Smart Businesses Use AI-Powered Contracts
Smart Businesses Use AI-Powered Contracts
Did you know you can use AI for contracts? Many leading organisations are implementing artificial intelligence (AI) with great success, yet for others, it remains misunderstood. Even when considering using Artificial Intelligence specifically for business applications, it can be hard to tell how effective it will be, and some leaders are hesitant to implement it. As SVP of strategy and product marketing at DocuSign, I’m here to set the record straight by showing how three of our customers have literally saved hundreds of millions of dollars by harnessing the power of DocuSign AI.
But first, let’s look at some fundamental reasons businesses need to turn to Artificial Intelligence for help.
AI is smart business
One of the biggest reasons organisations use AI is to increase productivity. AI can do things faster and more efficiently, for some tasks, than humans. So for ai powered organisations, this increase in efficiency can lead to great success. This doesn’t mean companies are rapidly replacing all their people with this technology. Instead, they’re using AI as a force multiplier, increasing what they can accomplish by several orders of magnitude while cutting operating costs.
This productivity increase can take many forms, but generally speaking, AI can perform manual and repetitive tasks accurately and insanely fast. Automation like this has many benefits, including reducing human error and freeing employees to focus on more strategic pursuits.
AI is also often called a “smart” technology. It can uncover hidden risks and opportunities and extract intelligence from existing assets. AI can reveal essential and valuable knowledge from the variety of contracts that provide the framework for the successful operation of any business. These documents are filled with data just waiting to be converted into actionable insights that can drive smarter business decisions.
Of course, for AI to assist in these situations, the documents must be digital—and that’s where DocuSign can help. We’re super proud of how we help businesses digitally transform their manual, paper-based processes and enable the flexible workforces and convenient customer interactions that drive today’s anywhere economy.
And we’ve been busy helping companies across this digital business landscape realise all the benefits of smart technologies with DocuSign AI.
DocuSign AI
DocuSign believes in the power of AI and has invested heavily to deliver on its promise. Our motivation is simple: we believe business runs on agreements, and every business is better off knowing exactly where their agreements are and what’s in them.
That means locating the exact contracts you need, even when you’re unsure of the correct search terms. It means finding answers quickly to pressing questions around supply chain vulnerabilities, sales relationships and legal obligations. And it means immediately identifying the terms in a document and highlighting which are favourable. Whether analysing the contracts you've signed in the past, or the latest inbound contract from a third party, contract AI helps businesses run faster and more profitably.
Artificial Intelligence Contracts
Leading organisations are using DocuSign AI to analyse agreement risk and opportunity. DocuSign AI analyses contracts and agreements by breaking them down into their core components. DocuSign AI uses a range of technologies, including natural language processing, machine learning, semantic indexing and a specialised logic engine. It leverages knowledge and expertise encoded by a team of lawyers and experts who know how to apply AI to contracts. Together, these capabilities help extract key terms from contracts and conduct deeper analysis to understand the significance of those terms.
Other contract-analysis products can look through a contract and identify a limitation of liability clause. But DocuSign AI goes deeper, using semantics and logic to answer specific business and legal questions about the language. This functionality is essential to responding quickly when disputes inevitably arise.
Managing risk and revealing opportunities are key reasons customers—especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, life sciences and energy—turn to DocuSign. The cases below show how DocuSign AI can provide tangible and significant cost savings.
DocuSign AI Success Stories
For the following three organisations, the promise of AI became a reality. They represent three different industries—telecommunications, aerospace and technology—and all of them used DocuSign AI to augment or replace manual contract analysis processes.
Telecoms Company - Terms in contracts
A telecom company had the massive challenge of managing over 600,000 contracts for mobile tower leases. They needed to review each one for unfavourable terms, which would have been virtually impossible without the help of AI. With DocuSign AI, they could prioritise the contracts with the highest savings potential. Renegotiating those priority contracts saved the company $100 million or roughly £87 million.
Aerospace Company - Vendor Payments
An aerospace company struggled with a highly complex vendor payment process that resulted in skyrocketing late fees. Each contract required manual effort to extract the necessary data for payment processing. With DocuSign AI, the data was extracted and organised automatically, eliminating the vast backlog of contract reviews and creating a far more efficient process. These productivity gains resulted in the company saving £52M
Technology Company - Procurement Terms
A technology company was facing a common problem in their industry: trying to manage tens of thousands of procurement contracts dispersed across multiple repositories they’d inherited from several acquisitions. While many of the acquired companies used the same suppliers, each had its own negotiated discounts and pricing. The company wanted to consolidate the supplier relationships and use the most favourable terms, but to do this manually across thousands of agreements and multiple repositories was virtually impossible. DocuSign AI consolidated all the contracts, made them searchable, eliminated duplicates and extracted normalised structured data to sync with their ERP system. The company uncovered tremendous savings by optimising supplier terms and also reduced IT spending and overhead by consolidating repositories and eliminating redundant documents. All told, harnessing the power of DocuSign AI saved them $500M or £432M.
These real-world success stories prove that DocuSign AI is delivering major results today already - but that’s not the end of the story. AI is still in its infancy, and we have big plans for the future of DocuSign AI.
The future is bright
DocuSign pioneered the electronic signature category, and we’re continuing to define the future of agreement technology overall. This very much includes AI-driven contract analytics.
The three organisations above are large enterprises that handle massive quantities of agreements. We’re currently working to democratise our AI technology for organisations of any size, whether they’re dealing with dozens or thousands of contracts. In addition to applying DocuSign AI across the spectrum of organisation sizes, we’re also developing ways to infuse AI into every stage of the agreement process—from preparing to signing, acting on and managing agreements. Using ai powered contracts can help all different types of organisations.
So, if you already use DocuSign AI, we’ll keep driving further value for your investment. Or, if you’re just getting into the topic, know that a critical component of our mission is to help make your contract work faster, easier and smarter with AI.