Businesses are navigating unrelenting macro-pressures – shifting regulations, tariffs, rapid technological change, cyber-risks and even the rise of deep fakes.
Complexity is accelerating, with new regulations and frequent supply chain shocks. Operating conditions are becoming more demanding, placing increasing pressure on legal, procurement, sales and compliance teams to manage changing risks. But one of the most powerful levers organisations can pull is how they manage contracts and digital identities.
Agreements underpin every decision – hiring staff, engaging suppliers, serving customers. Yet Deloitte and Docusign estimate that poor contract management destroys nearly £1.5tn in global economic value each year. And, according to their research, 77% of leaders in high-performing organisations credit agreement management as critical to their success.
As agreement volumes grow and workflows become more disconnected, organisations are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools. These bring clarity, speed, and resilience to the way they manage contracts and identities.
At the same time, the UK is advancing its government-backed digital identity ecosystem, including a GOV.UK One Login and the emerging GOV.UK Wallet. This creates opportunities and challenges. Verified digital identities can help organisations reduce fraud, speed onboarding and cut costs. But businesses risk being left behind if they don’t seamlessly integrate with new identity frameworks, or if they mishandle customer data.
Turn fraud risk into workflow resilience
Docusign and Entrust research found that 69% of organisations say identity fraud attempts are increasing, costing businesses an average of £5.4m annually for larger enterprises.
Organisations should treat contract and identity management as a strategic capability. Often agreements are built from scratch, passed through multiple handoffs before reaching a counterparty, and then left waiting for review. At the same time, AI is maturing just as the complexities of modern IT and global events intensify. There is a path to simplification and control: Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM).
That path brings agreement intake, drafting, review and approval into a single, structured end-to-end workflow. That workflow includes built-in policy guardrails, auditability, and verified identity checks at critical moments.
When contracts and digital identity operate together on a governed platform, businesses can move faster because trust is embedded by design. The real value emerges when agentic capabilities are woven into the very fabric of a governed architecture, rather than functioning as isolated tools within a traditional workflow.
Firms that adopt intelligent agreement platforms and digital verification solutions are better positioned to reduce costs, strengthen compliance, and deliver secure, user-friendly experiences. High-performing organisations are responding by industrialising agreement management. Intelligent agreement management and identity verification are no longer just operational tools.
In a world where fraud is rising and customer expectations continue to grow, placing trust at the heart of every transaction is becoming essential for growth.
From ‘agentic’ to ‘workflow’ contract AI
Leaders are recognising that agentic AI delivers the most value when it’s built on strong data foundations. The biggest gains will come from solid platforms and workflows that empower these agents safely and consistently. AI can help customers build workflows that previously required developers or systems integrators, accelerating how teams design and deploy processes.
It can also support decision-making inside workflows – determining routing, suggesting next steps, and assisting with exception handling – all within governed, auditable boundaries rather than relying solely on pre-coded scenarios.
AI is increasingly trained on company-approved language and internal playbooks, enabling it to suggest compliant clauses, flag policy deviations, and recommend negotiation red lines. This augments legal teams by reducing the need for line-by-line reviews while still maintaining high levels of precision and oversight.
As capabilities mature, agents will evolve from assistance to active ownership of specific areas, including even higher-risk ones like contract workflows. AI can:
- automatically draft terms,
- chase approvals,
- support the negotiation of standard clauses across departments.
Finance, procurement, sales and legal may increasingly receive pre-negotiated agreements rather than first drafts.
But while AI will move deals forward autonomously within defined boundaries, it can only do so on platforms with governance and trust built in. Businesses that define their platforms with clear guardrails – including audit trails, identity checks and policy-backed playbooks – will unlock faster cycles and fewer bottlenecks. Ultimately, people still trust people, and human accountability remains essential.
Weatherproofing the enterprise: The structural power of intelligent agreements
Cross-border business agreements are becoming increasingly complex as organisations navigate regulatory expansion, market volatility, tariffs, and geopolitical uncertainty. Agreements now sit at the centre of risk management, revenue growth, compliance, and customer trust.
In this environment, intelligence applied at the point of agreement is no longer optional. Businesses need visibility across every clause, every workflow, and every identity interaction. They need systems that reduce handoffs, surface risk early, and allow AI to accelerate progress without compromising governance.
That is the real promise of intelligent agreement management – faster, better business decisions. When agreements become structured data rather than static documents, leaders gain insight. When identity is verified and workflows are governed, trust and cooperation can scale, and when AI operates within clear guardrails, complexity becomes more manageable.
Begin that journey by asking:
- Where are agreements still delayed by manual handoffs?
- Where does identity verification sit outside core workflows?
- Which teams lack visibility into contract risk or approval bottlenecks?
We are at a critical juncture in how organisations define value, manage their agreements, secure their interactions and build trust. Resilient businesses are laying strong foundations to weather current and future global uncertainty.
Agree. Commit. Manage. Since inception in 2003, Docusign has been on a mission to accelerate business and simplify life for companies and people around the world. We pioneered the development of e-signature technology, and today Docusign helps organisations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements. Docusign offers the world’s #1 way to sign electronically on practically any device, from almost anywhere, at any time. Our value is simple to understand: Legacy, paper-based agreement processes are manual, slow, expensive, and error-prone. We eliminate the paper, automate the process, and connect it to all the other systems that businesses are already using, powered by specialised, enterprise-grade AI.
Our platform has 350+ prebuilt integrations with popular business apps. In addition, our API enables embedding and connecting Docusign with customers’ websites, mobile apps, and custom workflows. Today, more than 1,000,000 customers and hundreds of millions of users in over 180 countries use Docusign to accelerate the process of doing business and to simplify people’s lives under the mission of helping people come together and agree.
