An American business called DocuSign offers services for digital document management. Businesses in need of assistance with handling electronic business agreements make up the company’s target market.
Revenues for the fiscal year that ended on January 31, 2021, according to the company’s annual report, were $2.1 billion, a 40% year-over-year gain. About 7,500 people work for the company, which is listed on the NASDAQ under the handle DOCU. Its market capitalization is reportedly only $17 billion.
Using two distinct use cases, this essay will look at how DocuSign incorporates artificial intelligence into its business strategy.
Text analysis and extraction: DocuSign employs AI to find particular terms, clauses, and other information in business agreements.
AI is used to automatically anchor tag fields in digital documents, saving users time while setting up contracts. This process is known as automatic tag placement.
We’ll start by looking at how DocuSign locates important terms and clauses using pre-built AI, and then filter those results to do further in-depth searches.
Case Study No. 1: Text Analysis And Extraction
DocuSign states in its annual report that one of the biggest problems facing companies nowadays is handling a plethora of different agreement documents, including contracts, consulting/partnership agreements, and supplier documentation. Scanning is a traditional technique of document storage that can be expensive and time-consuming.
The complex wording found in agreement documents only serves to further confuse matters. According to DocuSign, businesses are vulnerable to needless risk, delays, and lost business prospects because of the intricate wording and structure of commercial agreements.
DocuSign provides an AI-powered program called DocuSign Insight to assist companies in overcoming these challenges.
DocuSign claims that clients can use pre-built AI models in Insight to extract frequently occurring important phrases and conditions. The business advises users to use DocuSign applications, other corporate systems, or file repositories to first develop a searchable index of their agreements to achieve this.
After that, users can apply envelope metadata to filter agreements and do an advanced keyword search across the entire text of an agreement. Additional features include idea search and comparison of AI-extracted phrases and clauses. The company states that picture agreements may be searched thanks to its integrated OCR.
The following is a brief, two-minute video that explains how DocuSign operates:
Here’s a longer, almost nine-minute demonstration of the Insight software:
Overview Of DocuSign Insight – Product Illustration
As for the commercial results, the company says it cut the time spent on legal evaluations by 75% at a large worldwide information services corporation. Another example provided by DocuSign showed how they were able to automate the examination of more than 2.6 million data points from supplier agreements, saving an international telecom firm over 80% of the time they spent evaluating customer agreements.
The fact that the business can only find a few instances and none of them are prepared to be named speaks volumes. Truly successful initiatives typically have little trouble locating a dozen businesses eager to endorse a brand that genuinely helped them, even if it’s only a banner on the home page of the business. It’s also important to note that DocuSign has an impressive client roster, including T-Mobile, Unilever, Boston Scientific, AAA, and Salesforce.
Case Study #2: Placement Of Automatic Tags
To make the process of manually dragging and dropping tags unnecessary, DocuSign added an “auto-tag” function to its eSignature package. Before the release of this functionality, eSignature needed manual tags to direct users to the appropriate places for data entry and signature addition.
According to the company, manual tagging is a laborious and resource-intensive task that may be eliminated with the help of auto-tag capabilities. Additionally, the business informs clients contacting customer service online that by decreasing manual errors, its auto-tag system increases tag insertion accuracy.
In other comments, DocuSign staff members informed clients that the auto-tag algorithm uses computer vision to identify places tagged in their locations and natural language processing to detect “general text” fields (such as “date signed,” “initial here,” “sign here,” etc.).
According to DocuSign, there isn’t much user involvement with the feature. The user does the following actions, per the company:
The necessary information is entered by the user (e.g., name, email, recipients, etc.)
Documents are uploaded by the user to the DataSign platform.
The user is given the choice to accept or reject the auto-tagging feature after the upload.
The PDF documents are converted to PNGs and sent through the auto-tagging method if the user agrees.
The marked document appears to the user.
This one-minute, thirteen-second video shows how the eSignature product’s auto-tagging feature operates.
Since auto-tag is a function of DocuSign’s eSignature product, there isn’t any information that specifically addresses the feature’s business value. Nonetheless, we discovered certain assertions concerning the effectiveness of eSignature, wherever the auto-tag function serves as a fundamental element.
According to DocuSign and its client, M&T Bank, the bank may save $17 on each document when a consumer opens a new account thanks to eSignature technology. Furthermore, according to both, the software only took five minutes to notarize documents.