Why ‘broken’ just ran out of excuses

“The way agreements are handled today is fundamentally broken” – Allan Thygesen, CEO, Docusign

In truth, there never was a golden era of agreement management – but in an increasingly interconnected world, with increasingly complicated rights, obligations and regulations, the ability to manage performance has become a critical capability.

So why did anyone allow agreement management to become ‘broken’? It’s not new news – WorldCC has been researching and writing on this for more than 20 years. And people were listening, working to contain the value leakage, which back in 2013 WorldCC first evaluated as equivalent to an average 9.2% of revenue. 

The answer is that no one wanted to own the problem. It was just too difficult. Contracts sat with legal. Performance sat with the business. Obligations sat wherever someone remembered to track them – a spreadsheet, a calendar reminder, a relationship manager’s memory. Each function optimised its own piece and protected itself from its own risks, with no one positioned to see or manage the agreement as a whole.

And when it came to technology, fragmented systems defeated efforts to deploy contract lifecycle platforms. At best, CLM offered a system of record, not a system of action. They tell you what you signed. They don’t tell you what’s happening.

AI changes that equation. For the first time, it’s possible to read across the silos – contract terms, performance data, regulatory change, counterparty behavior – and surface what matters. That’s what we mean by commercial intelligence: not a smarter repository, but an integrated function that continuously connects agreement to outcome and flags the gap before it becomes value leakage.

Docusign shares that same perspective. It’s using AI and insights from more than 200 million agreements to help companies move faster, operate smarter, and turn agreements into a competitive advantage. At Momentum 2026, we saw how industry leaders like Experian and Aon are fixing the problems, deploying its AI-native intelligent contract platform (IAM) to eliminate the leaks and turn agreement management into a source of competitive advantage.

‘Broken’ is no longer inevitable: it’s a choice.

If you’re interested in what an AI-native intelligent agreement platform looks like in practice, Docusign’s overview of IAM is a good place to start: https://www.docusign.com/