Case Study: How Redwood Logistics automated contract renewal reviews with Gatekeeper Agents

Redwood Logistics uses Gatekeeper's Contract Renewal Agent to return around 300 hours to procurement by automating renewal preparation.Redwood Logistics is a modern fourth-party logistics (4PL) provider headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, recognised by Gartner® as a Visionary in the 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Fourth-Party Logistics. Redwood orchestrates logistics execution and supply chain technology for shippers across industries, including food and beverage, building materials, chemicals, medical devices, and grocery retail.

Procurement at Redwood manages around 1,200 vendors and $90,000,000+ in contracts under management, processing approximately 300 contract renewals each year. Almost every contract carries a notice period, so renewal cards land steadily in Gatekeeper throughout the year.

The Challenge: Every renewal Is A Research Project, One Vendor At A Time

For Redwood, contract renewals are decision points at scale. Across a portfolio of around 1,200 vendors and approximately 300 renewal cards a year, every contract demands a clear call: renew, renegotiate, or terminate. Making that call well requires more than the contract document. You need the original commercial terms, what the vendor has actually delivered, how much you have spent with them, who internally owns the relationship, and a sense of the market today.

For most procurement teams, including Redwood’s, that preparation work happens one renewal at a time. Pricing, value, and key terms get manually extracted from the original contract and any amendments. Vendor performance is assessed from memory or scattered notes rather than a structured record. Notes get compiled across documents and passed between procurement and legal. By the time everyone weighs in, the renewal deadline is on top of you, and the choice becomes binary: renew without negotiation, or scramble through last-minute talks.

Redwood’s renewal pipeline was running on exactly that pattern. When a renewal card landed, someone had to open the contract, recall what the vendor actually does, cross-reference invoice spend, work out the internal owner, and draft an outreach email to the business asking whether to renew, renegotiate, or source a new provider. That meant up to an hour of context-gathering for every renewal card.

Across approximately 300 renewals a year, that work was consuming hundreds of hours of senior procurement time before any negotiation, sourcing, or savings activity could begin.

The solution: Contract Renewal Agent to eliminate manual renewal preparation

During an on-site Gatekeeper Agent Discovery Session, the Gatekeeper team walked through every stage of Redwood’s renewal workflow and deployed the Contract Renewal Agent against the contract review phase, configured to Redwood’s priorities.

When a renewal card lands in that phase, the agent reads the underlying contract data and returns a structured renewal brief. The brief covers contract name, vendor, value, and expiry date with months to expiry, a two to three-sentence summary of what the contract covers, and a recommendation of renew, renegotiate, or terminate with a reason.

The agent acts as the senior contract analyst who does the preparation work. When Gubio Henrique, Redwood’s Senior Vice President of Sourcing and Purchasing, opens a card now, the brief is already there. The context-gathering that previously consumed up to an hour per contract is done before he reads the first line. 

Implementation timeline:

• Short Discovery Session to map Redwood's renewal workflow and configure the Contract Renewal Agent
• Contract Renewal Agent deployed into the contract review stage using Redwood's existing contract data
• First live renewal processed the same day, returning a structured renewal brief and saving up to an hour per review

“Gatekeeper’s Agent handles the work my team would normally do at the start of every renewal: identifying what the vendor does, what we spend, and producing a brief with recommendations. By the time we start, the groundwork is already done. It is 95% faster to get the context we need, on every renewal, hundreds of times a year.” 

Gubio Henrique, Senior Vice President of Sourcing and Purchasing, Redwood Logistics

See it in action

The results: Contract renewal Agent returns ~300 hours to procurement

The first live renewal card the agent processed was waiting on Gubio’s desk that morning. The agent produced a full analysis and a recommendation in seconds.

By recovering up to an hour of preparation time per renewal across approximately 300 renewals each year, Redwood’s procurement function gets hundreds of hours of senior procurement time back each year. Renewal decisions now start from analysis rather than a blank page, which means negotiations begin on the front foot rather than at the deadline.

Every recommendation is logged with the data behind it, giving Mario Sanchez, Redwood’s Purchasing Coordinator, and the wider procurement team an audit trail at renewal time. ROI inputs are configured in Gatekeeper, so the AI savings report ticks up as cards pass through the phase.

The Agent toolkit:

• Gatekeeper Contract Renewal Agent to generate structured renewal briefs with performance assessments and market analysis
• Gatekeeper Extract for automated data extraction
• Contract Summaries for executive-level overviews

“The agent does the context-gathering on every renewal before the card hits my desk. That time goes back into the work where I can actually contribute to sourcing and savings. Once you see one agent doing this, you start thinking about every workflow we could run one on.”

Mario Sanchez, Purchasing Coordinator, Redwood Logistics 

What's next: Contract Renewal Agent proves the value of AI in procurement

Redwood Logistics has turned contract renewal reviews from up to an hour of manual research into a structured brief that is ready before procurement opens the card. Across 300 renewals each year, that returns hundreds of hours of senior procurement time for for sourcing, negotiation, and savings.

Seeing that impact on the very first renewal has changed how Gubio and Mario think about AI across procurement. They are already planning the next iteration of the Contract Renewal Agent, adding spend data to the renewal brief while identifying other procurement workflows where agents can deliver the same value. What started with one workflow is becoming a broader portfolio of AI agents running across procurement.

“Gatekeeper’s model, where you pay for the workflow board and get unlimited agents, is the right shape for an enterprise function like ours. It lets us deploy agents where they earn their keep without arguing about the cost of every interaction.”
Gubio Henrique, Senior Vice President of Sourcing and Purchasing, Redwood Logistics