Why 90% of Procurement Teams Struggle to Find Agreements Before a Renewal

Procurement mandates continue to expand. Sourcing divisions frequently find themselves balancing high-level responsibilities like managing AI category strategies and navigating global supply chain risks while trying to maintain baseline operational execution. But when basic activities like verifying active contract terms or finding existing amendments absorb hours of your week, long-term strategic initiatives are pushed to the sidelines.

When I was a supplier relationship manager, I quickly realized my job wasn’t just about managing contracts. It was managing spend, risk, and vendor relationships, often all at once, and often for hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors.

At this year’s Docusign Momentum, my colleague Ramsey Kincannon, a product marketing manager focused on procurement, and I outlined the operational disconnect holding procurement teams back from proactive business orchestration. This breakdown stems from a systemic misalignment between modern procurement goals and legacy document storage—a challenge I experienced firsthand before moving to the technology side of the business here at Docusign.

I'm not coming at this as somebody who's read a white paper about your job. I've actually lived it. I had the spreadsheets. I had the 47-tab renewal tracker and the Friday afternoon panic when someone would ask, "Hey, what did we negotiate with that vendor again?"

But there is a way to make your job easier. Stay tuned.

The Value Leakage Hidden in the Statistics

In procurement, we often have limited visibility into our historical contract portfolio, leading to significant data gaps. This everyday operational friction introduces three major liabilities:

• Unexpected auto-renewals: According to Docusign research, a striking 90% of procurement teams report that they struggle to locate and thoroughly evaluate vendor agreements within 30 days of a renewal deadline.

• Visibility gap: Even when an agreement is found, 62% of procurement leaders say they miss critical opportunities due to a lack of visibility into specific contract terms. Value slips away through unmapped volume rebates, unclaimed service-level agreement (SLA) credits, and unnoticed price uplift clauses.

• AI adoption lag: While adjacent business functions have digitized their manual workflows, procurement has yet to do so. According to a recent Deloitte and Docusign study, only 8% of procurement respondents report using agentic AI solutions, compared to 22% in HR, 17% in sales, and 13% in legal. 

This imbalance means sourcing professionals spend critical hours on manual administrative tasks rather than on the major strategic challenges they face.

I vividly recall this vulnerability from my own procurement career. I remember a major vendor renewal when I struggled to track down the final, signed contract within the 30-day deadline. Because documents were scattered across multiple repositories, shared drives, and the inbox of a former employee, I wasted nearly a week simply trying to reconstruct the agreement—time that should have been spent on strategic activities like benchmarking and negotiation.

Evaluating the Procurement Maturity Spectrum

To scale effectively without expanding headcount, organizations must migrate away from basic transactional processing to comprehensive data orchestration. In my current role building these products, I see most procurement professionals operating as one of these three distinct roles:

While most teams likely identify with the first two columns, the goal is to move closer to the right to meet the moment. However, as Ramsey shared during our session, this change won’t occur overnight.

“Our goal is not to flip a switch and become a fully automated AI-driven procurement function. It's to move in a way that's realistic for you and your teams,” he said. “That’s where the Docusign IAM platform comes in.”

Unlocking Hidden Value with Docusign IAM

When I transitioned from procurement to the product team at Docusign, my core objective was to build the exact software solutions I genuinely wished I had back when I was buried in spreadsheets. Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) functions as a single command center for vendor data, allowing organizations to map the complete agreement lifecycle through three major features:

1. Centralized discovery

Instead of running separate searches across isolated hard drives and local repositories, procurement professionals can use Docusign Agreement Manager to isolate master services agreements (MSAs) and associated statements of work (SOWs) in seconds using standardized attribute filtering.

2. Live AI analysis

Cross-referencing amendments to see which historical clauses have been modified or superseded is standard practice, but it’s often slow-going. Powered by Docusign Iris, our AI engine built for agreements, the platform reads across the entire contract family simultaneously. Teams can ask direct questions, such as "What is our exact termination notice window across all active amendments?" and receive an immediate, contextual summary.

3. Automated renewal briefings

Rather than spending hours preparing for vendor meetings, AI contract agents compile complete renewal briefings on demand. These briefings pull historical obligation fulfillment, commercial parameters, and performance milestones into a consolidated overview.

The structural impact of this platform model is clear. The Deloitte and Docusign study shows that companies implementing centralized, AI-powered agreement management achieve a 33% reduction in overall vendor spend, directly driven by clear contract visibility and data-informed negotiations.

A Phased Framework for AI Adoption

Transitioning away from manual spreadsheets, luckily, doesn’t require a disruptive tech overhaul. I always advise sourcing teams to scale their digital capabilities using a structured, step-by-step approach:

• Visibility: Centralize all primary vendor MSAs, SOWs, and expiration timelines into a single repository to eliminate search friction.

• Insights: Automate the extraction of essential contract terms, price caps, and milestone obligations across your top tier-one suppliers.

• Automation: Connect agreement intelligence to internal workflows to trigger automated renewal tasks 90 days before an expiration date.

Ultimately, offloading repetitive retrieval and decoding tasks to AI platforms allows procurement specialists to apply their expertise where it delivers the highest return.

Leaning into AI with IAM isn't about replacing your judgment, because your judgment is the whole point. It's about choosing where your time and your judgment actually get spent. Instead of burning hours hunting for documents and decoding terms, you walk into every vendor conversation with a clear, AI-assisted view of risk, value, and obligations.

Explore how automated systems help your sourcing department identify hidden value. Read our full guide on How Contract AI is Transforming Procurement Workflows, and find more Momentum 2026 content here. (If you registered for Momentum, you can log in with your existing credentials. If not, you will need to create an account to view this content.)