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The Cost of Mismanaged Agreements; Why Contracting Must Reinvent Itself · The Leading Edge

• 0:03
  Speaker 3: Well, hello, and welcome to the Leading Edge, a series offering in-depth insights into the key challenges, innovations, and evolving dynamics of the contract and commerce landscape.
• 0:15
  Speaker 3: I'm your host, Nikki McKay, Chief Development Officer of the Commerce and Contract Management Institute.
• 0:21
  Speaker 3: Now, in today's episode, the cost of mismanaged agreements, why contracting must reinvent, we are tackling one of the most persistent, most expensive, and most underacknowledged problems in global business.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: The sheer scale of value destroyed by poorly designed, poorly executed, and poorly managed commercial agreements.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: So DocuSign's latest research in collaboration with Deloitte draws on insight from over 1,100 senior leaders globally.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: And it estimates that poor or inefficient agreement management has previously been linked to close to 2 trillion US dollars in lost global economic value every year.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: 2 trillion.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: That number is extraordinary.
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: And yet, for so many organizations, it barely registers as a strategic priority.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: Now, the benchmark research that comes out of the Commerce and Contract Management Institute tells us a very consistent story.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: So to explore these questions, I am joined today live in London at DocuSign's flagship event Momentum by two people who sit at the very heart of this conversation.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: Tim Cummins is president of WorldCC and executive director of the Commerce and Contract Management Institute.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: And he brings an unprecedented body of global research insight into commerce and contracting.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: And together with Stefan Barber, he is group vice president and general manager of Amir at DocuSign.
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: He brings the perspective of an organization that really has been at the forefront of helping enterprises rethink how their agreements actually work in practice.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: So, Tim, Stefan, welcome to the Leading Edge.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: We're very happy to be here.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Absolutely established.
• 2:47
  Speaker: Thank you very much, Mickey, for this brilliant introduction.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: Wonderful.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: So let's dive in and I'm going to come straight to you, Stefan.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: Let's not waste any time.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: What strikes me really about the findings from your latest Deloitte report is how closely they mirror what we've been seeing in our benchmarking for the past decade.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: The two trillion cost figure, that fragmentation problem, the post-signature blindness, these have been central to our research agenda at WorldCC for years.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: So tell us, Stefan, what has made DocuSign decide the time was right to commission this kind of study?
• 3:27
  Speaker: All right.
• 3:27
  Speaker: Thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you this morning.
• 3:30
  Speaker: And uh yeah, so as you know, DocuSign has been dealing with this issue in this business for 20 years.
• 3:36
  Speaker: And we we always knew, we always understood that agreements were creating friction inside the organization.
• 3:43
  Speaker: And with this survey, and you mentioned this number, this two trillion lost in value.
• 4:00
  Speaker: Now we have uh we have the tools to actually measure that.
• 4:04
  Speaker: And now with AI, we can measure really for the first time what happens when agreements become intelligent workflow rather than static documents.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: Um I'm gonna dive straight into another question coming to you, Tim, and then I'll follow closely with you, Stefan, because this is not just a technology question, is it?
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: Your identification of high ROI cohort maps really closely, again, to what we see, Tim, in the contract management standard maturity benchmarking.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: The organizations that get sustained value are the ones that have treated this as a governance and capability question, not just a technology question.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: So, Tim, first of all, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're seeing in the contract management standard maturity benchmarking.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: What is that data telling us?
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Yes, the challenge, as you rightly say, is that very often people have just tried to implement technology without actually defining the process.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: And what we see with agreement management across businesses is it isn't defined.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: It is fragmented across different functional silos that very often pull in different directions.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Um I suppose the key point to make here is that contracting as a lifecycle is a platform activity, not yet another sort of ERP type silo.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: You have to have technology that sits across those different systems.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: And of course, for that technology to work, you have to have a definition of process that everybody buys into.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: If they all continue just safeguarding and acting to their individual functional measurements and uh and risk perspectives, then you if you simply finish up with internal contention.
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: Uh Stefan, what's your read on why so many organizations still treat this as a technology, this technology as a procurement exercise rather than a strategic one?
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: What's your read?
• 6:22
  Speaker: So looking at our experience and uh I think it's because contracts in general and agreements have historically been viewed as a responsibility of one department.
