Agiloft names Jason Barnwell chief product officer

Agiloft has appointed Jason Barnwell chief product officer, moving the company's former chief legal officer into the senior product role.

Barnwell joined Agiloft as chief legal officer in late 2024. He will now lead product as the company continues to focus on contract lifecycle management software and related artificial intelligence tools. Agiloft will not replace him in the legal post.

The appointment brings an unusual background to a product leadership role. Barnwell trained as a mechanical engineer at MIT, worked as a software engineer, later qualified as a lawyer at USC, and then spent 15 years at Microsoft in legal and operational roles tied to large-scale contracting.

Most recently at Microsoft, he was general manager and associate general counsel for monetization and business planning in the company's Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs organisation. He also led the legal operations team responsible for the contract lifecycle management platform used in Microsoft's global procurement operations, tied to billions of dollars in procurement spend.

That experience is central to Agiloft's case for the appointment. The company develops software used by legal, procurement, finance, and operations teams to manage contracts across their lifecycle. Barnwell is taking the product role as businesses place greater scrutiny on the quality of contract data used in AI systems.

Product shift

Barnwell succeeds Andy Wishart, who built the company's product foundation as chief product officer and is leaving the business. Wishart is stepping back to spend more time with his family.

The management change also reflects how Agiloft has described Barnwell's contribution since he arrived. It says he quickly moved beyond legal work and began shaping product direction, testing the platform against the standards he expected as an in-house user.

His background spans both the legal and technical sides of Agiloft's market. Before Microsoft, Barnwell practised at Cooley in the Emerging Companies group, advising startups and venture-backed businesses on technology and legal matters. He also served on the board of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, a professional body for legal operations specialists.

Agiloft operates in a contract management software market that has increasingly tied its pitch to AI, especially for extracting, organising, and analysing data from large contract estates. Vendors are trying to show that AI tools can do more than summarise documents by linking them to structured operational data and workflow systems.

That is also where Barnwell has publicly focused his argument. In Agiloft's account of his approach, he has stressed that AI in contracting depends on reliable underlying contract data, not standalone language tools.

"Contracts are the operating layer of every commercial relationship, and the organizations that can manage them intelligently at scale, with clean data, are going to have a material advantage," said Jason Barnwell, chief product officer, Agiloft. "I've spent my career inside that problem. As an engineer, as an attorney, and as someone who ran contracting infrastructure for a multi-billion-dollar organization, I have a clear picture of what the work actually requires and where the current generation of tools falls short. That's the lens I'm bringing to Agiloft's product, and I intend to hold us to it."

AI focus

The company has been pushing its Astra contract intelligence product, designed to make contract data searchable and analysable across corporate functions. Agiloft links that strategy to enterprise users that need contract information to move beyond legal repositories and into procurement, finance, and operational decision-making.

For software groups in this category, that broader use case has become more important as buyers ask whether AI features can produce measurable value inside large organisations. Agiloft's decision to put a former legal operator in charge of product suggests it sees practical enterprise contracting experience as a differentiator.

Chief executive officer Eric Laughlin framed the appointment in those terms, pointing to Barnwell's technical, legal, and operational experience.

"When Jason described what he wanted to accomplish at Agiloft, he said he felt like he was built in a lab for this role," said Eric Laughlin, chief executive officer, Agiloft. "Having watched him work, he is absolutely right. He is a tinkerer and a builder at heart - someone who still codes, who has been at the forefront of applying AI to legal and contracting work long before it became an industry talking point, and who has practiced law and run a contracting operation at scale most people never see. That combination is exactly what our product organization needs, and it is going to show in what we build."

Agiloft says its customers include enterprises in financial services, healthcare, procurement, and manufacturing, where contracts are often managed across multiple teams and systems. The company is backed by KKR, JMI Equity, and FTV Capital.