5 Ways AI Improves Your Contract Process

Table of contents

• 1. How can AI find valuable data about our business in contracts?
• 2. Will AI help streamline contract reviews and negotiations?
• 3. How does AI improve reporting insights for strategic decision-making?
• 4. Can my team ask AI contract questions without technical language?
• 5. How does AI drive efficiency across the entire contract lifecycle?
• The foundation of trust and innovation

Think about the typical agreement process. It's often a source of significant pain and inefficiency. Legal teams get buried under a mountain of contracts, trying to find critical clauses, while sales teams get stuck waiting on approvals, their deals stalled by slow review cycles. To boot, the data locked within these agreements is unorganized, making it nearly impossible to gain strategic insights or track key obligations.

These challenges can cost companies big: not only are they major roadblocks to productivity and growth, but revenue can suffer greatly. According to Deloitte, the cost rings upwards of $2 trillion in global economic value.

Here are some answers to key questions you may have about how AI can improve your contract workflows.

1. How can AI find valuable data about our business in contracts?

Thirty-one percent of contracting professionals struggle to understand terms, risks, and obligations within their agreements. What's more, it takes an average of 45 minutes for them to find a specific agreement. That means important contract milestones are easy to miss, and finding agreements is a huge time suck.

Storing contracts in a folder or shared drive leaves teams with untapped potential. Without a way to make sense of the unstructured data, it's impossible to gather meaningful insights.

AI-assisted data extractions tackle this head-on. Docusign Iris, our agreement AI engine, identifies and pulls out key attributes from agreements, standardizing information and making it effortless to find critical details. For those with unique needs, like an HR team that wants to track independent contractor or gig worker agreements to enhance workforce planning, Custom Extractions in Docusign allow you to train AI to capture specific terms at scale, delivering highly relevant, organization-specific insights without extensive manual work.

2. Will AI help streamline contract reviews and negotiations?

Reviewing agreements can be a major source of friction, especially with the endless cycle of redlines, different versions, and dozens of stakeholder reviews.

But AI-Assisted Review automates critical aspects of contract review and negotiation to reduce these issues and streamline your review. It allows teams to evaluate agreements against predefined guidelines, suggests AI-generated markups and clause language, and even answers contract-related questions through a generative AI-powered Q&A experience.

Say you're drafting a new agreement for a customer, and you're not certain about the clauses you've included. AI-Assisted Review will compare your agreement with your pre-built playbooks so you can see exactly which areas need work. The tool will make recommendations to align with your standardized language and rules stored in your CLM clause library, such as changing payment dates to match the previously established timeframe.

And if you don't have a clause stored in your library, you can ask AI to generate one for you by describing in plain language the changes you'd like to make.

3. How does AI improve reporting insights for strategic decision-making?

Beyond the day-to-day work, AI helps you see the bigger picture.

Out-of-the-box reporting uses AI to generate comprehensive, pre-built reports, providing a bird's-eye view of your agreement portfolio and uncovering deeper insights. AI-powered features like renewal management help procurement teams monitor auto-renewal agreements and avoid being locked into supplier agreements that aren't particularly cost-effective. Obligation Management streamlines financial and operational oversight, and you can create custom obligations with specified managers to make sure important steps don't fall through the cracks.

These features simplify tracking, automate notifications, and generate reports, which help prevent unwanted auto-renewals, identify cost-saving opportunities, and ensure compliance.

4. Can my team ask AI contract questions without technical language?

Finding specific information in a complex agreement can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Think about doing this for dozens or hundreds of documents, and try not to let your head explode.

Search powered by Docusign Iris-the AI-powered engine that powers Docusign's Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform-lets users ask plain language questions about their agreements in Docusign and receive direct, intelligent answers.

Ask about things like contract effective date, renewal terms, agreement types, and much more without the need for technical or legal language. This provides a great deal of accessibility, giving your entire organization more control and your legal team a break.

5. How does AI drive efficiency across the entire contract lifecycle?

From preparing documents for signature to ensuring secure identity verification, AI plays a crucial role in enhancing efficiency across every stage of the agreement process. Here are some ways Docusign Iris makes your agreements more efficient:

• Agreement Summary uses AI to condense complex agreements into concise key points, making it faster for reviewers, approvers, and signers to grasp essential information and move forward with confidence.

• Field Assist/Auto-tagging leverages AI to automatically detect and place fillable fields within an agreement, significantly speeding up the preparation process.

• For identity verification, Docusign incorporates AI through partners for capabilities like Liveness Detection and ID Name Matching, providing higher identity assurances, reducing fraud, and streamlining the signer experience.

The foundation of trust and innovation

It's important to note that Docusign's commitment to AI is built on a foundation of data protection and privacy. Docusign Iris is built into our platform and is designed with security in mind.

By integrating AI across our product suite, Docusign is not just digitizing existing processes: we are reimagining the very nature of agreement management. We are enabling organizations to move faster, make more informed decisions, and unlock the true strategic value embedded within their agreements.

To learn more about how Docusign incorporates AI to improve your contracting process, talk to our sales team.