Docusign IAM Platform: An Overview of Intelligent Agreement Management

Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) is a new platform designed to tackle an old problem: inefficient agreements that cost as much value as they create. If your team has ever struggled with lost documents, questioned which contract version is official, or experienced long waits for approval, IAM can help.

IAM takes an innovative approach, offering foundational tools and allowing you to expand with composable extensions that address your unique needs. All components are integrated and share the same backend data, ensuring information flows freely at every stage of the agreement lifecycle. This post will help you understand the big-picture value the IAM platform offers, structured around how you create, commit to, and manage your agreements.

Create: Get from request to signature faster 

The create phase focuses on the path of getting an agreement from, “hey, I need this” to “alright, let’s sign this!” For too many companies, it’s a tangled web of cascading email threads, outdated drafts, and disconnected systems offering little (or no) visibility. It’s slow, fragmented, and riddled with opportunities for error. The Docusign IAM platform offers a wide variety of solutions to accelerate agreement creation from end-to-end and help you get to signature in a fraction of the time.

The Docusign IAM platform can help you: 

• Manage the intake, negotiation, and approval process using Agreement Desk. This central hub streamlines intake, centralizes negotiations and approvals, and automates routine tasks with AI and no-code customizable workflow automation, providing instant visibility to all stakeholders. Anyone can initiate and track requests with Agreement Desk and follow a clear audit trail or see real-time statuses. This ensures a smooth flow from initial request through internal approvals, and ultimately signature–all within a single, unified system.

• Provide customers with a convenient experience to submit information into an intuitive web form and automatically generate an agreement. Web Forms simplifies data entry and pre-populates existing details to improve the signer experience and reduce errors.

• Agreement Preparation can help you instantly generate custom agreements wherever your teams work, whether that’s directly in Docusign or your own internal systems. This includes leveraging conditional logic and dynamic tables to create multiple variations of standardized documents while only needing to maintain a single template.. 

• AI-Assisted Review helps with redlining agreements against your company’s requirements. You can also ask your agreements questions and get quick insights, or generate new clauses or redlines from plain language instructions. This allows you to empower more of your team to review and negotiate without jeopardizing compliance with your organization’s standards.

Commit: Securing and executing agreements

The commit phase is all about getting agreements signed and finalized securely, efficiently, and without disruption to the user experience. These IAM features help you go from review to signature with clarity, precision, and reassurance. Here’s how Docusign helps, step-by-step: 

• Once an agreement is ready for commitment, bringing all stakeholders into a shared space will help keep things rolling. Workspaces centralizes all agreements for signers, simplifies next steps, and allows for real-time collaboration in one secure hub. You can use activity sequencing to make sure steps are followed in the correct order, streamline notifications, and even store and reuse data across forms and documents to save time, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

• Docusign IAM also makes signing contracts with legally enforceable signatures as easy as possible. eSignature lets parties sign from practically anywhere with an internet connection using almost any device, and IAM plans include unlimited envelope sends, offering your team even more value. 

• For situations or agreements that require a heightened level of security or identity assurance, Docusign Digital Signatures provide the highest level of compliance with local standards and regulations. Through IAM we support all levels of digital signature: Simple (SES), Advanced (AES), and Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES).  To further enhance security and minimize errors during signing, Data Verification confirms signer-entered data against third-party sources in real time.

• And Docusign Identify enables you to securely verify the identity of recipients, adding an additional layer of security to your signing process when necessary. With an extensive portfolio of identity verification methods to select from, including biometric detection, document verification, phone authentication, and dynamic risk-based analysis, you can tailor the level of assurance to match your security needs.

Manage: Organizing and optimizing agreements

The manage phase helps you keep track of your agreements after they're signed, ensuring they're accessible and actionable. You can also gain valuable insights and takeaways to make your future process all-the-more streamlined.

• Once an agreement is signed, it automatically moves into Docusign’s intelligent central repository. AI then scans and extracts key data points from your agreements, such as parties, expiration dates, dollar amounts, and contract types. This transforms your scattered files into an organized collection of structured data. You can also store documents directly to external cloud storage solutions like Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, SharePoint, or Dropbox, but Docusign brings all this information together. Your team can then easily search for contracts or filter/sort the repository to instantly answer questions about your agreements, dramatically reducing the time spent looking for them.

• Beyond just finding agreements, IAM empowers you to proactively manage them. With Obligation Management, you can capture, assign, and track key obligations within your agreements, receiving proactive alerts or generating reports on scheduled commitments. This AI-powered automation ensures you never miss a renewal or termination reminder.

• With built-in reporting and analytics, you can gain valuable insights about your entire agreement process using customizable dashboards and reports. See where steps are stalling to better optimize in the future, and set up automatic alerts to remind you of upcoming renewals so you never miss a deadline. 

With these (and more!) features, IAM can replace the patchwork systems and manual efforts you currently have in place. No more duplicating old agreements, copying/pasting details, exporting PDFs, emailing attachments, or managing version control with spreadsheets. Instead, create, commit to, and manage your agreements in a single system with ease and speed. 

IAM provides the flexibility to build a standardized, automated agreement process that meets your needs today, and easily adjusts as those needs change. 

If you're interested in learning more about how IAM can transform your agreement process, talk to one of our experts.