Well, thank you for joining me here at DocuSign Momentum in London. For everybody listening, can you tell them a little about who you are and what you do?
Yes. So, my name is Allan Thygesen. I'm the CEO of DocuSign. Grew up in Denmark. Came to the US when I was 24 and settled there. Been in tech my whole career. Joined DocuSign as CEO three and a half years ago. And been trying to bring the company forward into the AI age. And I think as today's event illustrated, I think we're making great progress.
You really are. And one of the things I wanted to bring up is DocuSign became synonymous with electronic signatures. And that's what people immediately think when they hear DocuSign. But why is that no longer enough? And what convinced you that the company needed to maybe reinvent itself around intelligent agreement management? It feels like there's so much more scope and opportunity now.
Well, so on the signature piece, there's still a lot of headroom. There are still plenty of PDFs, let alone paper out there to automate. With that said, I felt and I think the team agreed we had a broader opportunity to reimagine the entire agreement journey. If you think about it, DocuSign zeroed in on that moment of executing an agreement and that was a fantastic idea and obviously it took off and we're very fortunate to have thought of it and developed it. But there's so many other steps in the agreement process that have not been reimagined, that have not taken advantage of modern technology, let alone of AI. And that's our mission is to bring the same delight that we brought to the signature moment to the entire agreement process.
And you often describe contracts as business assets rather than just documents. I absolutely love that. But what does that shifting actually mean for a CEO or a CIO that's trying to run a modern enterprise? What's that mean?
Right. When you say agreement management or contract management, a lot of people think about saving time in processing agreements and that is very, very important. We can save time not just for the lawyers but for everyone who touches agreements, sales people, procurement people, HR people. But the even bigger opportunity is to unlock the value in the agreements. Companies negotiate for all kinds of things that they then forget about. They're not getting what they negotiated for, let alone of course negotiating smarter the next time around. That is the ultimate value and that's what I mean by unlocking the value in the agreements.
And every company has decades of contracts sitting in repositories that were written long before AI existed or at least mainstream AI as we know it now. But how valuable is that historical data becoming and how are organizations maybe beginning to see it as an almost untapped source of business intelligence rather than just a pile of legal paperwork?
Yes. Well, I think you're right. In many companies, vendor and customer relationships go back decades. And some of the prevailing terms that govern the relationship today are embedded in agreements that are 10 or 20 years old. And so we often find that in order to get a full picture of your agreement library, in order to position you to have the best possible value from the relationship, we need to go back and make sure we have a complete collection. And there's of course enormous business intelligence value in what's in those agreements and even more what's the context of why they look the way they do. You know, why did we agree to those payment terms with this vendor when everybody else is supposed to pay in 30 days or etc. And so that's the underlying value is understanding the history and the context to then put you in the best position to get the most out of the relationship.
And when you need to renegotiate, you can do that on an informed basis. And if we both scroll down our LinkedIn feed, everyone claims to have an AI strategy today, but what have you learned about separating meaningful transformation from maybe simply adding AI features to existing software because there's a huge difference and gap there, isn't there?
Yeah, there is. You know, it's interesting. So we probably all remember when GPT-3.5 came out, that was a seminal moment and the discontinuities, there's such an incredible change in the capability of the model. And when that was released, a lot of people said, well, we can write things, we can have the AI write things for us, whether it's term papers or contracts, right? And people, I think, overly focused on that. And you can in fact do a very passable job of writing presentations and spreadsheets and documents with AI, but we focused elsewhere. We said, well, we're going to start with the finished contracts. AI could do an unbelievable job of taking these what used to be unstructured files, in pictures in many cases, extract the information out of them and figure out what did we agree to, why did we agree to it, and how can we make sure we get what we negotiate for. That was the insight where we started from the back, and now we're bringing AI to the negotiation process, to reviewing proposals that you're getting from your vendors or partners, and all of that same idea applies. How can we make it smarter, faster, better?
And more than 40,000 organizations have currently adopted AM. I mean, what are customers discovering once they began treating agreement data as more of a strategic business asset? What's the ROI and the big value add there?
Yeah. So we're sharing a number of customer stories here at the event today and many of them are speaking for themselves. So maybe just to cite a few examples. One customer that presented today is Experian, a large global financial data provider, operates I think in 32 countries, and they wanted to reimagine their entire sales process. You know, basically there's contracting of course for many different products across thousands of customers, and so they built that around DocuSign and they have now collapsed their time to agreement from I think 10 days on average to hours. And we see that across companies that sell to businesses like Experian and companies that sell to consumers, that make those processes more efficient. And you can do that not just for your sales processes but for HR. Payworks is an example of a global HR software provider and they have used our software to, you know, again dramatically collapse the time it takes to get to an agreement and get more insight so you're entering into better agreements.
I love it. Absolutely love it. And you're also working with big partners as well. Anthropic is a big name to throw in there as well as Harvey, Lora, Thompson Reuters rather than trying to build everything yourself. So why do you think AI ecosystems might maybe possibly outperform some platforms?
You know, we've always had the view that we want to enable you to use DocuSign in whatever tools you want to live in. We offer of course you can do a lot of things in the DocuSign product itself, but you know, for over two decades now we've been deeply integrated in Salesforce. We're integrated in other CRM systems so the sales people don't have to leave the environment they prefer. We do the same in HR with Workday and SuccessFactors. We do the same in procurement with SAP and Ariba. And now since there's so much innovation in the legal area, historically that's been a very siloed, chopped up space, and now you have some partners who are really taking a more holistic view, and we can provide quite a bit of legal functionality, but if you want to go deeper we can hand off to you say Alora or Harvey or Thompson Reuters. And then of course there's new interfaces. So there's the traditional software vendors, but now the Anthropics and OpenAI and Google of the world are providing chat interfaces. And we again we want to make sure if you want to look up agreements and get those extractions or if you want to trigger the execution of a document with someone else that you can do that from those agentic platforms. And so that's why we've always maintained a very open stance to integrating with other platforms and giving our customers that choice. And this is just a natural extension of that strategy.
