The Future of Agreement Management: Turning Insights into Action
Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen shares his vision of how organizations can develop a competitive advantage by managing agreements in an AI-powered platform that acts as a system of action.
Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen delivered the keynote address at Docusign Momentum on May 20, 2026 in New York City, outlining the company’s vision for the future of agreement management. His keynote is shared below and lightly edited and updated for clarity. You can watch the full keynote address live here. opens in a new tab
Here's something we’ve noticed working with hundreds of thousands of organizations across every industry: most companies are solving agreement problems by function.
Sales teams want faster contracts. Procurement wants better pricing.Legal wants better compliance support. HR wants smoother onboarding. Finance wants to know what's in those agreements before the renewal hits.
So each team goes looking for a solution: a point tool here, a workflow hack there. Maybe a shiny AI product that promises to read contracts faster.
It helps a little — for that team, for that moment.
But here’s the problem: the agreement doesn't live in just one team. It starts in one place and touches many others before it's done. Every handoff, every time that agreement moves from one system to a different team to another tool to the next — that's where time disappears.
That's where information and money are lost. That's where the deal slows down, risk sneaks in, and the value you thought you were capturing walks out the door. The problem isn't just one step in the process. The problem is the handoffs between the steps.
No point solution solves that on its own. Not a standalone AI tool. Not a legal tech add-on. Not a wrapper for an LLM. Because they were built to solve one moment, for one team, and then hand off to the void.
Unifying the agreement lifecycle: the platform advantage
You need a platform.
We’re not the only ones who think so. A recent research from Deloitte shows that:
Deploying some AI-assisted contract workflows produced only a 3% increase in ROI.
Companies using an end-to-end AI platform reported a nearly 30% increase.
That’s a huge difference for your company.
This is why our customers are choosing Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management.
Docusign IAM is an end-to-end agreement management platform that creates proven advantages for the companies that use it.
With IAM and the power of Docusign’s AI engine, Iris, we gave businesses a “system of record” for all their agreements, so they could finally see and understand the insights buried in all of their contracts.
The next evolution is about action. Not just knowing what’s in your agreements, but doing something about it. For example, routing an agreement to the right teams for approval, or identifying a risky clause before it becomes a liability.
Triggering action to help a deal close faster or help a renewal fix what you wish you had negotiated last time. That’s the power of a unified platform and a system of action for your agreements.
Transforming outcomes for every function
Think about what this means for each part of your business.
If you’re in sales, deals stop stalling in legal review because your legal team has full visibility along the way. If you’re in procurement, you no longer leave money on the table just because you didn’t have time to compare your contract terms against the MSA.
If you're in legal, you finally get to spend your time on the work that truly needs your expertise — not manually comparing redlines, tweaking playbooks or researching why an agreement looks the way it does.
The platform handles the process and provides the context, and you manage the decisions.
Docusign Iris outperforms point solutions by unifying everything on one platform. This allows us to fully understand the context of your agreements, including past negotiations, acceptable terms, and risk posture
Our platform knows your business. That’s not general AI — this is AI that’s purpose-built for agreements and for the problems you need to solve for your company.
It’s a platform that can operate across languages, geographies and data centers at enterprise scale.
Approximately 40,000 businesses have adopted the Docusign IAM platform, making it the fastest-growing product in our company history.
Since delivering this keynote, we’ve announced new companies, including Aon, Experian, Flowserve, HSBC and ServiceTitan, that are using IAM for their agreement management needs. You can read more about them in our recent 1Q27 Earnings Prepared Remarks opens in a new tab.
And the results are concrete — using the platform leadsto an 81% improvement in document turnaround time, which means deals close sooner and customers get served faster.
The next era: agreement work as a service
Now let me tell you where all of this is going. Because the platform we’ve built isn’t just about the problems you’re solving today. It’s about where agreements are headed. Here's what I believe:
Contracting will become a service inside the enterprise.
Not a patchwork of departmental handoffs. Not a bottleneck. A service, one that flows to sellers, to procurement, to HR, to your clients — wherever and whenever it's needed. Automated where it can be and human where it should be.
And it’s going even further than that. In the future, agents will negotiate with each other on your behalf.
When your agent is negotiating terms with your supplier's or customer's agent without a single email being sent, someone still has to set the rules. Someone still has to define the terms that those agents are authorized to accept.
We’ve created Iris to do that. Establish the guardrails. Carry the context. We don’t think that’s a tech problem. We think that’s an organizational challenge. And that’s what Docusign is built for. All of it running on the platform that 1.9 million customers already trust with executing and storing their agreements.
You may be thinking about your piece of the agreement process. Maybe it's signing. Maybe it's compliance or risk. Maybe it’s running your vendor relationships better. Maybe it's just trying to close deals faster.
After reading this, I think you're going to see something bigger.
Because the companies that win in the next five years aren't just going to be the ones who signed or created a redline faster. That is table stakes. They're going to be the ones who run their agreements as a service — intelligently, end to end, across every team — as a competitive advantage.
Docusign is the platform that gets you there today. And it's built for wherever tomorrow takes you.
Watch the complete keynote opens in a new tab from Docusign Momentum 2026.
Allan Thygesen has served as Chief Executive Officer of Docusign since October 2022. In his role as CEO, Allan leads employees globally to capture the company's largely untapped $50B market opportunity, as it continues to diversify and delight its more than one million customers and over a billion users.
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