How Is AI Changing Contract Negotiation?

If contract review is tedious, contract negotiation can feel endless. Email chains. Redlines. Version after version after version. It’s a slow dance—and often frustrating.

AI may not negotiate deals for you. But it’s starting to reshape the negotiation process, making it faster, more efficient, and more accurate—and far less painful.

How process bottlenecks hamper negotiations

Organizations face several challenges in contract negotiation with vendors, suppliers, customers, and other counterparties, including:

• Balancing risk mitigation with agility to meet strategic business objectives and revenue goals

• Misunderstanding complex and ambiguous contract language, which can lead to errors and future disputes

• Weighing the needs of several internal stakeholders and business functions, often with different goals and objectives

• Remaining current with evolving regulatory, compliance, and data privacy obligations

• Tracking changes manually across multiple document versions that are shared via multiple channels and stored in multiple locations

• Struggling with inefficient processes that impact deal velocity and slow time to revenue 

Throughout all this, business leaders keep their fingers crossed, hoping that nothing slips through the cracks.

This is where AI for agreements shines.

Where AI can add leverage in negotiations

When only a handful of team members are empowered to review and negotiate, they can easily become a bottleneck in agreement workflows. For sales, procurement, and other teams, that can mean trouble—especially at the end of the quarter or during peak periods, when every moment counts. 

AI-enabled contract review can help streamline and accelerate the contract negotiation process. This is a revolution in agreement efficiency for legal teams and business stakeholders: AI can identify language requiring further review and suggest pre-approved fallback language in real time. This can help cut down the time it takes to turn around redlines and reduce risk by making sure that agreements are reviewed according to the same standards, every time.

With the help of AI, legal can empower more of the business to help speed up the review and negotiation of a high volume of agreements in alignment with organizational requirements. It can review agreements against your pre-approved playbooks and provide redline suggestions to align language with your standards.  That means more time for teams to devote to higher risk, more complex agreements where their expertise is especially critical—and fewer bottlenecks for your business.

Negotiate smarter with Docusign

Docusign AI-Assisted Review is designed to help legal and other teams review and negotiate faster, more efficiently, and more confidently.

AI-Assisted Review is available now to Docusign CLM and CLM+ customers globally, and to IAM Enterprise and IAM for Sales customers via Agreement Desk in the United States. Contact our sales team to learn more.