Business doesn’t get completed and people don’t get paid unless agreements are signed. Work may make the world go ’round, but business agreements enable the work to go ’round first.
Docusign, which practically invented the global digital signature market, has grown into an international standard due to that innovation. But it has evolved beyond that. It now offers what it calls an Intelligent Agreement Management platform that covers the life cycle of agreements — from creation, verification and negotiation to signing, management and documentation. Like any initiative, this entire process must be carefully monitored and maintained, which is what the software also does.
“Docusign is about a lot more than signing documents,” Larry Jin, the company’s vice president of product management, told The New Stack. “It is really about helping our customers manage everything to do with agreements, end to end. We’ve been the leader for the past 20-plus years in e-signature. We effectively established the category with, of course, many other entrants coming into the space. Through that experience, we’ve realized that customers need a lot more than just signing agreements.”
IAM, launched earlier this year, handles all of the above plus adding AI-powered insights and no-code workflows that line-of-business users can use to smooth out business processes. It is catching on with both administrators and developers — the latter thanks to Docusign’s November release of Docusign for Developers, a suite of tools and resources designed for developers, partners and entrepreneurs to customize agreement management.
Docusign IAM Fuels the Agreement Ecosystem
The Docusign IAM platform operationalizes static documents into actionable ones that power business workflows in an open and extensible manner. The company’s ecosystem of partners, developers and entrepreneurs can customize how more than 1.6 million customers create, commit to and manage their agreements, offering new ways to:
- Automate complex workflows with Maestro, enabling businesses to reduce manual work and boost efficiency.
- Extract actionable insights with the Navigator dashboard user interface (UI), surfacing critical data locked inside static documents for better decision-making.
- Build and publish custom applications that connect and extend Intelligent Agreement Management solutions to existing business systems.
IAM also has predesignated hooks in data from other vendors, thanks to several key partnerships. With Workday, SAP and Salesforce integrations, data that needs to be added to agreements — such as offer letters, procurement contracts or sales deals — flows automatically from these systems into each agreement, ensuring accuracy and eliminating time-consuming manual data entry.
IAM even enables the use of messaging apps including WhatsApp for document delivery in regions such as Latin America, where the app is very popular. Docusign supports 44 localized languages for signing documents and 13 languages for sending documents.
Other usability features include Sandbox Banking’s Gluye app, which automates customer account management for financial institutions, reducing errors and improving the customer experience; Quik’s FormXtract, which uses AI to extract data from forms with high accuracy; and NeuraFlash’s connector app, built in partnership with MuleSoft, which integrates Docusign with systems such as Coupa, SAP and Workday, eliminating manual data entry and unlocking agreement data.
In health care, Velatura digitizes patient consent management, eases workflows and enhances data sharing for more than 12 million health-care records. Bonterms smooths agreements with open source, standardized templates for enterprise businesses, including nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), service-level agreements and cloud terms — crafted by expert legal professionals to reduce negotiation time.
An Entire Document Creation and Records System
There’s a lot that goes into creating an agreement to begin a business relationship, Jin said. For starters, Docusign provides a generous number of document templates, many of which are already customized for industry verticals. Second, it’s up to the principals to insert the correct specific language. Later, the IAM also enables negotiating on that agreement and making revisions and edits in a cooperative manner, he said.
“Let’s say two companies are buying and selling widgets to each other,” Jin said. “In those contracts, you typically have key factors such as: How many units are you buying? On what dates do they have to be delivered? What’s the price per unit? What’s the total contract value? And our AI is specialized in really deeply understanding all of those key terms and attributes,” Jin explained.
IAM automatically pulls those out of the agreement using AI large language models, Jin said. “Our new UI, Navigator, can be used to view those things on a single screen,” he said.
New AI-Assisted Review for Contracts
Another of Docusign’s new features is AI-Assisted Review, which speeds up negotiations by reviewing agreements against internally approved legal guidelines, flagging discrepancies and suggesting language changes in real time.
Using this feature, users can also generate new language from simple instructions, ask specific contract questions and receive instant insights — all in Microsoft Word documents. By automating tedious tasks while keeping human oversight at the center, AI-Assisted Review reduces risk, accelerates agreement cycles and enables teams to focus on higher-value work, Jin said.
AI-Assisted Review became available for Docusign Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) users in the United States on November 20 and will expand to more countries and Docusign IAM next year, the company said.
Monitoring and Managing Agreements
How about managing all agreements once they have been signed?
Early in 2024, Docusign worked with Deloitte Consulting to study the amount of economic loss from businesses that don’t properly manage their contracts and agreements. It’s surprising how many businesses don’t know the full extent about what’s in them, thus they don’t know all the risks they are facing, Jin said.
For example, when a surprise event happens in enterprise business — a change in regulation, a natural disaster or failure of a supply chain — suddenly a company has a set of contractual obligations that it can’t meet. It can face millions of dollars in legal and regulatory fees in some cases. Docusign’s AI, however, is prepared for this, Jin said.
Docusign helps businesses mitigate contract liability through AI-powered contract analysis, automated contract review, predictive analytics and streamlined contract creation. This improves accuracy and consistency, identifies potential risks, automates tasks and provides insights, ultimately reducing liability and improving contract management efficiency.
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