The NDA Theatre: A Waste of Time (But a Perfect Use Case for AI). If there’s one bit of corporate theatre that’s managed to survive every wave of transformation, it’s the NDA. You know the dance. You get one in from someone you already trust. You’re about to have a conversation that barely grazes sensitive territory—nothing you wouldn’t say in a pub. But now you’ve got to put your entire legal apparatus on red alert to process a ten-page document written in legal Esperanto. Why? Just in case you accidentally reveal the coordinates of the secret company treasure chest? Please. It’s idiotic. Not because protecting sensitive information is idiotic—of course that matters. But because the paperwork ritual around it is utterly out of sync with how modern work happens. I want to build trust, not generate legal backlog. And it’s not just annoying. It’s expensive. Legal teams are drowning in low-risk paperwork that should’ve been automated years ago. Meanwhile, the real work—the relationship-building, the value-creation, the speed—is stuck in the car park waiting for clearance.
So at Great Wave, we don’t play that game. We still sign NDAs, sure. But we let an AI agent do the heavy lifting. It compares the inbound doc to our standard terms, flags any red flags (which never exist), and greenlights the rest. Whole thing takes 30 seconds. Why does this matter? Because this is the kind of automation that’s actually useful. Quietly saving time, reducing risk, and removing one more ridiculous blocker between people and progress. Most Gen AI talk is about grand vision—reinventing the enterprise, disrupting whole industries, blah blah blah. But here’s the truth: if your AI can’t handle something as boring-but-necessary as NDA review, it’s not ready for the boardroom. So, next time someone sends you a generic NDA with 17 pages of nothing, don’t send it to legal. Send it to an agent.
Let’s stop pretending paperwork is work.
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