Mayer Brown publishes seventh annual book on contracting for Agentic AI

As agentic AI moves from experimentation to deployment, businesses are confronting a new generation of legal, operational and commercial challenges. To help organizations navigate this rapidly evolving landscape, Mayer Brown has published Contracting for Agentic AI, the seventh edition of its annual Technology & IP Transactions book series.

The release follows Mayer Brown's 18th Annual Technology & Outsourcing Conference in Chicago, which brought together over 130 attendees and 13 speakers, including industry leaders from ISG, Accenture and Capgemini, to explore the opportunities and risks emerging at the forefront of artificial intelligence.

The book offers a forward-looking guide to contracting for agentic AI tools, agentic AI implementation, and managed services powered by agentic AI.

"Unlike our earlier books, which focused on what we are seeing, this book seeks to anticipate what we will see in contracting for agentic AI as that technology develops," said Brad Peterson, who served as this year's book editor. "I want to thank the companies, providers and advisors who have engaged with us in discussions on these topics. Agentic AI presents technical, operational, financial, business and compliance challenges, and our understanding of what is required from lawyers is far richer for those discussions."

The book draws on Mayer Brown's experience advising on prior technology shifts—offshore outsourcing, cloud, platforms, and earlier waves of AI—each of which demanded innovative lawyering to create higher-value deal structures and tailored contract terms. Agentic AI raises the bar further: unlike earlier shifts that replaced people, infrastructure, or provided probabilistic guidance, agentic AI performs work directly, with capabilities and limitations fundamentally different from those of humans.

The book is organized around three broad topics:

1. Contracting for agentic AI tools. The right terms depend on the use case—from low-risk pilots to AI agents that independently perform critical services—and on the agentic AI supply chain, where tool providers rely on underlying AI model providers.

2. Engaging integrators and managed service providers to design, build, and run agentic AI solutions. Some providers will integrate AI agents into a company's environment; others will deliver services using AI agents, including onboarding, monitoring, correcting, and sunsetting them. Governance is critical given the complexity, uncertainty, and pace of change.

3. Managing risk in agentic AI contracts. The book highlights litigation, data security, data governance, and data privacy risks, offering practical guidance to help contracting lawyers address them.

Together, we hope that the chapters in this book will help readers develop the legal and contracting innovations required to bring companies and their providers together with tailored contract terms for agentic AI.

For more information about Mayer Brown's Technology & IP Transactions practice and to download a copy of Contracting for Agentic AI, click here.