DocuSign Blog

AMAZING! Artificial Intelligence in DocuSign Pro 2.0

Back in 1972, my Dad was an attorney. He used to dictate into a tape recorder, and later his secretary would present him with a contract ready to go, with an envelope and "sign here" tabs in place.  His assistant was performing the task of creating the document, and preparing it to be sent.  This let him focus on higher order tasks, and the assistant was very good at making sure the contracts were ready and error free. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Artificial Intelligence (AI) as:

The ability of a digital or computer-controlled to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.

In essence, AI seeks to duplicate tasks that require a human being. When applied to preparing Documents for the signature process, AI might feel a little like my Dad’s assistant from 1972.

The new "Intelligent Document Recognition" (IDR) capability of DocuSign Pro 2.0 has been a very interesting foray into the application of AI to the task of preparing documents for signature – creating an "assistant" capable of preparing your documents for you.

As some know, DocuSign has a very powerful feature called "Signing Workflow Templates." These templates describe the signing process that should be applied to a document. Signing Workflow Templates include everything about the signing workflow – who is to sign (buyer, seller), where they are to sign, initial, or provide data, how they should authenticate, what sequence should be followed, etc. They are incredibly powerful because they allow a sender of a document to have the benefit of standardizing on a workflow for signing by simply applying a template to a document when they go to send it. All the sender has to do is apply the right template. This gives the power of exact signature placement, with "one click" simplicity. The only challenge is selecting the proper template to apply.

Enter AI. (and the word "automagically")

With the release of DocuSign Pro 2.0, these signing templates are automagically applied to documents on the fly, and these templates are created automagically on the fly. The system literally learns the documents you send for signature, where you place signatures, what sort of recipients you use, etc. Once it learns this, it automatically begins to place your "sign here" tabs, and prepares your documents for you...just like my Dad’s assistant in 1972.

The amazing part - how it works

The way IDR works is very similar to the way a human being decides which document is being presented. It ‘looks at it’. It literally does the same thing a human does –- it reads the first few sentences of the document, it looks for pictures and other tell-tale signs, and decides if it has seen it before. If it has, it knows exactly where to put your signature tabs, and what roles will be signing.

More amazing

DocuSign Pro 2.0 is even capable of "looking at pictures." My favorite demo involves two documents that have nothing but pictures. Document One is a picture of a golf course, Document Two is a picture of the Columbia River. From a distance, a human could not tell the difference, DocuSign Pro’s "Document Assistant" can reliably differentiate the two images without a problem.

Even more amazing

Some "line of business applications" used by our customers actually create PDF documents on the fly which are actually composed of multiple documents. This poses a unique challenge – how to tell what documents are inside the single file, and then determining if any of these documents are recognized. Well, our Document Prep Assistant is able to do this as well. It literally recognizes that there are multiple documents inside one file, and can place signatures and assign roles to the documents inside properly –- no matter what order these documents may appear.

The experience of sending documents for signature using DocuSign Pro now feels a lot like you have your own assistant looking over your shoulder helping you work faster and work smarter.

On a Roll

The past few months have been quite successful for DocuSign and for our partners. We’re on a roll, signing new deals with companies across a wide variety of industries. Insurance, real estate, supply chain, e-commerce, travel and hospitality, student loans — you name the industry and there’s a good chance that DocuSign is in use. eSignatures are changing the way that many companies work, in fact, changing many of their long-standing business processes.

For instance, the instability in the real estate and mortgage markets has agents, brokers and lenders looking at new ways to generate revenue and turn prospects into customers. In today’s uncertain market, partnering with DocuSign is a good move. Working with partners like Document Systems, Inc., Fidelity National Real Estate Service and Land America, we’ve been helping real estate agencies, mortgage brokers and lenders reduce costs, generate revenue faster and become more efficient for a while now. We’re focused on cultivating partnerships that are financially beneficial to us and our partners, extend our reach into more and more business processes and most importantly, deliver additional strategic and economic benefits to our customer base.

BioPassword is another company that we’ve partnered with. We’re incorporating BioPassword’s advanced biometric technology into our eSignatures service, taking our enterprise class ID verification services even further. This technology offers a powerful solution for ensuring signer identity. It’s ideal for financial services and  a number of other industries. 

But why stop there? We recently joined forces with Upside Software. The Canadian company has incorporated eSignatures into its contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution to help its customers close contracts faster, bringing in revenue sooner and locking out competition. Initial results show that Upside users finalize contracts up to 30 percent faster using eSignatures. That’s got to have a positive impact on the bottom line.