• 6:32
  Speaker: So procurement, as you said, will uh manage, will negotiate the agreements, legal overall will owe them, sales will sign the agreement, will cross the agreement, but no one really owned the entire agreement life cycle.
• 6:46
  Speaker: And this is changing.
• 6:48
  Speaker: What's becoming clear now is that the agreement connects every single critical business process inside an enterprise.
• 6:55
  Speaker: Every sales, every supplier relationship, every hiring decision, every compliance obligation.
• 7:01
  Speaker: And when you start at looking from that lens, from that angle, agreements stop being legal documents.
• 7:07
  Speaker: They become the business infrastructure of the company.
• 7:10
  Speaker: And we like to call it like this like agreements are becoming the business infrastructure, the business layer.
• 7:16
  Speaker: So the organizations that are seeing the greater returns are not simply deploying new software, new applications.
• 7:23
  Speaker: They redesign how the work happens inside the organization, and technology is not just enabling this transformation to happen.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: I'd like to build on that now because I want to talk about where commercial intelligence actually sits.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Your Deloitte colleague uh talks about moving the intelligence and insights phase to the front of the process.
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: And the CCM Institute, we've been building frameworks around exactly this, what we call the commercial intelligence function, right, Tim?
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: So talk to us, talk to us about the commercial intelligence function.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the the critical point here is that when people need information, they can't get it.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: And we've seen, I think, this growth of tremendous frustration at board level, at CEO level, that says, okay, what are these tariffs going to do to us?
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Or what's the supply chain disruption going to mean in terms of our ability to serve our customers?
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: To which the answer is, I don't know, we'll try and find out.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: And if you're lucky, a few weeks later, somebody might come back with an estimated answer.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: You know, the pace of change, the uncertainty, the volatility we're facing is unparalleled and shows no signs of diminishing.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: And I think this goes back to why perhaps the world is awakening and is saying, okay, we've maybe put off this problem for a bit too long.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: We need to do something.
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: Stefan, what does that actually look like operationally for your customers that are doing it well?
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: What are who's doing it well?
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: Who's got it right today?
• 9:06
  Speaker: So I think the best way at looking at that is probably looking at the recent evolution of the use of AI inside the company.
• 9:13
  Speaker: So the the first generation of AI was really all about uh helping people finding the information, like an evolved search engine.
• 9:21
  Speaker: Uh, and that was already like providing a lot of uh value to customers.
• 9:25
  Speaker: The second generation was about summarizing this information and making it more available for the people to make decisions in the business, which was another good uh evolution of the use of AI.
• 9:36
  Speaker: Uh but the next generation, and if you were listening to the keynote this morning, is really acting, uh executing against this information.
• 9:45
  Speaker: So imagine like uh a sales agreement arrives uh in a company.
• 9:50
  Speaker: So instead of someone manually uh reading 20, 40, 60 pages, identifying you know the unusual clauses where there is gaps, routing approvals manually, and then updating you know the systems internally, like the sales force of the world with all of this information.
• 10:07
  Speaker: AI now understands the agreement and that makes a difference.
• 10:12
  Speaker: It identifies the commercial task, the commercial risk, it routes the approval automatically and not manually anymore.
• 10:19
  Speaker: It updates, downstream, all of the other uh information systems.
• 10:24
  Speaker: So it reminds teams about future obligation.
• 10:27
  Speaker: In other words, the agreements becomes the trigger for business execution.
• 10:33
  Speaker: And this is the major evolution that we see.
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, phenomenal.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: And of course, the excitement, I think, of the ability to start looking at the interconnections between agreements, looking at portfolios of agreements because they don't really, of course, stand in complete isolation, do they?
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, we only buy things because we sell things.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: There's a direct interconnect which today you just can't really unravel.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: Wonderful.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: I think we're gonna we're gonna change direction slightly to a more interesting, under explored dynamic because there's lots of insight and data available to show what happens inside an organization using AI-powered agreement management.
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: But those agreements have someone on the other side of them, right?
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: Often also deploying AI.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: So, what do you think happens to value creation and deal quality when both parties are using these tools?
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: Because our research should suggest that there's some some of the most interesting, unexplored dynamics are happening there.
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: What are your thoughts, Stefan?
• 11:43
  Speaker: Yeah, that that's probably the most fascinating question.
