Building Practical Digital Tools for Problems That Should Be Easier to Solve
Hi, I’m Ben Kemp, founder of Agentic Media Lab.
I have spent approximately four decades working with information technology, from hands-on technical engineering and programming to project leadership, consulting, infrastructure, enterprise IT, and technology-focused business environments.
Agentic Media Lab is where I bring that experience together with a newer generation of technologies: artificial intelligence, automation, modern web development, and focused software-as-a-service applications.
My objective is straightforward: identify practical business problems that are unnecessarily complicated and build focused digital tools that make them easier to solve.
One of those problems is calculating contract notice deadlines.
Why Contract Notice Deadlines?
Contracts contain dates everywhere.
There are effective dates, commencement dates, service start dates, expiration dates, renewal dates, termination dates, notice dates, acceptance dates, payment dates, implementation dates, audit dates, and many other contractual milestones.
The difficult part is often not finding a date.
The difficult part is determining what that date means for the next deadline.
A contract might state that notice must be provided:
- 30 days before expiration;
- 60 days before automatic renewal;
- 90 days before the end of the current term;
- 180 days before a specified contractual event;
- within a certain number of days following an event; or
- according to more complicated contractual timing provisions.
A seemingly simple question then becomes surprisingly important:
What is the actual last day on which I can give notice?
Getting that date wrong can have real consequences.
An organization might unintentionally renew a contract, lose an opportunity to terminate, miss a contractual right, delay an important action, or discover that a decision needed to be made weeks or months earlier.
That problem became the foundation for the Contract Notice Deadline Calculator project.
The Contract Notice Deadline Calculator
The idea behind the Contract Notice Deadline Calculator is to turn contractual timing requirements into a structured calculation.
Instead of opening a calendar and manually counting backwards or forwards, the calculator is intended to help users work systematically from the relevant contract information.
At its simplest, that means understanding elements such as:
Anchor Date → Notice Period → Calculation Direction → Date Rules → Notice Deadline
For example:
Contract renewal date: December 31
Required notice: 90 days before renewal
Question: What is the contractual notice deadline?
The objective is not merely to display another date.
The objective is to make the calculation understandable, repeatable, and easier to verify.
Why I Created So Much Contract Deadline Content
A calculator alone does not solve every part of the problem.
Before calculating a deadline, someone still needs to understand the contract language and determine which information should be entered.
What is the anchor date?
Does the clause refer to the contract end date or renewal date?
Does “90 days before” mean the same thing as three months before?
Are calendar days or business days relevant?
Does the triggering date count?
What happens when the calculated date falls on a weekend or public holiday?
Does the contract require notice to be sent by the deadline or received by the deadline?
Which date controls when several related dates appear in the contract?
These questions are why Agentic Media Lab contains an expanding library of articles about contract notice deadlines, notice periods, anchor dates, contract dates, renewal deadlines, termination deadlines, date calculations, and related concepts.
The articles are designed to break a complicated subject into individual questions that can be researched and understood separately.
Together, they form the knowledge base surrounding the Contract Notice Deadline Calculator.
From Content to Software
Agentic Media Lab is not intended to be only a collection of articles.
The larger objective is to connect information with practical software.
A visitor might initially arrive because they searched for something such as:
“How do I calculate 90 days before a contract renewal date?”
An article can explain the concept.
A calculator can perform the calculation.
A dedicated software application can eventually help manage those calculations consistently across many contracts.
This progression—from question to explanation to calculation to workflow—is an important part of how I approach product development at Agentic Media Lab.
Why Focused Software?
Many business software platforms attempt to solve enormous categories of problems.
That can be appropriate for large organizations, but it can also result in complicated implementations, extensive configuration, long training cycles, and functionality that many users never need.
I am interested in another approach.
Build a focused tool around a clearly defined problem and make that tool exceptionally useful for that problem.
The Contract Notice Deadline Calculator follows that philosophy.