As long as there’s a need to sign contracts and documents anywhere in the world, the question becomes…why not use DocuSign and the Web to do so?

Authors (and Publishers) Rejoice

Author and IT industry analyst Michael Sampson writes on his “Being Effective with Collaboration” blog that the “days of retaining a fax machine just for signing contracts are over.”

The reason is that his publisher is using DocuSign to obtain signatures on contracts – rather than antiquated, outmoded technologies like faxes. It’s worth noting that Michael is based in New Zealand and his publisher is over 7,000 miles away in the US. 

Needless to say, Michael was very happy about the process of completing the contract over the Web, noting that “it’s pretty cool.” Be sure to read Michael’s post here.

Looking at the big picture, we definitely see a major opportunity for the publishing industry to increase velocity and lower costs through the use of DocuSign. In fact, DocuSign is a great tool for anyone involved in lining up talent such as artists, actors, photographers, screenwriters and many others where contracts needs to be signed before work can begin.  Everyone has a computer and Web access, but more and more, very few folks have fax machines.   

Printer Security: What’s Missing?

eWeek, the leading IT journal, recently posted an item detailing 20 steps for improving printer security. As the author M. David Stone notes:

Printers can compromise your information with hard disks that hold on to data after printing or scanning, fax features that can send to anyone and documents left sitting in output bins for anyone to see. And that’s just a partial list.

If you’re not nervous about the security risk presented by printers, you should be. Stone walks through a list of extremely complex ways to potentially make printers more secure such as encrypting the hard drive or attempting to use biometrics. Such measure may control who can print, but do nothing about the problem of documents sitting around on the printers waiting to walk off.

What eWeek misses completely is that the only true way to ensure printer security is to not use printers and paper-based processes in the first place - or at least reduce their use significantly.This is especially true for sensitive business-critical documents such as contracts and agreements.  In such cases, the largest and most urgent reason these documents are printed is to get wet-ink signatures, and then to store these paper contracts. The problem begins when documents are converted to paper which is inherently unsafe, easy to lose, and can be easily modified without detection.

Clearly we can add printer security – or the lack thereof – as yet another compelling reason for the use of a good e-Signature process. As a Web-based enterprise-class eSignature service, with rigorous security and secure online storage included with every DocuSigned document, DocuSign delivers peace of mind that your documents are well-protected. You’ll only find them on the printer if you choose to go that (antiquated) route. 

New Uses for eSignatures

“Once in a while you can get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right.”
-- The Grateful Dead

OK, so maybe I’m harkening back to my college days, but this quote does ring home for me. As we all know, it’s quite common for engineers or programmers to develop a new form of technology or a new application that may sound impressive, but at the end of the day does it really help anyone? Many years ago a friend of mine bought his kids a small robotic dog that could understand voice commands. It would do things like roll over or sit down. Big deal. The kids lost interest after a day and now that toy is collecting dust somewhere in the back of the closet.

Since we started DocuSign over three years ago, one of our goals has been to create easy to use technology that streamlines the contract and document signing process…a service that fundamentally transforms business processes like the Web and Federal Express and UPS have and, most importantly, provides real business benefits. Our service helps companies close deals faster, increase revenue, lock out the competition and helps make a positive impact on the environment. But what are the other interesting ways that eSignatures are being used?

Recently DocuSign announced that Aloha Airlines had become the first international airline to use eSignatures as a core part of its flight operations. That means Aloha Airlines’ pilots and dispatchers are using DocuSign to quickly and easily file and electronically sign mission-critical flight plans at the Honolulu-based carrier. Take a moment to check out Rob Willers’ blog, TheAirlineHub, to get his take on this recent news and to see how eSignatures are positively impacting the airline industry.

eSignatures help keep Aloha Airlines’ planes on time. In fact, on October 3, Aloha Airlines announced that it had reclaimed the top spot as the most punctual of the nation's airlines with a record-breaking 97 percent on-time record for August 2007. That is the best monthly performance posted in the past two years among all the airlines that report to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

What other ways can eSignatures help improve the way your company works? Yamaha keeps the pulse and shares information with over 7,200 resellers and channel partners using our eSignature service. Expedia helps close deals with its travel partners on a global basis. But one of the best, and most surprising stories, comes from our own backyard in Bellevue, Wash.

For many of us, the start of spring means Little League baseball and the start of fall means soccer season. While the kids are happy, what does that actually mean for the parents? It means running kids to ball games, and for coaches and volunteers, it means lots of paperwork getting documents such as release forms signed. Even in kids’ sports leagues, data has to be collected and documents signed by parents and coaches alike. With insurance, liability risk and governing bodies to worry about, leagues can’t begin play until everyone has signed on the dotted line.