• 11:46
  Speaker: And you're projecting yourself in a world where agents are going to be talking to agents, agents are going to negotiate with other agents.
• 11:55
  Speaker: And uh and most of the time, when people think about AI, they think about a system that will aid them to make decisions faster, negotiation faster.
• 12:04
  Speaker: And it's true, but I think the changes are way more profound than that.
• 12:09
  Speaker: The changes are getting us to a completely different stage.
• 12:13
  Speaker: So if post-organization have better visibility into the obligations that they have, into the risk, into the performance they expect from this contract, into the uh business outcomes, into the historical outcomes, then the conversation is changing.
• 12:28
  Speaker: It's not about making a transaction anymore, it's about being more collaborating and creating value for both organizations.
• 12:36
  Speaker: So the the day we get there and the day is tomorrow or even today, uh, it's completely changing the way organizations are managing their agreements and are managing their relationships.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: Yes, and it's a very exciting transformation.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: Tim, we've done a few experiments, haven't we?
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: Um, especially around negotiation.
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: Can you give us some examples of what you found with those experiments?
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we published a few papers, and of course, as you well know, Nikki, we work a lot with um academia to drive a lot of this research too.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are some fascinating and often contradictory elements to all of this.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: One thing is that research shows that people actually trust machines more than they trust other people.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: So one of the fascinating things is they are more ready to share data, their personal goals, their objectives, whatever it is, they are more ready to divulge that to a machine than they are to another person.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: That's interesting.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Which is where, of course, we begin to see that potential for it to drive greater collaboration.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Because when we look at the big constraint of negotiation today, and we're about to put out a paper on this actually, which has got AI links too.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: The big constraint is Stefan, as you and me have a negotiation.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Uh, you go first, you tell me all of your innermost secrets, and then I'll tell you mine.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: But of course, you don't want to go first.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: No.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Please didn't go first.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: After you.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: And so we go on.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: So actually, negotiations consistently underperform against their potential.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Now, the experiments we did where we had both parties using AI actually resulted in not only dramatically faster negotiation, but consistently better results.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Um, and that is a documented study which we've actually published in our journal.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: And it was really quite compelling.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Now, the counterside is of course, people are still somewhat worried about AI.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: You know, if I devolve stuff, where's it going to go?
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Who's going to have access?
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: If we're using AI, well, what about if it hallucinates?
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: It could lead us into a completely erroneous conclusion.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: So, of course, there is also this wariness.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Um, particularly on the part of lawyers.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: The study we've just done, 33% of lawyers were not prepared to use AI in negotiation, and they stood behind the traditional legal position of it's unethical.
• 15:23
  Speaker: But if I may, Tim, uh Iko, on your on your answer, I think you're you're spot to the point.
• 15:28
  Speaker: And that's exactly what the QSANM is providing.
• 15:31
  Speaker: It's actually providing a platform that will help the companies, the businesses, to put the guard race, to put the rules that are going to control these agent interactions.
• 15:41
  Speaker: Because otherwise, you're right, people could be very afraid about agents making these decisions outside of the guard race, outside the rules of the company.
• 15:49
  Speaker: And this is exactly the purpose of the DocuSANIM platform.
• 15:52
  Speaker: This is actually to provide the humans, the responsible for the UTB decisions, to create those rules into the platform.
• 15:58
  Speaker: Absolutely.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: And of course, it is exactly what we can do.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: It leads us, as we've published with uh papers earlier this year, it leads us to a position where we can really reimagine the commercial operating model.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: And we can cut back on all of these lengthy reviews and approvals because AI can help us to understand when we're operating within acceptable guardrails and when we're moving outside them.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: So I'd like to talk a bit now about how leadership are responding.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: Um, today your CEO in his opening keynote said um how contracts are handled today is fundamentally broken.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: Um that two trillion number, of course, has real currency.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: And we, like Dr.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: Seim, we agree that this field really deserves serious attention.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: And I'm really glad to see through this report that it's gaining wider attention.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: What's your sense, Stefan, of whether enterprise leadership is actually internalizing the scale of the problem, or does it still feel like it's a stat that gets cited and then gets filed away?
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: Are we getting the attention from leadership that it needs?
• 17:15
  Speaker: I think the attention is really increasing.
• 17:17
  Speaker: And we see every day signs of increasing attention.
