Docusign says Intelligent Agreement Platform hits inflection point

Docusign is betting that its Intelligent Agreement Platform has reached an inflection point and the company can harness LLMs and combine them with its orchestration, industry expertise and agreement data.

The company reported better-than-expected first quarter earnings and raised its outlook. The company reported earnings of 40 cents a share on revenue of $830.2 million, up 9% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.09 a share.

Wall Street expected Docusign to report first quarter non-GAAP earnings of 99 cents a share on revenue of $824.75 million.

The company said it is gaining customers signing up for its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform, which moves Docusign beyond e-signing to broader contract management and intelligence. Docusign is an example of how SaaS vendors are navigating disruption from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI.

• Anthropic vs. SaaS: A Nuanced View
• SaaS Under the Microscope: How To Evaluate Your Vendor
• How DocuSign Uses AI to Drive Customer-Centric Transformation

CEO Allan Thygesen said Docusign signed up 40,000 customers in the first quarter. The company during the quarter announced IAM tools including Iris, the company's agreement engine. Docusign Agent Studio also enables teams to build agents to manage deals, renewals, approvals and other parts of the contract workflow.

In addition, Docusign rolled out AIM versions for HR, Sales and customer experience. In prepared remarks, Thygesen said:

"Our AI innovation is establishing IAM as the definitive agreement platform, and we are rapidly launching new capabilities that deliver increased value to customers. Our overarching goal with IAM is to provide customers with a unified platform for everyone who touches contracts across an organization, to unlock topline growth while eliminating friction and increasing efficiency on the bottom line."

The priorities for the year ahead are to deliver end-to-end agreement workflows and expanding its AI data and orchestration tooling, said Thygesen.

"We have reached an inflection point in agreement management. Customers now recognize how a unified AI agreement platform spanning the organization can solve problems that isolated, department-level point products cannot," said Thygesen.

Docusign also said it named Graham Sheldon, an alum of UiPath and Microsoft, as its Chief Product Officer. Sheldon was the chief product officer at UiPath and before that was the Corporate Vice President for Product for Microsoft Teams.

As for the outlook, Docusign projected second quarter revenue of $865 million to $869 million. Fiscal 2027 revenue will be $3.49 billion to $3.5 billion.

Takeaways from the earnings call:

Verticals and partnerships. Thygesen said Docusign is targeting areas like legal and procurement. The company added a set of legal agents to assist on contracts. "We also deepened our partnership with Anthropic by integrating IAM with Claude's new legal tools, so legal professionals can access IAM contracts and connect to IAM workflows from inside Claude. And we announced similar integrations with legal tech specialists, Harvey, Legora and CoCounsel Legal by Thomson Reuters," he said.

In procurement, Docusign partnered with Coupa and lined up deals with Workday and Greenhouse for HR.

Credit-based plans. "In Q1, we launched the IAM Platform Plan, a credit-based subscription pricing model that ties pricing to business outcomes, said Thygesen.

Better models. "We continue to believe we can achieve to a 15 percentage point improvement in precision and recall compared to our models trained on public contract data, while operating at incredible cost efficiency. We've optimized AI processing costs by more than 50x compared to running direct prompts on LLMs," said Thygesen.

LLMs: Friend or foe? Thygesen said:

"In terms of the partnerships with the LLMs, we're thrilled to be partnered with Anthropic. We just announced this week a partnership with OpenAI, and we really want to make our data and workflows available wherever people want to do their work. This has always been core to Docusign's strategy. Already, we signed more than half of our total signed volume was consumed via API through integrations with other products. We've had a 20-year partnership with Salesforce, long partnerships with the Microsoft, SAPs, Workday and others of the world. And this is really an extension of that.

Now as these chat surfaces become popular, people want to consume agreement data and agreement workflows that way and trigger them there. We want to partner with where people want to be and want to do their work."