By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
Whether a spot can run again depends on the MSA, talent releases, sync licence and change orders. In 2026 the entire file fits into a single question.
Key takeaways
Fair. Two years ago you pasted a few pages of a master service agreement into a chatbot, asked whether the spot could run past the term, and it answered confidently about a clause that did not exist in your document. You closed the tab and went back to searching the PDF by hand. That was the correct reaction to the tool that existed then.
What changed in 2026 is not that the answers got smarter in some abstract way. It is that the whole file goes in at once. Million-word working memory — Claude Opus 4.6 among others — means a 60-page master service agreement, forty change orders, eleven talent releases, a music sync licence, three stock-footage licences, a location agreement and the drone release all fit into a single question. No splitting the contract into chunks. No "which page do you mean." It reads the whole thing before it answers, and it points at the clause it used.
That matters more in this trade than in most, because the question that costs you money is never in one document.
An agency producer emails on a Thursday afternoon: the client wants to extend the :30 and the two :15s for another eight weeks, and add Canada. Can you confirm we are clear?
To answer that honestly, someone has to open: the master service agreement and the statement of work, which set out the ownership and territory; the SAG-AFTRA talent paperwork, which drives use cycles, holding fees and session payments and is written in a vocabulary nobody outside this business reads voluntarily; the music sync licence, which very often says one year, web only, North America excluding broadcast; every stock or archival clip licence, each with its own term and territory; the location agreement, which sometimes restricts how long the property can appear; drone footage, which has its own release; and the change orders, because the fourth one quietly added two influencer cutdowns with different usage.
Those documents live in a Dropbox folder called 07_LEGAL, in Frame.io, in the line producer's email from a job that wrapped nineteen months ago, and in one PDF someone scanned crooked. Answering the question well takes forty-five minutes of digging, and the honest version of what happens instead is that the post supervisor says "should be fine, let me double-check" and then does not.
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flowchart TD
A["Master service agreement and SOW"] --> F["One question: can the :30 run in Canada to 15 Dec?"]
B["SAG-AFTRA releases, use cycles, holding fees"] --> F
C["Music sync licence: 1 year, web only"] --> F
D["Stock, archival and drone footage licences"] --> F
E["Location agreement and 40 change orders"] --> F
F --> G["Answer, with the clause and document it came from"]
G --> H["Post supervisor verifies and quotes the renewal"]
Reading an entire rights file in one pass means you can ask the question the way you would ask a producer who had read everything, rather than the way you would search a PDF. In practice that is one folder, dragged in, and a question like: which of these documents expires first, what does it cover, and what breaks if the spot runs in Canada until December 15.
The answer comes back as a short list with sources: the music sync licence ends November 30 and is North America excluding Canada, so it is the binding constraint; the talent use cycle runs to January 8 and a holding fee is due in October; the archival clip in shot 7 is licensed worldwide in perpetuity; the location agreement caps depiction at two years from first air. Each line cites the document and the section it came from, which is the part that makes it usable — you are not trusting a summary, you are being pointed at the paragraph so a human can read it.
The rule to hold onto: an answer without a source is a guess, and on rights questions a guess is worse than no answer at all. Never accept a rights answer that does not name the document and the clause.
The second document pile in this business nobody can hold in their head is the review history. A mid-size corporate job goes to fourteen versions in Frame.io, with comments from the brand manager, the agency creative, someone in legal and a product person who joins at v9 and contradicts everything.
Two questions were previously unanswerable without a person reading all of it. First: what did they ask for at v3 that never actually got done? That is the note that resurfaces at v13 as "we've mentioned this before," and it is where scope creep turns into free labour. Second: which of these comments are outside the approved scope in the SOW? Put the whole comment history and the SOW into one question and you get a change-order draft with timestamps attached — and a change order backed by "requested by the brand manager on May 12 at 4:07pm, outside sections 2.3 and 2.4" gets approved far more often than one backed by a feeling.
| Assumption | Value |
|---|---|
| Rights or usage questions fielded per week | 3 |
| Time to answer today, digging through folders and email | 45 minutes each |
| Time to answer with the whole file read at once, including human verification | 10 minutes each |
| Loaded cost of post supervisor or EP time | $85 per hour |
| Working weeks per year | 48 |
Today: 3 × 45 min × 48 weeks = 108 hours = $9,180. New way: 3 × 10 min × 48 = 24 hours = $2,040. Saved: about $7,100 a year in time alone, and the time saved is your most expensive people's time, not your cheapest.
The bigger number is the one that does not show up on a timesheet. Assume one expiry a year gets missed — a spot keeps running five weeks past a music sync term, or a talent holding fee goes unpaid. The make-good licence, the agency's legal time and the emergency re-version land somewhere around $12,000 illustratively, plus a conversation you do not want to have. Catching one of those pays for everything else several times over.
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Reading is not advising. A model that has read your whole rights file can tell you what the documents say and where they conflict. It cannot tell you what a court in your state would do with an ambiguous territory definition, whether a particular use falls inside "corporate internal use," or how hard to push back when an agency claims a change order was verbally approved on set. Those are judgement calls with money and a relationship attached.
Two more limits worth naming. Scanned documents still bite — a crooked phone photo of a signed release from 2019 can be misread, and if a date is wrong the whole answer is wrong. And union paperwork is a specialist area; if you are on a SAG-AFTRA commercial contract, your signatory advisor or payroll house is the authority on use cycles and holding fees, not a summary. Use the tool to find the questions fast, then take the two real ones to the person who is paid to be right.
Check the business terms of whatever you use, turn off training on your content, and use a business or enterprise plan rather than a personal account. Then check your own MSA — many of them now have confidentiality language that governs where client documents may be processed. This is a ten-minute check, and it is your obligation, not the tool vendor's.
It slows it down but does not ruin it. Scan the legal folder for your ten largest recurring clients first — that is where the repeat usage questions come from — and leave the one-off jobs from 2018 alone until someone asks.
It can draft it, and the draft will be structured correctly. Price it yourself. A renewal quote is a negotiation with a client you know, and the number should come from you.
That is the most valuable output, not a failure. Ask specifically for conflicts between documents and rank them by which one expires first. Contradictions between an MSA and a later change order are extremely common and they are exactly what nobody catches by hand.
Start with one campaign. Take a job that is still running and put its complete legal folder into a single question, then have your post supervisor verify every line against the source document. If the sources check out on one job, do the next ten. If they do not, you have learned something cheap.
A footnote on where these questions arrive: usually by phone, usually at the worst hour, usually while the person who knows the answer is in a colour session. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer the studio line and web chat, capture which campaign and which market the caller is asking about, and get the request to your post supervisor with the details already written down. It does not read your contracts or answer rights questions — that stays with your people. It just stops the question from sitting in voicemail until Monday.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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