Introducing the New Docusign, the Intelligent Agreement Management Company

Key takeaways:

• Today Docusign is announcing a significant expansion of its company strategy, opening up a new SaaS category — Intelligent Agreement Management — and launching Docusign IAM, an Intelligent Agreement Management platform and new line-of-business-focused applications to lead that category.

• Nearly $2 trillion dollars are lost in global economic value each year due to poor agreement management practices and systems according to a recent study from Deloitte.* We call that the Agreement Trap.

• The Agreement Trap happens when outdated agreement systems and processes slow your business down and trap business-critical information inside static, flat files, unconnected to existing systems of record. We think it represents one of the greatest destructions of value in businesses today.

• Docusign IAM will use artificial intelligence to bring agreement management into the 21st century, so businesses of all kinds can transform agreement data into insights and actions, accelerate contract review cycles, and boost productivity organisation-wide.

• Docusign’s new IAM applications for Sales and Customer Experience will be available to customers in Australia starting in late May, and will expand to other major markets this year.

Agreements are the foundation of any business. Your relationships with your customers, your vendors, and your employees are all based on agreements. If you manage your agreements well, chances are you’ll be able to operate efficiently and grow your business quickly. If you manage them poorly, chances are you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Unfortunately, very few companies manage agreements well. Research from Deloitte indicates that these outdated agreement systems and processes will cost nearly $2 trillion in global economic value.* We call this problem the “Agreement Trap.”

Today we are announcing a bold new vision for Docusign, one that will help businesses around the world break free from the Agreement Trap and help recapture that nearly $2 trillion in lost value.*

That vision begins with Docusign IAM - a platform for end-to-end agreement management that we believe will be the first entrant in a new Intelligent Agreement Management SaaS category. Docusign IAM and our first two line-of-business applications, IAM for Customer Experience and IAM for Sales, will launch soon in Australia.

The Agreement Trap – and a new SaaS category

Most businesses know the pain of crucial deals slipping yet another quarter; potential customers experiencing poorly designed signup processes; and losing money because their vendors aren't delivering everything they promised in their contracts. These problems add up, and they cost businesses time, money, and opportunity.

There’s a simple explanation for why this pain is so universal: The way we manage agreements is stuck in the past.

Most companies use word processors and email to draft and route agreements, and store the executed copies digitally. Many now execute their most important agreements using Docusign eSignature. But otherwise very little has changed. Drafting and negotiating agreements remain as cumbersome and time-consuming as ever. And the completed agreements largely remain as unstructured, flat, and disconnected files that can’t be easily located, searched, or connected to the systems and people who run your business.

The cost of these outdated processes and disconnected systems is significant*: 

• Nearly $2 trillion in global economic value is lost each year.

• Companies waste an average of 25,000 hours per year, per function, developing agreements.

• Companies take an average of two weeks longer to close a big deal or hire top talent.

The opportunity for change here is so great – and the potential solutions are so powerful – that we believe we are on the cusp of a new SaaS category: Intelligent Agreement Management.

Just as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) leveraged the internet to modernise sales, HR, and resource management, we believe Intelligent Agreement Management will transform the agreement management process and how agreement data informs every part of your business.

Our solution: Docusign IAM

Docusign IAM will help businesses of all kinds create smarter agreements, commit to them more efficiently, and then actively manage them to unleash and realise their full value.

Docusign’s new capabilities seamlessly connect different components of the agreement management process and leverage state-of-the-art AI to speed up contract creation, enhance negotiations, and provide strategic insights to manage your agreement portfolio.

With Docusign IAM, companies of all kinds – big and small – will be able to:

• Create agreements in a way that is collaborative, automated, and integrated with all their business processes and systems like CRM, HCM, and ERP.

• Commit to agreements faster, more securely, and with a better end customer, partner, and employee experience.

• Manage agreements by unveiling the information hidden within, unlocking value, and reducing unnecessary risk.

These new capabilities will be made possible by new platform services that are part of Docusign IAM.

• Docusign Navigator is a smart repository that enables organisations to centrally store, manage, and analyse agreements from any source. More than just document storage, Navigator is powered by Docusign AI, to effectively transform unstructured agreements into structured data. With this data unlocked, Navigator makes it easy for you to find agreements, access vital information quickly, and gain valuable insights from your agreements. No more wasted time, lost revenue, and unnecessary exposure to risk due to a lack of agreement visibility. With Navigator, you can drive efficiencies across the organisation, uncover opportunities to reduce costs, and increase agreement oversight and security. 

• Docusign Maestro helps you create flexible, customisable agreement workflows that are fine-tuned to your needs without needing to write a single line of code. Gone are the days of needing coding skills and hours of work to create end-to-end workflows. With Docusign Maestro, you can configure custom workflows in minutes — combining Docusign capabilities like eSignature, ID verification, and data verification with third-party apps to connect to your business processes. In the future, you will be able to leverage our pre-configured recipes built to address common use cases like customer, vendor, and employee onboarding and KYC compliance requirements. 

• App Center builds upon our ecosystem of developers and partners, so you can now easily discover, install, and connect a wide variety of apps to integrate your existing systems into Docusign IAM. You can connect HubSpot and Salesforce to record customer information, ServiceNow to trigger a new workflow, Quik! to extract agreement data, Stripe to generate a payment subscription, or Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Sharepoint, and Prisidio to archive completed documents - with more apps to come.

With these capabilities as part of the platform services, we’ll be able to offer purpose-built applications for specific lines of business. When Docusign IAM launches in May, we’ll offer:

• IAM for Sales: Sales teams will be able to close deals faster by generating smart contracts and seamlessly connecting the agreement process with CRM systems.

• IAM for Customer Experience: Product managers will be able to create elegant agreement experiences that improve conversion, reduce abandonment, and deliver a frictionless experience. 

• IAM Core: Any team not directly served via an” IAM for X” application can customise their own solution with  Docusign IAM Core. Teams can design their own agreement management experience using our modular platform services, build their own apps on top, or customise with an app from the Docusign App Center.

Those are the first three Docusign IAM applications coming to market but certainly not the last. As we grow the Docusign IAM portfolio, we plan to launch more IAM applications targeted at other lines of business as well as verticals. For example:

• IAM for Procurement:  Procurement teams will be able to streamline the source-to-pay process, mitigating risks and delays, and then ensure that agreement terms are met on time.

• IAM for Human Resources: HR teams will be able to deliver world-class employee-agreement experiences, from hire to retire, with integrations between Docusign and key HR tools.

What’s next?

This is a big moment for our industry. It’s also a big moment for Docusign. We are building on 20+ years of innovation in Agreement Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, and eSignature to pioneer a new software category and deliver powerful solutions for our 1.5 million global customers.

This is just a starting point, and we have a lot of work to do. We are excited to see how customers respond to this first version of the Docusign IAM portfolio, and we will continue to evolve it over time.

Nobody is in a better position to bring agreements to life than Docusign. After all – nobody understands agreements better, and nobody cares about them more than we do.

The Docusign IAM portfolio will be available in Australia starting in late May and will expand to other major markets this year. To learn more about Docusign IAM, visit our new website.

*Source: Deloitte & Docusign Digital Agreement Management Study, 2024