Career attorney, engineer, and legal operations leader steps into CPO role, a deliberate signal about what it takes to build AI that actually works for enterprise contracting; Kristin Esche joins as General Counsel
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Agiloft, the global leader in data-first contract lifecycle management (CLM), announced the appointment of Jason Barnwell as Chief Product Officer. Barnwell is a mechanical engineering graduate of MIT who spent years as a software engineer before earning his law degree from USC, then built a 15-year career at Microsoft where he led the legal operations team responsible for running the CLM platform that powered Microsoft’s global procurement operations – a system tied to billions of dollars in procurement spend across one of the world’s most complex supply chains. He joins the product seat with a perspective that is rare in enterprise software: he has been the buyer, the builder, and the practitioner.
At Microsoft, Barnwell served most recently as General Manager and Associate General Counsel for Monetization and Business Planning within the company’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs organization. He drove the digital transformation of legal work, building systems to keep contract deviations minimal, rationalize resource pyramids, and make legal work scalable and data-driven. Prior to Microsoft, he practiced law at Cooley LLP in the Emerging Companies group, advising startups and venture-backed businesses at the intersection of technology and law. He previously served on the board of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), the leading global community for legal operations professionals.
Barnwell joined Agiloft as Chief Legal Officer and has been shaping product direction since his arrival, describing himself as “customer zero” and holding the platform to the same standards he would demand as a practitioner, formalizing that mandate stepping into the role as CPO. Agiloft will not backfill the CLO role.
Andy Wishart, who built Agiloft’s product foundation as Chief Product Officer, will conclude his tenure on July 3, 2026, to step back, recharge, and spend more time with his family.
Agiloft has also hired Kristin Esche as General Counsel, effective June 22, 2026, to lead the company’s legal function going forward.
“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 at 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.”
Barnwell has been outspoken about the gap between what legal technology promises and what practitioners need. In his view, CLM gives legal and operations leaders a control-and-management plane for their commitments as an organization, and the value of AI in contracting depends entirely on what sits underneath it: structured, reliable contract data that makes analysis, simulation, and operational insight possible.
That thesis is central to Agiloft Astra, the company’s AI-native contract intelligence platform, designed to make contract data searchable, analyzable, and actionable across legal, procurement, finance, and operations, the same interconnected functions Barnwell managed at Microsoft scale.
Agiloft works with enterprise customers in financial services, healthcare, procurement, and manufacturing, helping them manage contracts as a strategic business asset across the full contract lifecycle.
To learn more about Agiloft, visit agiloft.com.
About Agiloft
Agiloft is a global leader in data-first contract lifecycle management (CLM), helping businesses improve outcomes. Its no-code CLM platform with embedded AI centralizes, automates, and governs contracts from request through renewal, reducing review times and integrating with over 1,000 systems for real-time visibility. Astra, Agiloft’s contracts AI platform, unlocks post-signature data to drive better decisions across legal, procurement, sales, and finance teams. Backed by KKR, JMI Equity, and FTV Capital, Agiloft delivers strong performance with high implementation success and customer renewal rates, enabling organizations to create, control, and capture more value across industries today. Learn more at agiloft.com.
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