Artificial intelligence agents are coming to the Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform. Later this year, the company will roll out purpose-built bots designed to streamline contract workflows and flag risks in real-time. These agents will help organizations expedite their review process and alleviate administrative bottlenecks.
Along with the contact agents, Docusign is rolling out seven new IAM features powered by its new proprietary AI engine, Docusign Iris.
Launched in 2024, the IAM platform leverages AI to tackle what the tech company calls the “agreement trap.” Billed as a solution to a $2 trillion inefficiency, it brings together every component of the agreement process—helping organizations make sense of contracts, Master Service Agreements (MSAs), Statements of Work, amendments, and more. From there, a process was established around them to make contracts work better.
Traditionally, this was managed across multiple applications, Docusign’s Chief Product Officer Dmitri Krakovsky explained to me last year. “There are processes from tools from different vendors, a little bit of self-written stuff, and some [system integration] is involved. And they put together this process that sort of holds sometimes but often has a lot of gaps, has big pieces, and doesn’t really connect. And because of that, there’s this disjointed, inflexible, expensive, hard-to-implement process.”
Automating Contract Reviews
“Every company wants to adopt AI, and contracts are a natural place to start, given the inefficient workflows, unstructured data, and lack of visibility,” Allan Thygesen, Docusign’s chief executive, remarked. “With AI contract agents, we’re taking a major leap forward, bringing automation to the entire agreement management process.”
Like other agents, these contract agents are built to eliminate tedious and inefficient work, automate the mundane jobs humans do, and deliver better results across the entire agreement lifecycle. Contract reviewers may typically have other responsibilities, which forces them to divide their time and slows down the agreement process. Docusign claims its bots are trained to identify urgent tasks quickly, display related agreements within its Navigator contract repository, verify the documents comply with company policies, and more—all within minutes instead of days.
“Our agents don’t just answer questions or summarize text—they leverage the full power of IAM and its solutions to automate time-consuming, repetitive steps across the entire agreement process, from search and review to drafting and negotiation,” Krakovsky stated.
Docusign’s AI contract agents are scheduled to become available in the U.S. by the end of this year, with the first ones dedicated to improving procurement and sales workflows. The company did not specify when the bots would be launched internationally.
New Docusign IAM Features
AI agents aren’t the only announcements. Docusign has also introduced new capabilities to improve how organizations create, commit to, and manage agreements. Though not explicitly stated, some—if not all—were made possible through the company’s $165 million acquisition of Lexicon in May 2024. At the time, Docusign shared how it would integrate the AI-powered agreement management software provider into its IAM platform, including providing customers with richer insights into agreements, offering an AI plugin for Microsoft Word to help in contract development, an assistant to help find information in agreements, and managing document intakes through email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.
Here is a list of the newest features:
Agreement Prep: Tool for contract creation and management using dynamic templates that ingest data automatically
Agreement Desk: A collaboration space to track and manage agreement requests and approvals
AI-Assisted Review: AI that provides risk assessment and language recommendations to ensure contracts match a company’s policies
Workspaces: A collaboration environment for multi-step agreements that provides a universal, organized view to keep all stakeholders on the same page
CLEAR Identify Verification: For the first time, CLEAR is integrating its identity verification technology with Docusign, allowing stakeholders to confirm their identity with a selfie
Custom Extractions: Organizations can use a few example contracts to customize AI models to understand their agreements at scale better
Obligation Management: A dashboard to track contractual commitments, deadlines, and renewals
All of these capabilities are powered by Docusign’s AI engine called Iris. It identifies the right agreement AI models for specific use cases, such as reviewing risk detection or customizing insights for complex business needs. The company boasts Iris generates “more reliable agreement-specific extractions, deeper insights, and automation than generic [large language models] can deliver.”
Lastly, Docusign revealed that the IAM platform will soon be made available for those in the public sector, joining its eSignature and [contract lifecycle management] offerings as being FEDRAMP Moderate and GovRAMP certified.
Featured Image: An AI-generated image of an AI agent helping human workers analyze contract agreements. Image credit: Adobe Firefly
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