What will your firm look like in the future? That’s the question CNM began to ask itself — a question that quickly led to substantial transformation of some of its workflows.
CNM is a technical advisory firm for small and mid-sized businesses across the US. The company’s vision is to be the most trusted technical advisory firm in the markets they serve. To be trustworthy in today’s business world means offering reliable, efficient service to customers, and that starts with behind-the-scenes workflows.
Like many growing companies, as CNM grew, handling contracts and bringing on new clients became more and more time-consuming. Teams struggled with limited visibility into contract statuses during critical onboarding phases, and got snared waiting on master service agreements (MSAs) without having clear insight into the progress or their specific responsibilities. This lack of transparency slowed down operations and created bottlenecks that made it hard to do a great job serving customers.
To work more efficiently while still providing great service, CNM turned to Box, streamlining processes and redefining how CNM’s people work.
Key takeaways:
- CNM was grappling with inefficient manual workflows that slowed down the process of onboarding and serving customers
- With a goal of becoming “a firm of the future,”CNM leaned into the AI capabilities built into Box, encouraging a culture of experimentation and innovation
- CNM has seen client onboarding speed up by 40% as a result of automating contract processing with Box AI
Visibility and workflow roadblocks
MSAs are a standard, crucial process for companies like CNM that offer services to external customers. They typically involve several departments and require multiple approvals before customers can be onboarded. Traditionally, teams at CNM had little clarity on where each contract stood and who was responsible for next steps.
The legal and contract management teams in particular lacked an effective way to track agreements throughout their lifecycle. Without automated status updates or real-time insights, they were constantly following up manually, which led to a lot of delays and inefficiencies.
As Alan Farrar, IT Director at CNM, describes, “Setting up an MSA is a standard, repeatable process. There are a whole bunch of teams waiting for it to be signed before they can start their customer onboarding. They’ve never had a lot of visibility into where the MSA is, what's going on, or who's doing what.”
How Box transformed CNM’s contract process
When CNM initially started exploring how to become a “firm of the future,” they were already using Box for content management. The natural next step was to leverage the AI capabilities built into Box. Farrar explains: “We decided to let everyone use AI — and we trained everyone on different features within Box AI, creating a very personalized testing journey that would showcase some of the benefits to using these things, including how to use the Box API to extract metadata.”
We decided to let everyone use AI — and we trained everyone on different features within Box AI, creating a very personalized testing journey that would showcase some of the benefits to using these things, including how to use the Box API to extract metadata.
Farrar’s team encouraged professionals across different departments to experiment in ways tailored to their expertise. As he describes, “We wanted to push the idea of being curious, trying everything, and ultimately being able to relate what they learn back to their subject matter expertise so they can think about things in a different way and innovate.”
This hands-on approach helped build momentum internally before extending solutions outward. The breakthrough came when CNM started addressing MSA processing challenges using Box products like Relay for workflow automation, metadata tagging for tracking statuses and document generation for creating contracts dynamically.
With input from Box’s engineering and professional services teams guiding best practices in design and implementation, CNM went on to build a robust system, automating key steps while keeping room for human oversight where needed.
Driving efficiency with automation and AI
The results speak volumes: faster contract processing has significantly improved internal coordination and sped up client onboarding by approximately 40%. Teams now enjoy transparent access to real-time data about every stage of agreement fulfillment — reducing guesswork and manual check-ins dramatically.
Farrar says the team has also begun to use Box Automate for agentic workflow automation, and says,“Box Automate is where it’s at. We’re looking forward to chaining agents together so complex problems get solved seamlessly without manual handoffs.”
Box Automate is where it’s at. We’re looking forward to chaining agents together so complex problems get solved seamlessly without manual handoffs.
This orchestration capability promises even greater efficiency by triggering multi-step workflows automatically — a game changer compared to today’s segmented agent tasks that typically require manual intervention between stages.
Looking ahead, CNM plans deeper integration of automation tools alongside continued use of AI-powered features within Box Notes and other products, further empowering employees while delivering exceptional value to clients nationwide.
