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DocuSign moves beyond e-signatures with AI-powered contract platform
DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen explains how the company is leveraging its brand recognition and GenAI capabilities to solve decades-old problems in how businesses create, negotiate and manage contracts
DocuSign is reshaping how businesses handle agreements with its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform for intelligent agreement management (IAM), designed to oversee the entire lifecycle of contracts.
Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of DocuSign Momentum 25 in Singapore, DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen noted that while the company is synonymous with electronic signing, he sees the brand as a launchpad, not a limitation, for its broader ambitions.
“I keep telling my team that we solve an important problem for people and we do it at scale,” he said.
“I did have some marketing people suggest that we should maybe change our name, but you don’t take a name like DocuSign that’s so well recognised and throw that away.”
Instead, DocuSign is focused on educating customers about the deep-seated problems with managing agreements. These include poor visibility over agreements, which are often stored in disparate systems and flat files; manual processes in drafting, reviewing and negotiating contracts that lead to delays and errors; and the lack of unified workflows, causing miscommunication between teams like legal and procurement.
“Most people are aware they have agreement problems, but they think the problems are intractable,” said Thygesen.
“They don’t think there’s a solution, and it’s been that way for 50 years. Once you let people see that things could be transformed, I think they’d be very happy to accept DocuSign.”
Generative AI unlocks value
Thygesen, who joined the company just a month before the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in 2022, said generative AI (GenAI) is uniquely suited to unlocking value from the “dumb, flat files” that have traditionally plagued agreement management.
By leveraging GenAI, DocuSign – with its vast repository of agreement data and specialised models tuned for legal-grade accuracy – can extract data from contracts, automate workflows and provide deep insights across entire agreement libraries. These capabilities, he said, set it apart from generic AI tools.
“We have a very carefully tuned system that’s built on an agreement definition model that creates a very high level of action,” said Thygesen. “I don’t think anyone is going to be able to match us in terms of our access to data, our understanding of agreement structure and our specialised models.”
The DocuSign IAM platform, launched about a year ago, was built with a modular architecture in a deliberate move away from the monolithic nature of its earlier products. This allows customers to select the functionalities they need – such as identity verification or document generation – and embed them directly into other enterprise systems such as Salesforce or Workday.
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Thygesen said the platform is gaining traction, with over 10,000 customers already signed up. The most common use cases are in sales, procurement and human resources, particularly for employee onboarding.
As the company expands the platform’s availability from its initial markets in the US, Canada and Australia to other countries and regions, it has had to localise functionalities beyond simple translation. “If I want to evaluate a Brazilian agreement in Portuguese, it’s not enough that I understand Portuguese,” he said. “I have to get Brazilian agreements and do the separate training and validation.”
This is also why functionalities such as Agreement Desk, a centralised hub for teams to submit and track contract requests, and AI Contract Agents, which automate agreement processes, are only available in Singapore in 2026.
Data security concerns
Addressing concerns around data security and privacy, Thygesen explained that DocuSign is taking steps to protect customer information. The company initially trained its AI models on public contracts, but now uses millions of anonymised customer contracts, with consent, to improve accuracy.
“Customers share their contract data with us, and we give them back better AI,” he said. “Practically everybody agrees to that because they want to get better results.”
For organisations with stricter requirements, such as government agencies, Thygesen said DocuSign could potentially build custom models for them.
“When we started two years ago, I was worried our cloud costs were going to be too high,” he said. “But with improvements in chips and models, the costs have come down, so it’s now more feasible for us to contemplate custom models.”
In addition, DocuSign is exploring options to store data in secure environments such as government cloud offerings from major hyperscalers, though Thygesen acknowledged the significant licensing costs and architectural limitations of doing so. “All that said, I can see where things are going, and we’re doing our best to support all that,” he added.
Plans are also afoot to roll out more pre-built capabilities for specific industries such as finance and insurance, while also creating a platform for partners and developers to build their own custom modules that solve specific problems, such as managing complex cloud agreements.
“We have so much to do,” said Thygesen, “both to fill in modest gaps that remain, and to make the whole platform more robust, integrated, verticalised and functionally specialised.”
Asia-Pacific opportunity
Asia-Pacific is a key part of DocuSign’s growth strategy. The company is investing more in the region and has established Singapore as its regional hub. Today, 70% of DocuSign’s revenue comes from North America, with the remainder from international markets.
“My expectation is that Asia should be the fastest-growing region for us,” said Thygesen, adding that DocuSign hopes to increase the share of revenue from international markets from 30% to nearly 50%, with Asia eventually contributing 15% of that international figure.
A key market for DocuSign is Japan. “I’ve said publicly that our two biggest investment areas from a geography perspective are Japan and Germany, both of which are, relatively speaking, less developed for us and yet are top-five global economies,” he said.
“Culturally, and from a government regulation standpoint, Japan has been a little behind, but we’re very optimistic. Our Japan business is growing very nicely right now.”
