Choosing The Right AI Contract Software for Your Business

AI has transformed how we operate, and its impact on contract management is no different. This shift is fueling rapid industry growth, with the global contract management software market projected to grow at a CAGR of 12.7% to reach $5.65 billion by 2030. 

This surge reflects a critical reality: AI is no longer just a futuristic concept but the engine driving modern agreement workflows. With the market evolving this quickly, ensuring AI plays an essential role in your contract strategy is increasingly important; — relying solely on manual, legacy processes can limit efficiency, insight, and scalability.

This strategic guide will help you understand how AI contract software can accelerate the entire contract process, outline the key capabilities you should look for in a solution, and explain how a leader like Docusign can enhance your agreement workflows.

Key takeaways

• Manual contract workflows are being phased out: As the contract management software market rapidly expands, AI capabilities are becoming a key enabler of secure, high-speed business operations.

• Five key features of AI contract software: A top-tier AI solution should offer automated risk assessment, data extraction intelligence, negotiation acceleration, seamless integration, and a centralized repository.

• Look beyond e-signatures: True value comes from platforms that leverage natural language processing to analyze contract data and guide your legal expertise, not just platforms that facilitate signing.

• The Docusign advantage: Docusign delivers agreement AI designed for contracts, powered by a unified platform approach that connects the end-to-end process—from creation and execution to management and analysis. 

The bottlenecks of complex business agreements

Let’s face it: manual contract management processes are prone to error and delays. Your business demands speed, accuracy, and enterprise-grade compliance to remain competitive. Relying on human review and decentralized document storage can introduce risk and divert you from more important strategic work. 

Does any of this sound familiar?

• High volume and complexity of agreements

•  human error and time-consuming manual reviews

• Contract review processes that can delay deals and increase risk

• Agreements living across multiple inboxes and systems

Legal teams, for example, waste countless hours on repetitive tasks, deals stall waiting for approvals, and the chance of a costly error increases as agreements become more complex. Recognizing these operational friction points is the first step toward identifying a platform that addresses them, particularly for in-house legal teams managing large volumes of agreements. 

Sales teams face their own contract challenges: lengthy approval cycles that can slow down deal velocity, manual redlining that can extend negotiation timelines, and disconnected systems that can make it difficult to track contract status. When contracts become bottlenecks, revenue and competitors gain ground.

Procurement teams often struggle to maintain visibility across vendor agreements, monitor compliance with negotiated terms, and identify cost-saving opportunities buried in thousands of contracts. Without intelligent automation, valuable time is spent manually tracking obligations and renewals instead of optimizing supplier relationships and capturing savings.

Where AI tools come in

The right AI solution steps in to address these core pain points. Docusign Iris is purpose-built for contracts, going beyond general-purpose LLMs that simply summarize text to understand the nuances and complexity of contract language. Drawing on over 20 years of agreement expertise and 150 million processed contracts, Docusign Iris enables business and legal teams to shift their focus from manual review to strategic decision-making and negotiation, creating faster, more accurate, and more intelligent workflows for your company.

5 essential capabilities your AI contract software must have

Whether it's to improve your contract analysis, negotiation, or signing process -- you've concluded that your contract lifecycle management (CLM) needs to change.

The next step is differentiating between basic tools and enterprise-grade platforms. A simple e-signature tool that utilizes keyword search is insufficient. Leading solutions apply machine learning to identify, manage, and mitigate complex commercial and legal risks across the entire agreement lifecycle.

When evaluating options, ensure the platform you’re considering offers the following five key capabilities:

Automated risk assessment

Effective AI contract review software helps surface risks that are easy to overlook in manual review.. By comparing incoming and legacy agreements against approved standard language, it can flag missing, non-standard, or high-risk clauses—such as aggressive indemnification terms or incorrect governing law— along with a risk score. This reduces legal exposure and helps ensure agreements align with internal policy and external regulatory requirements.

Data extraction and intelligence

Modern agreements are valuable data assets, not just static documents. Effective AI software can instantly extract key metadata such as dates, parties, dollar amounts, and jurisdiction, and transform complex contract language into actionable data. By applying advanced natural language processing to understand contractual context, organizations can convert fragmented repositories into a searchable, organized databases that deliver immediate business insight.

Negotiation and redlining acceleration

The negotiation phase is often where deals stall. AI contract software should do more than simply highlight changes; it should accelerate the "commitment" phase of the agreement lifecycle, allowing your legal team to focus on strategy. The best provide real-time, AI-powered suggestions for approved alternative language and clauses, eliminating lengthy manual redlining, speeding legal review, and ensuring terms align with the company’s negotiation playbooks.

Seamless integration and automation

A standalone contract tool creates bottlenecks. The real power of AI contract software lies in its ability to seamlessly integrate agreement intelligence into the tools you already use —like Salesforce, ServiceNow, or major ERPs. This removes silos, ensuring that a signed renewal doesn't just sit in a folder; it acts on the data by updating client records, alerting finance, or triggering procurement workflows automatically.

Did you know? Docusign offers more than 1,000 integrations to ensure your agreements flow seamlessly through your existing business systems.

Centralized and searchable agreement repository

After a contract is signed, its value should not diminish. Your contract software should be able to transform agreements from static documents into strategic assets by automatically extracting key clauses and metadata, making agreements instantly retrievable and fully searchable across your organization. This helps all teams:

• Legal teams can quickly access historical agreements for precedent research and compliance audits

• Sales teams can surface renewal opportunities and upsell potential buried in customer contracts

• Procurement teams can identify unclaimed vendor savings and track obligations across supplier agreements

• Finance teams can monitor payment terms, milestone commitments, and revenue recognition triggers

This unified approach turns agreement intelligence into a single source of truth, enabling faster decisions, better strategic planning, and the ability to unlock hidden value across your entire portfolio of contracts.

Going beyond software with intelligent agreement management (IAM)

The market has already moved beyond simple point solutions. To truly maximize value, you need a platform that delivers intelligence and unifies the entire agreement process—how agreements are created, reviewed, signed, and managed after signature. This holistic approach is known as Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM).

From point solution to platform: the power of IAM

A dedicated e-signature platform acts as a single tool for a single task. This is valuable, no doubt. But these tools don't account for the many phases of the contract lifecycle.

In contrast, Docusign IAM transforms agreements from static documents into sources of actionable intelligence. This shift means that AI becomes a pervasive, core intelligence layer throughout the entire journey of the agreement, enabling organizations to create, commit to, manage, and analyze all agreements within one unified ecosystem.

• Accelerate your revenue: Inefficient agreement management processes and systems cost companies nearly two trillion in annual global economic value. With AI-powered automation, the Docusign IAM platform helps you connect, manage, and execute agreements faster so your team can spend less time on paperwork and more time driving growth.

• Reduce your risk: Docusign provides a trusted foundation to reduce risk and strengthen compliance across every agreement. Its AI-powered platform enhances human judgment rather than replacing it.

• Unlock hidden value: Transform your agreements from static documents into strategic assets. Docusign Iris extracts powerful insights, identifies opportunities, and drives action to surface revenue, renewal, and optimization opportunities across your entire portfolio.

Learn more about Docusign IAM.