts and amendments, tenant contract profiles, version-aware history, executive and operational summaries, natural-language question answering, clause-level citations, Azure deployment, documentation, training, knowledge transfer, and post-launch support.
The outcome was more than a faster document-search tool. Navy Pier gained a living, searchable knowledge system that lets teams access current, source-supported contract intelligence in minutes, reduce interpretation risk, improve executive visibility, and make more consistent decisions across the tenant portfolio.
