The Top Ways to Use AI for Contract Management and Workflow Automation

There’s a lot of noise around contract AI and how it’s transforming how organizations create, sign, analyze, and manage their agreements.

But beneath the hype, there's a real problem worth solving. Contracts hold far more organizational intelligence than most companies realize, with critical clauses, renewal dates, obligations, and risk signals that rarely surface until something goes wrong.

Docusign Iris, an AI engine for agreements built to understand the complexities of contract language based on processing hundreds of millions of real-world contracts. Our AI assistant and agents help teams accelerate contract review, automate follow-up tasks, and manage agreements more efficiently across sales, HR, procurement, and legal workflows. 

• Your personal agreement specialist: Stop searching and start asking. Use an AI assistant, grounded in your contract history, to summarize terms, flag risks, and manage intake.

• Always-on automation: Free your experts from repetitive tasks. Deploy ready-to-use agents for instant redlining and approval routing, or build custom agents by simply describing your process in your natural language.

How can Docusign Iris help simplify contract creation?

• Effortless digitization: Turn "static" PDFs into living, interactive experiences for your customers. With AI-Assisted Web Forms, Iris transforms complex layouts into smart digital forms in seconds, not hours.

• Automate intake and workflows: An AI assistant can automate intake processes by analyzing incoming contract requests, like emails. The agent can then recommend the correct intake form and automatically enter key data from the email. 

• Acceleratecontract creation: When you upload a document, Iris can instantly detect the agreement type and automatically place required data and signature fields. This eliminates manual drag-and-drop, reduces errors, and accelerates document generation for legal, sales, procurement, and HR teams. 

• Summarize agreement activity: Help stakeholders across your organization gain visibility into the full history of an agreement. Iris automatically summarizes key activity — who interacted with the document, what changes occurred, and what actions remain —  helping teams quickly understand status and move agreements forward.

How can Docusign Iris help teams accelerate contract review, redlining, and negotiation?

• Accelerate agreement review with AI-Assisted Review to flag potentially risky language, suggest edits and draft new language from an AI Assistant. 

• Create standard review playbooks from templates. Articulate term- and clause-level requirements for specific agreement types (e.g., NDAs, MSAs) based on your templates to leapfrog manual setup and start reviewing with AI.

• Streamlinecontract review and redliningto improve risk management.AI-Assisted Review analyzes agreements against your organization’s legal playbooks, flagging deviations and suggesting edits to align terms with their requirements. This helps business teams resolve routine matters faster while enabling legal teams to focus on higher-risk or more complex negotiations. 

How can Docusign Iris help simplify the signing experience and verify signers’ identity?

• AI-generated sender message: Use AI to generate a first draft of the message you send with an uploaded agreement, helping save time while adding a personalized touch. 

• Verify identity: Identity verification can compare the signer’s name on the envelope with the name extracted from the signer’s ID, helping confirm signer identity and providing an additional layer of security to help reduce fraud risk.

• Summarize an agreement for signers: Help busy signers quickly understand lengthy agreements without reading every page. Iris summarizes key terms and provisions, making it easier to review complex contracts and helping keep agreements moving toward signature. 

• Get real-time answers to questions about agreements: Allow signers to get agreement-specific questions answered in real time with AI, so they can sign with confidence.

How can Docusign Iris help me search and analyze completed agreements?

• Find information faster with AI-powered natural language search: Ask simple, straightforward questions like which contracts will automatically renew in a certain time period, or how many contracts do we have with this vendor, in everyday language across your entire library of completed agreements. 

• Identify key terms inside agreements: Identify and capture critical agreement data at scale—turning unstructured documents into actionable insights. Access pre-built and customizable AI-driven reports and dashboards to support faster, more confident decision-making.

How can Docusign Iris turn agreement data into actionable insights to mitigate risk and uncover new opportunities?  

• Manage renewals: Avoid unwanted auto-renewals and uncover cost-saving opportunities with streamlined renewal tracking, automated notifications, and AI-generated insights.

• Manage obligations: AI highlights and tracks key obligations in your agreements, supporting compliance and helping organizations capture more value from their agreements. 

• Identify customers at risk of churning: By combining contract data with customer segmentation, Iris helps organizations spot early indicators of churn risk and engage proactively to improve retention.

• Analyze legacy agreements in bulk: Iris can analyze large volumes of legacy contracts to extract critical metadata, such as termination dates and renewal terms, revealing hidden risks and compliance gaps.

How can Docusign Iris help improve workflow orchestration?

• Build agents around your workflows: With Docusign Agent Studio, teams can create and deploy custom agents tailored to how they manage deals, renewals, approvals, and more.

• AI where teams already work: Through its open platform and Model Context Protocol (MCP), Docusign connects with leading frontier models like Anthropic Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI ChatGPT– so teams can create, review, and manage agreements using natural language within the tools they already use.

• Deep integrations across business systems: Docusign integrates with core applications like Coupa, Hubspot, Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce, SAP, and Slack – so agreement workflows happen seamlessly across systems teams use every day, from triggering actions to surfacing completed agreements and the insights they contain.

What are the benefits of using contract AI?

Implementing Docusign Iris across your agreement process can help accelerate sales. Kindsight shortened its sales cycle by one week. Docusign and Deloitte research also found that organizations using agentic workflows within end-to-end agreement platforms report nearly 30% higher ROI than those that do not.

Contract AI can also help you stay ahead of potential issues by identifying areas of risk. Docusign Iris learns from millions of agreements to surface patterns associated with contractual risk and support compliance efforts. Cimplifi, a legal services provider, saved thousands of dollars and hours of work analyzing contracts by using Iris to analyze their contract portfolio. Flowserve, a flow control solutions manufacturer, is scaling agreement volumes without increasing headcount by using Iris to help reviewers compare third-party language against their own internal playbooks, flag deviations, suggest markups, and get answers on the spot.

Most importantly, by improving visibility and analysis across your agreements, contract AI can help you unlock value and avoid missed opportunities. Docusign Iris analyzes your entire portfolio of agreements to highlight renewal insights and potential savings opportunities.

Learn more about Docusign Iris.