For privacy reasons YouTube needs your permission to be loaded. For more details, please see our Privacy Policy.

Let’s call paperwork what it really is: A mix of communication, recollection, and — most of the time — covering your arse. And while that might sound cynical, it’s also entirely fixable. Because paperwork is language. And we now have machines that are very, very good at language. The Rise of the Predictive Paper Shredder, We’re living through this quietly profound shift — applying machine learning to language. We’re teaching machines not just to store words, but to understand them. To summarise, compare, redline, explain. To turn legalese into plain English. To turn templates into guardrails.

Which begs the obvious question: Why are we still manually grinding through NDAs, contracts, and meeting notes like it’s 1998?My Pet Hate: The Pointless NDA

Here’s a classic scenario from corporate life:

You’re speaking to someone you know. You trust them. You’re discussing something low-stakes. But suddenly — bam — an NDA drops into your inbox. You don’t really know why it’s needed. You don’t plan to share anything controversial. But the process kicks off anyway: Send to legal. Wait two weeks. Get it back. Sign it. All to protect… nothing. It’s not about security.

It’s about process theatre. It’s about being able to say, “Well, we had them sign something.”

What We Do Instead

At Great Wave, we still sign NDAs. But we don’t waste time reading them. We’ve trained a GenAI agent to do it for us. It takes every incoming NDA, compares it to our baseline terms, and flags anything odd. If a clause says, “By signing this, you surrender your entire business,” it gets flagged. If it’s just boilerplate, it goes through. The whole thing takes 30 seconds. No lawyers. No waiting. No drama.

Just common sense, applied at machine speed. What This Is Really About It’s not just about paperwork. It’s about focus. Every minute spent reviewing a pointless NDA is a minute not spent building trust, solving a problem, or having the conversation that actually moves the work forward. GenAI isn’t just a time-saver. It’s a distraction killer. So yes — paperwork has a purpose. But most of the time, that purpose is bureaucracy theatre. And frankly, we’ve got better things to do. Like building relationships. Solving real problems. And occasionally, getting on with the actual job.