“A lot of companies had overbought licenses,” Thygesen told Barron’s editor at large Andy Serwer in an interview for the At Barron’s video series. As the pandemic cooled, some businesses’ needs for virtual contract signing went away, he explained, adding, “Of course, that is very disruptive inside the company.”
Thygesen, who joined Docusign after more than 10 years at Google, worked to turn things around. In the summer of 2023, a solution was conceived: implementing artificial intelligence assistance into the digital agreements workflow. Docusign started integrating its intelligent agreement management in early 2024 and rolled out an AI contract agent in April.
Thygesen said Docusign now has about $3 billion in revenue from the 1.7 million businesses, nonprofits, and government organizations that pay monthly for its services. Ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 companies use Docusign, according to Thygesen.
“Docusign is probably the best-known company in signatures,” Thygesen said. “Most people regard Docusign as the gold standard for signing documents.”
In conversation with Serwer, Thygesen detailed the company’s AI agent and how it is changing the business. Below are some highlights from their interview, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Barron’s: Some people might think of your company as a one-product company, but I bet you don’t think of it that way.
Allan Thygesen: We don’t. But it’s not unfair to say that we are so identified with our product category.
As a result, we have built a tremendous amount of trust that over the years we’ve extended to other moments in the journey. An agreement goes through a journey. You draft it, you negotiate it, you execute it, and then you manage it once it is executed. And we have, over time, added pieces of all those workflows. If you want to sell mass-customized agreements, we can do that. If you want to verify the identity of people who you are sending documents to, we can do that. But we never really put the whole thing together and we never put it on modern plumbing. So that is what I’ve been working on.
We announced our new platform called intelligent agreement management last year. And now we’re releasing the full suite with modern AI built in.
How do you go through the Docusign agreements journey?
We help you create templates of various forms of agreements. You can then customize it, maybe pulling in data from your other systems. That creates a tailored agreement that then goes to the other party. You can go back and forth, and when you see their edits, you can have the AI review whether you approve or disagree with their comments.
Then you sign electronically, of course, with Docusign. And then the agreement goes to our intelligent repository, where now we can give you AI-assisted intelligence about everything in those agreements.
When is my agreement up for renewal? What would I want to renegotiate next time around? What are things I want to keep an eye on? All those things we can extract out of the agreements and present them to you.
How is the AI rollout going?
It is the fastest-growing product in our company’s history. I announced at a customer event that we have over 10,000 customers live with the product already, which is just an exceptional ramp for a new software product. And we keep building new functionality.
This spring, we’re announcing a whole suite of new functionality, including a contract agent—using AI to automate the end-to-end agreement workflow.
Let’s imagine your job is to review contracts with all your vendors. We can automate every step in that process: checking the vendor, whether something has changed with them. Checking the contract, whether it complies with your templates now. Automating the communication with the vendor. Every one of those steps, which normally would have been a separate workflow and step for a contract person or procurement person, can now be fully automated.
How are humans integrated into that process?
That will be a risk-adjusted thing. Maybe if you’re negotiating an nondisclosure agreement, you’d let the [AI] system just run it because there is a standard set of rules. But if it is a complicated, high-value agreement, there would be both a review on the front end and maybe multiple reviews during the negotiation process.
So it is really tailored; the system is flexible enough to let you use as much or as little automation as you want.
There is a lot of talk about Washington policies impacting different businesses in different ways. What does that mean for Docusign?
We have a very diversified customer base across all industries, so we aren’t as exposed to individual industries that might suffer more in the case of short-term swings in trade. And to the extent the trade shifts between countries, that also doesn’t have a huge impact on us. Obviously, if global trade really compresses, that wouldn’t be great for the big companies that work with us that import or export a lot. We haven’t seen any evidence of that yet, but that could happen.
The uncertainty could impact the investment climate, and we are an investment for companies. So we will just have to see. But we are hopeful—I think all Americans should be, that the U.S. economy can continue to perform strongly.
Final question. Why should someone buy or hold Docusign stock now?
We have the benefit of being trusted, well positioned, having established distribution, and we have a vision that I think addresses a very large pain point. We worked with Deloitte, and they estimated that over two trillion dollars are lost globally every year to inefficient agreement practices and systems.
That is a meaty problem to attack, and I think we are in the best position to do it. And I think we are delivering. There is some good early evidence that customers are adopting. So I think it is a good story.
