AI-Powered Contract Intelligence

for Navy Pier, a leading Chicago waterfront destination

Client: Navy Pier
Industry: Entertainment, Tourism & Hospitality
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:

Microsoft Azure

Secure hosting, scalable document processing, AI service integration, monitoring, environment separation, and ongoing maintainability.

Microsoft SharePoint

The existing contract source remained in place, reducing disruption and avoiding a separate document-storage process.

Generative AI and document processing

Structured extraction, version-aware contract history, executive and operational summaries, and clause-backed question answering.

Cloud & Integration:

Microsoft Azure

Secure hosting, scalable document processing, AI service integration, monitoring, environment separation, and ongoing maintainability.

Microsoft SharePoint

The existing contract source remained in place, reducing disruption and avoiding a separate document-storage process.

Intelligence Layer:

Generative AI and document processing

Structured extraction, version-aware contract history, executive and operational summaries, and clause-backed question answering.

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.

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Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors

Our experience with Sphere and their team has been and continues to be fantastic. We keep throwing new projects at them, and they keep knocking them out of the park (including the rescue of a project that was previously bungled by another vendor).

Ben Crawford

Senior Product Manager at Enova Financial

I would expect to be delighted. It's been a really positive experience, working with Sphere, and I would expect you to have the same.

Mark Friedgan

CEO at CreditNinja

Sphere consistently prioritizes the needs of their clients, demonstrating both agility and teamwork. As an offshore team, they have been an integral part of our organization and we plan to continue growing with them.

René Pfitzner

Co-Founder at Experify

Sphere provided excellent full-stack development manpower to augment our team and help push our product forward. They are easy to work with, tech-savvy and proactive.

Bruce Burdick

Chief Information Officer at Integra Credit

We've been working with Sphere and its excellent consultants since our founding. I've found that they are true partners in the success of our business.

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CEO at Dabble

The resources and developers that Sphere Software provides are skilled and have the required technical expertise, but more importantly, they have helped us build a culture of excellence within our team.

Arthur Tretyak

Founder and CEO at IntegraCredit

With Sphere, we were able to migrate in half the time it would take to train an additional FTE… and for a fraction of the cost. Our experience with Sphere has been exceptional.

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors