At a time when the AI revolution is sweeing through most aspects of business, one area that has remained surprisingly untouched is business agreements and contracts. That’s about to change, as DocuSign, the company that brought electronic signatures into the mainstream, is now leveraging AI to revolutionize how businesses create, manage, and extract value from their agreements.
The Hidden Problem With Modern Agreements
While we’ve digitized countless business processes, agreements have largely remained stuck in the past. Yes, we edit them in Word and email them around, but as DocuSign’s CEO Allan Thygesen explains, “Everything about agreements remains as brittle, delayed, and unpredictable as it’s ever been.”
The problem goes deeper than just inefficient processing. As Thygesen points out, “Once you negotiate the agreement, the strange thing is you spend all this time on that, and then you put it in a deep, dark place, and there’s no visibility into what’s actually in the agreement.” This lack of visibility means companies often miss crucial deadlines, renewal opportunities, and chances to improve their agreements.
How AI Is Transforming Agreement Management
DocuSign’s approach to solving this problem coincided with perfect timing. “I joined DocuSign just as there was a step change in what we could do with AI, right around the time when GPT 3.5 launched,” shares Thygesen. This technological breakthrough has enabled DocuSign to transform unstructured agreement data into actionable intelligence.
The company’s AI-powered platform can now extract essential data from agreements, make it searchable, and compare it against actual outcomes from various business systems. But it doesn’t stop there. The AI can also assist in creating agreements, customizing templates, and even performing initial legal reviews of incoming contracts.
Real-World Applications That Are Changing Business
The impact of this technology is already being felt across various business functions. Thygesen highlights three key areas where their AI-powered platform is making a significant difference:
In sales, the platform enables businesses to track renewal dates, notice periods, and opportunities for renegotiation. This prevents missed opportunities and empowers sales teams with crucial information that was previously buried in agreements.
For procurement teams, who are typically resource-constrained, the AI helps manage vendor relationships more effectively. “Procurement teams are typically fairly small,” Thygesen notes. “Having tools that can make them more productive is very important.”
In HR and recruitment, where there are many employment contracts that need management and updating, the platform can streamline high-volume processes while ensuring compliance. It enables quick customization of agreements and packages while maintaining regulatory compliance.
The Future Of AI-Powered Agreements
Looking ahead, DocuSign envisions a future where AI could potentially handle entire agreement processes autonomously, particularly for simpler documents. “I think it’ll be technically possible to do that with higher accuracy for simple agreements in fairly short order,” Thygesen predicts. He suggests that standardized documents like NDAs could be among the first to see full automation.
However, Thygesen maintains a balanced perspective about AI’s role: “For a variety of reasons, including risk compliance, regulatory and others, I think it’ll be a while before anything but the most trivial agreements get released. I think there’ll always be a human in the end, at a minimum.”
The Bigger Picture
DocuSign’s ultimate vision is ambitious yet practical. “If we’re successful, we will develop the first system of record for agreements,” says Thygesen. This would replace the current scattered approach where agreements are lost in email threads or buried in various digital drives.
The transformation is already underway. With 1.6 million monthly paying business entities, DocuSign is well-positioned to lead this revolution. The evidence of progress is striking: Thygesen reveals that their “costs to process an agreement have dropped by two orders of magnitude in the last 15 months” thanks to continued technological advancement.
A New Chapter In Business Efficiency
As businesses continue to seek ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs, DocuSign’s AI-powered approach to agreement management represents a significant leap forward. By turning static documents into dynamic, intelligent assets, they’re not just solving a technological problem – they’re addressing a fundamental business challenge that affects organizations of all sizes.
The future of business agreements is being rewritten. But as with all significant technological advances, the key to success will lie in finding the right balance between automation and human oversight, between efficiency and control, and between innovation and reliability.