Its starting question is not:
“How can we build another complete contract lifecycle management platform?”
It is:
“How can we make calculating an important contractual notice deadline easier, faster, and more reliable?”
That narrower question creates a much clearer product.
My Technology Background
My interest in building software comes from a long career in technology.
Over approximately 40 years, I have worked across different generations of computing and IT environments, including technical engineering, programming, project leadership, consulting, enterprise infrastructure, and technology-related marketing and sales.
My programming experience stretches back to languages and environments very different from today’s web development ecosystem, including Assembly, PL/P/PL-I, C#, and C++.
Technology has changed enormously during that time.
We have moved from highly constrained computing environments to cloud infrastructure, APIs, modern web applications, large language models, AI agents, and development tools capable of accelerating tasks that once required entire teams.
What interests me most today is not AI simply because it is new.
It is what becomes possible when AI is combined with conventional software engineering and a clearly defined business problem.
Why “Agentic Media Lab”?
The name reflects experimentation.
Agentic represents the emerging generation of AI systems that can increasingly reason about tasks, use tools, work through multi-step processes, and assist with increasingly complex workflows.
Media reflects the educational side of the platform: articles, guides, explanations, research, and other resources that help people understand the problems being addressed.
Lab reflects the way I work.
Ideas are researched.
Problems are broken down.
Solutions are designed.
Software is built.
Assumptions are tested.
And useful concepts can eventually become standalone products.
Agentic Media Lab is therefore both a publishing platform and a development environment for exploring practical applications of modern technology.
What I Want the Contract Deadline Project to Achieve
The long-term objective is simple:
Make important contract dates harder to miss.
A user should be able to take a contractual notice requirement, identify the relevant date and notice period, and determine the corresponding deadline without building formulas or repeatedly counting dates manually.
Over time, software can go further.
It can help preserve calculations, explain how results were determined, organize contracts, identify upcoming deadlines, and support increasingly sophisticated contract-deadline workflows.
But the foundation remains the same.
Get the date right.
Everything else builds from there.
An Important Limitation
Contract deadline calculations can have significant legal and commercial consequences.
The information, articles, examples, and software published through Agentic Media Lab are intended to provide general informational and computational assistance. They are not a substitute for legal advice or professional review of a specific contract.
Contract language varies, jurisdictions differ, and individual clauses can contain special definitions or calculation rules that materially change a deadline.
Where a deadline could affect important contractual rights, financial commitments, termination rights, litigation, regulatory obligations, or other significant matters, the relevant contract and calculation should be reviewed by an appropriately qualified professional.
Technology can make calculations easier.
It should not create false confidence where professional judgment is required.
Building in Public
Agentic Media Lab also documents much of the thinking behind the products being developed.
That includes exploring individual contract date concepts, calculation problems, edge cases, software architecture, product design, and the evolution from a simple calculator toward a production SaaS application.
This approach serves two purposes.
It creates useful educational material for people dealing with contract deadlines today, while also helping define the requirements for the software being built to solve those problems tomorrow.
Every article can reveal another question.
Every question can reveal another edge case.
And every edge case can help produce a better calculator.
What Comes Next
The Contract Notice Deadline Calculator is one example of the type of product I want Agentic Media Lab to create: small enough to understand, focused enough to be useful, and sophisticated enough to solve a genuine business problem.
The expanding contract deadline knowledge base will continue to support that product by explaining the terminology, dates, notice periods, calculation methods, and practical issues surrounding contractual deadlines.
From there, the objective is to continue turning carefully researched problems into focused software tools.
If you work with contracts, renewals, termination notices, procurement, vendor management, legal operations, finance, or other deadline-sensitive business processes, I hope the resources on Agentic Media Lab help you better understand the dates that matter—and act before those dates become missed opportunities.
Ben Kemp (LinkedIn profile url: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benkemp/)
Founder, Agentic Media Lab