Maximizing AI Returns: The Business Case for Automating Agreement Workflows

In 2026, the potential benefits of automating agreement workflows with AI are clear.

Many industries have successfully adopted AI to automate tasks in the contract process that can consume valuable resources, such as editing agreements, routing approvals, and evaluating risk. This has proven effective for surveyed organizations: new research by Deloitte and Docusign shows an average of 36% efficiency improvements and 36% cost avoidance due to risks mitigated using AI tools.

While these are big wins, leaders who leverage AI to analyze completed agreements can unlock even greater value.

Our 2024 research revealed the cost of inefficient agreement management to be nearly $2 trillion in global economic value. Since then, many companies that have begun using advanced agreement management tools have already started reaping the benefits. Last year’s research revealed that for organizations that outperformed their financial goals, 77% credited the use of advanced agreement management for helping them to do so. Building on this finding, this year’s study revealed specific strategies organizations can take to achieve an increased ROI: by choosing an end-to-end platform to manage the agreement process and using AI to surface insights from completed agreements.

Read the 2026 Deloitte ReportRead the Report

The maturity multiplier effect

The standout finding of this year’s research is the widening gap in benefit realization between companies using point solutions and those using end-to-end platforms (E2E). As your organization moves up the AI maturity scale–going from simple prompts to autonomous agents–the choice of tooling becomes the ultimate force multiplier.

The ROI correlation is compelling: over the last 12 months, organizations using an end-to-end solution saw significantly higher returns than peers with a point solution, and this improvement grew as their AI capabilities matured. While AI-assisted workflows produced a 3% increase in ROI (time savings, cost avoidance, and revenue uplift), more advanced users reported a nearly 30% increase.

End-to-end solutions amplify your AI efforts by providing a central hub to coordinate complex workflows. With this hub established, agentic AI can autonomously plan and manage work without constant human oversight. As your team becomes more comfortable with AI and your AI gets smarter, your results can improve exponentially.

What’s more, last year’s report examined the costly problems hidden in agreements opens in a new tab, noting that fragmentation leads to manual errors.

This year’s research shows the difference an end-to-end platform can make: 81% of organizations with an end-to-end solution reported marked improvements in agreement accuracy, including reduced clerical errors and greater clause consistency. That’s 15 percentage points higher than those trying to stitch together multiple tools.

The insights gap

While we’re seeing a 60% year-over-year surge in AI use for contract creation, the most valuable phase of the lifecycle remains neglected.

Sixty-one percent of respondents still rely on manual processes to surface agreement insights, and only 16% of organizations are using AI to analyze post-signature data to inform business decisions. 

It’s common to view AI initially through the lens of cost-cutting, seeking ways to easily reduce time wasted in workflows and automate, but the bigger opportunity lies in AI as a revenue-enhancing tool.

For instance, one procurement leader noted recovering over $500,000 in credits by using AI to track vendor performance that had previously been "falling through the cracks."

Additionally, sales teams are seeing incremental 1-2% annual revenue growth by using AI to manage renewals and identify upsell opportunities within existing agreements. While this might sound modest, the average respondent in the study manages 300 annual renewals with an average deal size of $670,000. That shift translates to an average annual revenue increase of $4.8 million.

Moving beyond pushing paper

AI should be used to enable your team to do more strategic work, and it can also be tapped to assist with the corresponding admin tasks these strategic efforts create. 

The report highlights several instances where specific lines of business have improved their agreement processes by strategically adopting AI:

Your 2026 contract AI roadmap

If you want to reinvigorate stalled productivity in your agreement process, it’s time to tap into agentic AI capabilities. Here’s what you should consider: 

1. Consolidate: With 65% of organizations still juggling four or more agreement tools, fragmentation is hindering progress. Adopting an end-to-end agreement platform, like Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), is the first step. Beyond the ROI boost, end-to-end users report 81% agreement accuracy—a 15-point lead over those using point solutions.

2. Shift focus: Transition from pre-signature automation to post-signature intelligence. Transitioning to AI-driven insights can trigger a 1–2% annual revenue uplift. For the average organization in this report, that's an incremental $4.8 million found simply by identifying missed renewals and SLA credits.

3. Govern: 74% of organizations said they are planning for autonomous AI, but only 21% have the guardrails to manage it. Establish a formal AI governance model to oversee data sovereignty, model drift, and audit trails. High-trust environments allow teams to scale capacity, as one Legal department did, moving from handling 200 to 1,000 contracts per year.

4. Elevate agreements to core strategy: Stop treating agreement management as a back-office cost center. Integrate agreement data into your broader Enterprise AI strategy, ensuring that insights from your contracts (e.g., vendor performance and customer behavior) inform your ERP, CRM, and HCM systems.

It's time to prioritize agreement management as a core pillar of your enterprise AI strategy. Download the full research study, Capitalizing on AI: How Automated Agreement Workflows Drive ROI or request a demo to see how Docusign IAM can help.