• 17:21
  Speaker: We see actually executives reaching out to us to actually come to them and explain what we can do from that perspective.
• 17:28
  Speaker: So we see increasing attention, but I think that there is still the executives still under underestimate, underestimate, sorry, where the value is being lost.
• 17:37
  Speaker: Because again, most of the time people think always about the delays, about how we can make it faster.
• 17:43
  Speaker: And uh that's pre-signature.
• 17:46
  Speaker: And we believe that the real biggest losses are happening after the signature, not before the signature.
• 17:53
  Speaker: So we discussed that.
• 17:54
  Speaker: It's all about the missed obligation, the poor visibility in the contract, the revenue leakage, the supplier performance that you could not really track, the renewals, the compliance, all of that that is not being tracked, and all of that is happening after the signature.
• 18:07
  Speaker: So this is where agreements become operational rather than administrative, because everything before is quite administrative.
• 18:15
  Speaker: After that, it becomes really an operational asset for the for the businesses.
• 18:20
  Speaker: So the encouraging part is that executive increasingly recognize that contracts are not simply legal assets, they are business data.
• 18:30
  Speaker: And once they understand that they are business data, it's a major leap uh you know to the business, to the value business that we can uh deliver.
• 18:38
  Speaker: And once you treat those uh agreements, those contracts as a structured business data, AI can really become the most powerful that you can use and can generate new sources of value.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: Tim, thoughts on that question?
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think um to be honest, over the last 40 years or so, um contracts lost their way.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: They became dominated by risk thinking, regulatory thinking, compliance thinking, uh, and we lost sight of the fact that they are first and foremost economic instruments.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, we get into them because we perceive there's an economic advantage to doing so.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: But they're not designed to deliver that economic benefit.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: So um, you know, complexity has grown dramatically.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Uh globalization certainly was a big factor.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, the last 30 years, the volume of contracts, the size of contracts has grown astronomically.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: And the systems and the internal mechanisms to manage them have not kept pace.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: We are now seeing that opportunity for fundamental change.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Technology has at last caught up with the complexity.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: But people do have to go beyond that, and that's where you get into the problem of internal politics, because of course, nobody actually wants to take responsibility for owning contracting, but nobody wants anybody else to have it.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: So that has been a real struggle for DocuSign.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: Um, that who do we talk to?
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Who is going to be the champion of this?
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: I think one of the exciting things for me, Nikki, has been the development very much aligned actually with the evolution of AI, of now the global contract management standard, which um obviously is already approved by the American National Standards Institute, is moving fast towards becoming an ISO standard.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: And it's going to add, I think, tremendous momentum to the conversation because it's a task-based standard.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: It doesn't say who should do the job or how to do the job, but it does map the tasks associated with that life cycle.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: So it really gives executive management now a combination of a process tool and a systems tool that can map.
• 21:14
  Speaker: That's interesting because when uh when we discuss with executives, they know that they have invested and overinvested in the past 10, 20 years in CRM, uh, ARP, HR system, finance systems.
• 21:28
  Speaker: And now they realize that most of the value is actually residing in the agreements.
• 21:33
  Speaker: And they know that the only thing they did at the best was digitizing the agreements, but nothing else, not really taking the value.
• 21:40
  Speaker: They are all still very static documents, and they do not extract value from that.
• 21:44
  Speaker: But we we see that uh increasingly being uh being a source of attention for the executives.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: And Stefan, I think well I'm sorry, I'm doing all script here, but sorry, Tim.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: We're getting excited now.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: And Stefan, one of the things that I'm particularly concerned.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Me is that we do not finish up with um AI solutions use cases being developed silo by silo.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: You know, the critical thing with DocuSign with the system that you offer people is it is that ability to think enterprise, not silo.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: And if people continue and replicate AI at a silo level, we're gonna lose so much of the benefit.
• 22:33
  Speaker: That's a tricky point because you're absolutely right on the desired outcome and the way to get the most value of platforms like IAM DocuSign.
• 22:41
  Speaker: But at the same time, uh AI is still at a stage where you need to build trust and build confidence.
• 22:47
  Speaker: And sometimes in order to do that, you have to choose, like, for instance, uh a dedicated workflow process could be supplier management, for instance.
• 22:56
  Speaker: And start from there and build trust, build confidence, and then scale, and then you're right.
