Broken is a choice

Two weeks on, I reflect on Docusign’s Momentum events. These have become a barometer for where agreement management is heading, and London 2026 confirmed an important message: the process by which most organizations manage their agreements is broken.

In my conversations with delegates, the reasons for that were clear and consistent. Fragmentation across functions and systems means agreements are delayed, data sits in disconnected repositories and e-mails, multiple departmental hand-offs are required to gain approvals. In today’s demanding market conditions, the status-quo is simply unsustainable. One CPO told me: “It’s not just embarrassing, it’s career threatening when I really have no clue how the agreements I put in place are performing”.

I was impressed by the numbers attending Momentum in London and by their evident enthusiasm to transform how they manage agreements for the better. This was especially the case on the customer message board – always a risky proposition – yet here there was tremendous positivity about the impact Docusign has had. Right now that impact has been most obvious in efficiency: reduced workload, faster turnaround. But as the Docusign team were keen to explain, efficiency is only the beginning. AI-equipped solutions are shifting from efficiency to effectiveness and action, and that is where the real value lies, especially in post-award management.

It wasn’t the diagnosis that made the event compelling – many of us have been making it for years – but the evidence that things really are starting to change. Customers like Aon and Experian described their journeys from fragmented, manual agreement handling to something far more coherent, and in doing so demonstrated how a specialised AI is elevating contract lifecycle management to levels that simply weren’t achievable before. These are not early stage pilots; they are large-scale implementations in complex organizations and they show that there is now a cure.

Docusign itself brings a perspective few can match. With nearly 1.9 million customers, it has an extraordinary vantage point over how the world actually agrees, and its capabilities continue to develop at an impressive pace. This year’s introduction of the Iris AI assistant and agents, together with Agent Studio for building custom agreement workflows, signals a shift from managing documents to actively moving work forward.

Yet the message was tempered with realism. In my interview with Stéphane Barberet, head of Docusign in EMEA, he was careful with his advice to ‘aim big, start small’. Technology is not an immediate fix. Simply implementing new systems on top of poorly defined processes is not the answer and it never has been. Technology amplifies whatever it is applied to, including dysfunction. The organizations making genuine progress are those that treat AI as a catalyst for rethinking the process and the value it should be generating.

The prize that awaits us justifies the ambition. Globally, an estimated $2 trillion leaks away from contract value every year. This is a finding that builds on and confirms WorldCC’s work stretching back almost 15 years on the cost of poor contract and commercial management and the sources of that erosion. This is commercial policy failure hiding in plain sight.

Docusign is not alone on its journey. Its close collaboration with market leaders such as Legora underlines a commitment to innovation driven by ecosystem engagement and customer outcomes rather than product features. The message from Momentum is clear. The question for every executive team is whether they continue to accept a broken process as just an unfortunate cost of doing business,  or whether they recognise that, increasingly, broken is a choice.

If there had been a vote in the main hall, it’s clear that the sentiment would have been overwhelming: it’s time to change.