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In the biogas industry, deals don't wait. When an energy company needs to build an installation, there's a window. Permits expire. Financing has deadlines. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a 100-page EPC contract sits on someone's desk, waiting to be reviewed.

At HoSt Group, that someone is usually not a lawyer.

HoSt is one of the leading technology providers in the biogas sector. 700 people across seven offices worldwide, headquartered in the Netherlands, with projects running across Europe and North America. They design and sell the technology that industrial parties use to build biogas installations. It's complex work with high stakes, long timelines, and contracts written in language that most salespeople were never trained to interpret.

And yet, the commercial team has always handled their own negotiations. No in-house legal department. Just a team of salespeople and engineers who learned to read contracts on the job, supported by external lawyers when things got really serious.

For years, that model worked well enough. Then the team grew. The deal volume grew faster. And everything started to slow down.

Where the cracks showed.

Jafeth Bulsink is Head of Sales at Bright Renewables, one of the companies within the HoSt Group. He watched the pressure build in real time.

"A lot of the questions from the negotiations ended up at the management level," Jafeth says. "Which then became the bottleneck of all the negotiations."

The pattern was consistent. A salesperson would receive a contract, read through it, get stuck on something that felt risky, and escalate it upward. Multiply that by a growing team across multiple countries, and the management layer became a queue.

The deeper issue wasn't capacity. It was confidence. Not every commercial person could spot the risks hidden inside legal language. And the ones who could, learned the hard way.

"Not all commercial people are legally trained," Jafeth explains. "It takes either quite a long time to get people trained to negotiate contracts with their clients, or people didn't really see the risks of things we agreed upon without sourcing outside legal counsel."

When something truly important came up, a large project or a contract type they hadn't seen before, HoSt brought in external lawyers. But for the everyday agreements, NDAs, and standard commercial terms that make up most of the workload? The team was on their own.

A hundred pages, clause by clause.

Rahul Ranjan knows what that looks like in practice. As a Sales Engineer at HoSt Bioenergy, he covers the Asia and US markets. His days are a mix of vetting customer inquiries, running preliminary calculations, and jumping into client meetings. But a significant part of his time goes to contracts. Specifically, Orgoline and Redbook contracts, EPC agreements, and country-specific frameworks that vary depending on the jurisdiction.

Before GenieAI, the review process was manual. Line by line. Clause by clause.

"It was a bit tedious," Rahul says. "Going through the contract documents line by line, just to be sure that the company is protected from the risks. And when it's a bit serious, we engage an external lawyer to review and propose modifications. Then you negotiate with the customer, fine-tune the agreement, and come to a final draft."

A typical contract cycle took two to three months. Sometimes four, depending on the complexity and the customer. But even the review portion alone, before any negotiation happened, consumed hours each day for weeks. A 100-page document with only 20 or 30 critical clauses still required reading every single page.

And then there was the version control problem. Multiple people working on the same document. Comments layered on top of comments. Track changes that sometimes weren't tracked at all.

"Sometimes people are not really organised. You lose the traceability of who changed what, who did what, and the reasoning behind it. We tried to be a bit organised, but still it's a mess to keep everything structured."

When the project was time-sensitive, which in the energy sector it often is, the team had no choice but to wait. Wait for the external lawyer. Wait for the client's lawyer. Wait for feedback that, with GenieAI, they could have generated themselves.

"We were dependent on the timeline of someone else," Rahul says. "Things which we could easily do now with GenieAI."

Choosing GenieAI.

The decision to bring in AI-powered contract review came from a practical need. HoSt evaluated several options, looking for something that would integrate with their existing workflows and scale across the entire group.

"The reason we chose GenieAI was that it offered us a complete package with the most integrated parts that we needed," Jafeth says. "It could compare contracts against the standard head of terms we already had. And with the enterprise package, everybody across the group could use it internally."

That last point mattered. HoSt Group isn't one company. It's a group of companies operating across multiple European countries and North America. Different jurisdictions. Different legal frameworks. Different contract standards. The enterprise setup meant all 25 commercial users could work within GenieAI, each with the right legal context for their country.

"We really like the fact that we can use it per different country for the legal frameworks that are applicable in every country," Jafeth adds.

How it works in practice.

Today, when a contract lands on Rahul's desk, whether it's a draft HoSt created or one received from a customer, the first step is uploading it to GenieAI.

The platform runs a risk review against the team's own playbook. HoSt built a set of standard boundary conditions, and GenieAI checks every clause against those limits. It flags issues by severity. And it adapts its perspective depending on whether HoSt is acting as contractor or purchaser.

"Instead of going through each line, you can first go through the critical points and check if it's definitely a risk for you or not," Rahul explains. "A 100-page document that would require me a week, GenieAI could do it in a few minutes. It summarises the key points. Then you go refer to the specific clauses where the concerns are."

But the part that changed the game for Rahul isn't the speed. It's the ability to write back.

In contract negotiations, having an opinion about a clause isn't enough. You need to express that opinion in contractual language. The kind of precise, legally sound phrasing that holds up in court. Before GenieAI, that required a lawyer. Now the team can do it themselves.

"Sometimes we have thoughts, but those thoughts need to be in contractual language," Rahul says. "We put our thoughts in, the objective, and GenieAI modifies the clause according to the governing laws. So everyone can contribute, even without legal training."

It's a shift that goes beyond workflow optimisation. It changes who on the team can meaningfully participate in a negotiation.

The results.

Contract reviews that used to consume two to three hours a day for two weeks are now done in a few hours total.

"Sometimes it's more than that, depending on how much risk there is," Rahul adds.

For Jafeth, the impact shows up in client-facing speed. "We could speed up the response times from getting a contract or an NDA to sending it back to the client. That's the big impact we had."

But the less visible change might be the more important one. For the first time, HoSt has a standardised process for contract review.

"Now we have a playbook," Rahul says. "If five people are reviewing the same document, they all have a standard playbook to follow. Earlier everyone was just doing reviews their own way. This makes it more structured."

The team still uses external lawyers. That hasn't changed. But the scope has narrowed. Instead of sending every page of every contract to legal counsel, they focus external expertise on the truly critical items. The rest is handled internally.

"Things which are basic, you can easily get it done with GenieAI," Rahul says. "For critical ones where you're not sure, you can always reach out to a lawyer. But at least you have a first draft ready. 80% of what you'd need from a lawyer is already solved."

Jafeth sees the broader effect on his team's capabilities. "Our commercial people get more input to determine which risks are in the contract, which they probably didn't see before. They're gaining knowledge and building confidence to do the contract negotiations themselves."

A preview of Genie 3.0.

During a recent visit, Rahul got an early look at upcoming Genie 3.0 features. His reaction was unfiltered.

"What we were working with was maybe level two. This is almost like level eight or nine. The features have just exploded."

The preview showed multi-document analysis, the ability to work across several contracts at once. Company-wide knowledge that carries between projects. And something Rahul had been missing. The ability to ask GenieAI what terms were agreed upon in past deals and apply that context to new negotiations.

"When you're working on a new contract, you can ask GenieAI what the last agreed terms were, what we signed over the years. So you know your boundary limits and GenieAI knows them too. It proposes changes accordingly."

He paused for a moment, looking for the right way to frame it.

"A lawyer would only go through one contract. GenieAI has a database of all your contracts. It knows what was signed in the past. So it's a lawyer, but it's a smart lawyer."

For a 700-person company negotiating complex energy projects across continents, that's not just a feature upgrade. It's the kind of shift that changes how fast you can move.

"I'm very excited to use it," Rahul says. "We tested it. It can do almost any task we suggested. We were really, really happy."