• 23:02
  Speaker: You you get the full value of that when you have scaled that to a platform that could cover, you know, uh and connect all of the business uh application, all of the business agreement frameworks.
• 23:12
  Speaker: Then you get the full value.
• 23:14
  Speaker: But at the same time, in order really to gain that confidence from your team, from your board, from your stakeholders, you need to start with uh something that is sometimes a bit more siloted in order to evidence uh the gains.
• 23:26
  Speaker: So it's uh sometimes it's uh uh strategy is going uh a little bit a little bit against that, uh, against the reality uh of the field.
• 23:34
  Speaker: Of course, we like every customer to start you know from the top, but in reality, you need to start somewhere.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: So you're saying corporate politics is a live or more.
• 23:46
  Speaker: You say that.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: So, Stefan, Tim, I want to move into uh the nature of the contracts because one of the things I think uh about agentic workflows is that they start to change the nature of what a contract actually is.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: And I think your use of the term agreement acknowledges that.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: With AI, it becomes less of a document and more of an operating system for a relationship.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: Um, in the institute, we've been working on, we've been exploring adaptive contracting, right, Tim, that looks at um adapting adaptive contracting in the world.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: Does your research give you any signal about whether organizations are thinking about the contract itself changing, or are they mostly focused on the process around the unchanged document?
• 24:41
  Speaker: Okay, so your question, if I can uh summarize, is are contract changing themselves?
• 24:47
  Speaker: Not only what is surrounding the contract, the processes and so on, the workflow, but also the contract themselves.
• 24:53
  Speaker: Um yeah, I believe we're seeing the beginning of this evolution uh happening.
• 24:58
  Speaker: So basically, in the past, agreements, contracts were documenting relationships.
• 25:05
  Speaker: That's all it was.
• 25:06
  Speaker: Today they help manage relationships, which is uh completely changing the typology of the contract, the form of the of the contract.
• 25:14
  Speaker: The agreements become connected uh to the to all of the other operational systems.
• 25:20
  Speaker: Uh again, I say it again, performance, payments, renewal, compliance, obligation, you need to connect all of that.
• 25:27
  Speaker: So, in order to do that, you need to change the contract.
• 25:30
  Speaker: The contract could not be the same contract that it was 10 years ago, where it was like just a static document documenting past relationships.
• 25:37
  Speaker: So AI really is transforming uh the agreements from static records into living business assets.
• 25:45
  Speaker: And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that we see today happening in the industry.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: I think we have we agree with that, Tim.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and actually a good illustration of this, uh Nikki, is um the I think far from coincidence about the companies that were featured on the platform today.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: So among the leaders that we've worked with on contract design and simplification, you know, Experian have recently been undertaking big simplification initiatives, and I think we started work with them actually out in Asia, but it's now moving across the rest of the world.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: Microsoft, of course, who we've worked with for 20 odd years, but have also really been focused on how do we simplify this stuff.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: Um, so as I say, I think no coincidence that those who are leading with these deployments and this thinking are also recognizing the fundamentals, the foundation of the contract itself.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: It needs to become something that is designed for a user community, not for a corporate room.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 27:02
  Speaker: And they they the outcome, David, you were talking about experience.
• 27:06
  Speaker: Look at the benefits, the business value they gain.
• 27:09
  Speaker: It's it's massive.
• 27:10
  Speaker: It was taking the in almost two weeks to win a just agreement.
• 27:14
  Speaker: Now it's a question of hours.
• 27:16
  Speaker: So their their credibility internally to use that kind of solution and tools is dramatically increasing and pushing the execs to actually scale to other areas of the business.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: And it's that whole ease of doing business.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: It just drives you crazy these companies where you try to engage with them and you you spend six weeks, six months trying to get an agreement in place.
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: So, uh gosh, we could talk all day here, couldn't we?
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: But we've come to the final question.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: Um and I'm gonna I'm gonna go to you first, Tim, and then I'll give you the final word, Stefan.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: What your data shows is performance gap, uh Stefan, performance gap.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: But the world CC research speaks to is the organizational governance architecture that closes that gap.
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: And it strikes us that there's a real complementarity here, um, the what and the how pointing in the same direction.
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: So, Tim, what's your advice to our audience?
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: What is the call to action?