For the Bellevue Boys & Girls Club Pony League and my colleague Brit Skinner specifically, it meant getting 45 coaches applications filled out and signed immediately. To ensure accuracy and to be as efficient as possible, Brit decided to use DocuSign. In a matter of minutes Brit was able to sign up for the service, upload the release forms, and put tabs to indicate where we needed the coaches to provide information and to sign. With the DocuSign dashboard, she was able to see who had signed the document and when. She also was granted access to the admin at the Boys & Girls Club, so she didn’t have fax all the contracts over the place, or manually go through and try to figure out who they were missing.

It’s great to see that all the hard work we put into making DocuSign powerful and easy to use is making life easier for companies and people in areas we never imagined. Have some ideas or suggestions for how we can help you? Give me a shout and let’s talk.

Transforming Business Series Part II…Dealer Agreements

Channel and dealer agreements and paperwork are iterative, lengthy, and arduous. And that’s on a good day. It gets even more interesting when multiple parties are involved.  Yet for companies whose businesses are dependent on channels, dealers and retailers, these agreements are absolutely critical to doing business.

A manufacturer has hundreds or thousands of dealers across the country with which they do business. Each dealer relationship requires a regular contract renewal. For every contract, as many as eight executives inside and outside the company need to understand, approve and sign it. What makes things more interesting is that eight out of ten contracts come back with missing signatures, crossed out clauses and unauthorized changes.  Addressing this challenge requires no less than whole team of full-time staff.

Now, whether your specific company has actively looked for a way to automate contract signing or not, something intuitively tells you that technology must exist to improve the process. (Why does the world still rely on pen, paper, fax and overnight in the Web era, anyway?) In this case, the key to successful signing automation was DocuSign Professional Services leveraging the DocuSign API.

In looking at the pieces of the process that were best suited to automation (typically the most repetitive and often the most painful) the first obvious candidate was just getting the agreements sent out to dealers. Using the DocuSign API interface and customer provided database of dealerships, Professional Services created a mail merge program that emailed eSignature envelopes out in bulk for electronic signature. Before DocuSign the process involved bulk faxing and bulk mailing, countless steps and people and days managing and executing this program. Now, in minutes, agreements were sent to thousands of customers for electronic signing. The savings in time, people and costs continue to be significant.

Another process pain was routing agreements in the proper order. This would be akin to asking FedEx to not just overnight a document, but to make sure that it went to eight different places in a particular order, while waiting to make sure that each executive reviewed and signed their section of each agreement. Using the DocuSign routing feature, each agreement (via a DocuSign envelope) was routed to eight or nine recipients in order with an added bonus—a custom-branded e-mail notification and signing experience.

When this project was complete, DocuSign Professional Services—working with the manufacturer—succeeded in eliminating tedious work and actually improving legal compliance as an added benefit.  As a result, the company has experienced an unprecedented e-signed, completed and closed contract return rate in a fraction of the time compared to pen and paper.

The best part of this story?  None of the electronically signed contracts had changes or crossed out clauses – DocuSign, unlike fax, doesn’t allow it.

Transforming Business Series - Part I

In a recent post I talked about our Executive Customer Council (ECC) meetings in Seattle that occurred in early October. During those meetings customers presented electronic signature best practices -- the most effective ways to implement and benefit from electronic signatures -- to the entire audience. The audience was comprised of the ECC as well as many members of the DocuSign team. We all learned a lot listening to these best practice sessions. It was great to see the charts and graphs from customers demonstrating the business impact of DocuSign at their companies - faster revenue growth, higher sales close rates, increased customer satisfaction, much higher productivity of their teams and companies. Exciting and gratifying alike.

Another presentation that day was from DocuSign's Professional Services group. This is a highly skilled and experienced part of our business. In fact, they are one among many things that distinguishes DocuSign as an enterprise-class, web-based electronic signature service. Our Professional Services group has executed over 75 successful implementations of DocuSign for customers. Listening to our Professional Services team outline and give examples of what they have developed and executed for customers at the ECC meetings, it made us realize that much of what they have done constitutes best practices for electronic signatures across dozens of industries and an equal number of business processes. As such, we thought it was time to give our Professional Services group their due.

Through occasional posts under the title of the Transforming Business Series, they will share what they have accomplished for customers, the how and the results. I hope you enjoy reading these. You will be getting a peek at one of the things that makes DocuSign a fun and interesting company.

