With a degree in biology and computer science, Rebecca Denman previously worked at Microsoft leading its healthcare solutions platform before a friend introduced her to the e-signature firm where she has worked for the last ten years.
In this time the VP has seen a few tech firsts, and now the firm is positioning itself as an AI-driven contract firm that is aiming to shape the future of agreements.
Last month the firm rolled out a new software-as-a-service platform that it calls ‘Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) to help customers create and manage contracts and other agreements.
How has AI helped Docusign transition from e-signatures to scanning the entire page of a contract?
When Docusign started 20 years ago, we set out to revolutionise how folks do the agreement part of the actual signing of an agreement.
But there’s more to a document than the signature. There’s the creation, negotiations, legal approvals, interactions with various teams, sending it to other parties etc.
With the introduction of AI, we believe that we have an opportunity to make agreements come to life. We’ve been talking a lot recently about the agreement trap: the idea that you have these static files that have a bunch of information in.
This might include renewal terms, or what you commit to or your obligations – so you must read the small print and half the time you need a legal degree to understand it.
We believe our IAM platform is going to help unlock that agreement data that’s trapped inside and make it available to our customers and their users.
What business applications is IAM useful for?
Companies can get a spending overview and save themselves money. We have a customer that was using a vendor that they had about 100 contracts with and all of them were on different terms and different prices.
So, the procurement team was looking and optimising these contracts and get better terms. With IAM, what you can do is look across the whole holistic portfolio with this vendor and realise where you can do better.
That customer saved millions of dollars by consolidating this and putting it into a single contract.
Will this help people from missing the fine print?
It can solve that age-old fine print problem and so much more.
There are two distinct parts to it. When you’re creating an agreement, one of the things we always worry about is whether these terms are good terms, and do these terms align with what my company wants to agree to.
There is a way IAM could highlight this by saying: ‘you normally agree to contracts that abide by a 30-day policy, but this contract says 60 days, are you sure you want to agree to this?’
So, AI can help highlight where there are deviations from your typical standards.
You could also create a playbook of all your important business clauses. In Europe, there are a lot of clauses around GDPR, and now there are EU AI policies and sustainability efforts. You could review all your contracts to see if they have appropriate clauses.
If you could create your own tool to make your own life more efficient, what would it be?
As a working parent, especially with a partner who also travels a lot, I need an assistant and I think that AI is getting to a place where I could basically have that personal assistant that is baked right here on my mobile device.
What if I want to buy all the groceries for my week? I’m one of those people who does meal planning. I have two small kids, so I have week one, two, three, and four planned. What if could ask my AI assistant to give me all the groceries for week two.
Or maybe even just e-mail replies. If my boss asks me to consolidate those slides, I could ask AI assistant Rebecca to go consolidate those slides while I’m doing another thing.
I think it’s around the corner. When it comes to AI it’s about how you can use it to assist you can get you to be more productive.
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