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Well, there is no doubt that this sort of change, this sort of transformation in capability does require a level of executive sponsorship.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: Sadly, I think very often the people who are perhaps closest to the problem and really appreciate it often don't have that louder voice.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Um, you know, certainly those in contract management, etc., are not necessarily perceived as major change agents.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: Um getting this message to senior management through the sort of work Doc Sign's doing that we're seeking to do, you know, bringing those voices together to really make a noise that alerts senior management to the fact that this is no longer a nice-to-have, a vague possibility, but it's a reality that can be achieved.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Um, after all, who would in their right minds not want to tackle value erosion of around 9%?
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: You know from the work we're doing with roundtables and so on in places like infrastructure in the energy sector particularly.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: 9% is a massive understatement.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: We're looking at more like 15-20% in those long-term complex project industries.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Um we just need to keep on developing the case studies, the examples such as we've seen here today, at momentum.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: We need to be promoting those much more um loudly, I guess, because uh I I think it was Warren Buffett who made the comment that there are innovators, imitators, and well, he said perhaps a little unflatteringly, idiots.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: But you know, at the moment we tend to be working with those at the forefront, the innovators, but we're certainly beginning to see the imitators quickly following suit.
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: Wonderful, thank you, Tim.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: Stefan, the last word to you.
• 30:35
  Speaker: Okay, so Tim picked the strategic uh argument.
• 30:39
  Speaker: So I will pick a very practical one.
• 30:41
  Speaker: Nice.
• 30:41
  Speaker: Okay.
• 30:42
  Speaker: So I I would say that um we see too many companies still saying, I want to start something with AI, which means pretty much nothing.
• 30:51
  Speaker: So my advice would be start with one business problem.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 30:55
  Speaker: Perhaps it's gonna be reducing the contract lifecycle time, uh, it could be accelerating the procurement process, it could be improving the compliance, it could be solve solving whatever workflow it is.
• 31:07
  Speaker: But pick one, measure the outcome, a precise outcome, build confidence, be successful, and then scale from there.
• 31:17
  Speaker: The organization that are achieving the greatest returns are not the one trying to transform everything overnight.
• 31:23
  Speaker: Unfortunately, that doesn't work.
• 31:25
  Speaker: So they are building trust in AI first on one measurable outcome and then they scale from that.
• 31:31
  Speaker: Because at the end, ultimately, technology adoptions follow business value.
• 31:36
  Speaker: It's not the other way around.
• 31:38
  Speaker: That's very important to precise.
• 31:40
  Speaker: And I believe that if I can close with that, the companies that will win over uh the next decade and even over the next five years won't simply execute agreement faster.
• 31:52
  Speaker: They will use agreement intelligence to make better decisions every single day.
• 31:58
  Speaker: And AI has really become remarkably good at creating content.
• 32:02
  Speaker: We're all using that to create our content, to summarize our content.
• 32:06
  Speaker: But the next frontier, the next big wave of changes, of evolvement is execution.
• 32:12
  Speaker: And execution, guess what, runs on agreement.
• 32:16
  Speaker: So every major business process eventually becomes an agreement, like all the time.
• 32:22
  Speaker: And if AI cannot understand an act on agreement, enterprise transformation will remain incomplete.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: Wonderful, Stefan.
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: Tim, I want to thank you so much.
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: I've really enjoyed this conversation with you here today at Momentum.
• 32:38
  Speaker: Thank you, Mickey.
• 32:39
  Speaker: Thank you, Tim.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: So unfortunately, that is all we have time for in this episode, live at Momentum in London, DocuSigns event.
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: Um, if there is one vital takeaway from today's conversation, it's this.
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: The cost of mismanaged agreements is not a contracting problem.
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: It's a systemic business problem.
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: And the organizations that will lead in the next decade are those that are willing to do more and to optimize.
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: They will redesign.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: The good news is that the tools, the evidence, and the frameworks now exist to make that redesign real.
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: CCM Institute's body of research and DocuSign's research with Deloitte both point in the same direction, from fragmented siloed control to integrated, outcome-centered, AI-enabled commercial operating models.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much for listening to the Leading Edge.
• 33:38
  Speaker 3: And if you like what you heard, stay tuned for our next episode where we will continue to explore the ideas, innovations, and leadership shifts shaping the future of commerce and contracting.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: Until then, keep challenging, keep adapting, and keep leading.