DocuSign's Executive Customer Council

Recently we invited a group of our most influential customers to become members of DocuSign’s Executive Customer Council (ECC). The ECC is our top customer advisory group. They have a pivotal role advising us on our product roadmap and product strategy. We want to make sure that the new products and services we are considering developing offer a very high likelihood of helping customers meet or exceed their business goals.

That is where the ECC comes in – they are objective and smart. They know first hand how DocuSign electronic signatures have changed and even transformed business processes inside and outside their companies. They help us calibrate and optimize our product plans accordingly.

We met with this group in Seattle, where DocuSign is headquartered. This was DocuSign’s inaugural Executive Customer Council meeting. We were excited and gratified that we had such a high acceptance rate by the customers we invited – an unprecedented acceptance rate for those of us who have been a part of similar strategy level customer groups at other companies.

That told us a lot about how much DocuSign’s electronic signatures are changing business processes and helping customers exceed their business goals. How hungry savvy customers are to hear the latest thinking about what could or should come next from DocuSign. It also told us a lot about how rapidly, beyond our own 2007 growth numbers, electronic signatures are growing as an industry.

The success and role of the ECC means that we are going to make this a twice yearly event. We’ll expand the size of the group significantly to reflect our growth. Which means we are going to need a bigger venue than the large downtown Seattle hotel where we hosted this year’s event. Our growth over the past year also means that we will start a DocuSign users group. Our users group will meet in parallel with the ECC twice yearly.

And since the weather in Seattle was turning towards fall and winter when we met with our ECC a couple of weeks ago, many of us - including our ECC members -are voting for an “away game” for the spring ECC, someplace we can climb out of fleece and Gore-Tex. Returning to Seattle during the beautiful summer months inherent when we meet with DocuSign’s ECC for the second time in 2008.

Aviation Paperwork

Over the last 20 years that I’ve been a private pilot, I have had the opportunity fly on 3 continents.  I’ve flown across the Bering Sea to Russia, down through the Caribbean Islands to the interior of Venezuela and back up Central America returning to Seattle.  This gave me more than a passing familiarity with the blizzard of paperwork that aviation often entails. 

On trips like these, probably the most time consuming and confusing activity is processing paperwork to get in and out of airports. Manifests, customs forms, immigration, flight plans, and country entry or over flight applications are just some of the documents (and their attendant “tips”) that need to be processed when traveling from country to country. 

Needless to say, I had to smile when I hear that Aloha Airlines has begun the process of moving their paperwork processing online using DocuSign.  It’s gratifying to see that my daily passion (CTO of DocuSign) is beginning to benefit the passion I pursue in off hours.

Arriving in San Jose, Costa Rica they didn’t quite know what to do with us.  So they gave us our own jet way at gate 1.

Oil change in Maracaibo, Venezuela.  A relaxing moment under the wing while the mechanics change the oil.

DocuSign Raises $12.4 Million to Fuel Rapid Growth

DocuSign has achieved another major milestone in the company’s history. I am very pleased to announce the closing of our $12.4 million Series C funding round. Joining our strong investment team of Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners and Sigma Partners is the prestigious investment fund of WestRiver Capital LLC. We are very fortunate to have such a great team of investors backing our company.

These are very exciting times at DocuSign and I’m very proud of our entire team. DocuSign is on a rapid growth path and it’s exciting to see the demand for our eSignature service accelerate rapidly.   We recently celebrated our 5 millionth signature event! During 2005 and 2006 combined we were at 1.2 million signature events. With this funding we will continue to fuel our strong growth through investments in sales, marketing, new product development, and the company’s channel and partner network.  

Most importantly, however, it’s been very rewarding to see the positive impact we are having on our customers’ profitability. We are growing rapidly because our best in class service has such a remarkable ROI for our customers. DocuSign is the clear leader in the Web-based eSignatures market and with this financing we are going to continue to expand that lead.

We have approximately 1,800 corporate customers and more than 300,000 users from leading companies representing a broad range of industries, including Expedia, Land America, RE/MAX, AMICA, Worldspan, Quadrant Homes/Weyerhaeuser, Yamaha, Tektronix and Fidelity National Title. Our mission is to continue to deliver positive impact to our customers including enabling increased revenue, increased close rates, e-signing deals in record time, and eliminating costly paper processes. For example we have customers that report increases in sales close and customer acquisition rates of 200 plus percent while eliminating hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in paper/pen expenses.

We’re also very pleased that DocuSign and our customers are having a positive impact on the environment by eliminating the paper process.

It’s good news this week at DocuSign and we’re looking forward to more great things ahead. You can check out TechCrunch’s take on our announcement here. Nick Gonzalez has his own DocuSign signature now, so don’t be left behind.