Docusign manages billions of mission-critical agreements: Apurva Dalal

Docusign is an Intelligent Agreement Management company that serves more than 1.6 million customers, and more than a billion people in over 180 countries. Established in 2003, Docusign pioneered the concept of using a digital signature to execute agreements, changing how business is conducted forever. 

Apurva Dalal, VP, Technology & India Site Lead, Docusign India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview: 

DQ: Can you provide an overview of Docusign?

Apurva Dalal: Docusign is an Intelligent Agreement Management company that serves more than 1.6 million customers and more than a billion people in over 180 countries. Established in 2003, Docusign pioneered the concept of using a digital signature to execute agreements, changing how business is conducted forever. 

We started the transition to virtual, digital business with e-signature and now we’re expanding to agreement management. 

This year, building on over 20 years of industry leadership, Docusign introduced its AI-powered Intelligent Agreement Management platform to help businesses of all kinds transform agreement data into insights and actions, accelerate contract review cycles, and boost productivity organization-wide.

In India, Docusign first established its presence last year and most recently announced the opening of a new office in Bengaluru. 

DQ: Tell us about Docusign’s core products and services. How do they differentiate from other solutions in the market?

Apurva Dalal: While there are different players in the agreement space trying to solve for specific parts of the agreement lifecycle, Docusign is solving for the entire agreement lifecycle end-to-end. We pioneered the e-signature market and have over 20 years of experience in agreements. We have held a leadership position in eSignature and Contract Lifecycle Management for the last several years. 

At Docusign, we are deeply committed to helping organizations simplify and streamline how they handle agreements, no matter their size or industry. Our goal is to make the agreement process intuitive, efficient, and secure with the help of our products so businesses can stay focused on their core.

* In 2024, we launched the Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform. Docusign IAM uses artificial intelligence to bring agreement management into the 21st century, so businesses of all kinds can transform agreement data into insights and actions, accelerate contract review cycles, and boost productivity organization wide. 

Just as CRM, HCM, and ERP leveraged the internet to modernize sales, HR, and resource management, we believe AI will transform the agreement management process and how agreement data informs every part of your business.

* Docusign CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) is purpose-built for managing the most complex contract lifecycles. It’s an end-to-end solution that enables businesses to create documents with accurate data pulled from systems like Salesforce, manage collaborative reviews with version control, and automate workflows to reduce manual effort. 

For organizations managing high volumes of agreements, CLM reduces friction and improves operational efficiency.

* Our eSignature solution is widely regarded as the industry standard for sending, signing, and tracking agreements. It’s versatile, offering delivery options across multiple channels like SMS and WhatsApp, and integrates seamlessly with tools that teams already use, including Microsoft and Salesforce.

What truly sets us apart is our focus on reducing complexity through automation and integration while ensuring the highest levels of security and reliability. By eliminating inefficiencies and making agreements smarter and more secure, we help organizations unlock their full potential.

DQ: Can you tell us about Docusign's recently launched AI-powered Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM). How is the company reinventing itself with the launch of IAM?

Apurva Dalal: Our work in India and globally as a company reflects our conversations with customers about the pain points, they face. A lot of business problems people accept as the price of doing business are symptoms of mismanaged agreements. A Deloitte study found that nearly USD 2 trillion (INR 174 trillion) will be lost in global economic value in the upcoming year because of poor agreement management systems and processes.

We call that problem the Agreement Trap -- when outdated agreement systems and processes trap business critical information inside flat files, unconnected to existing systems of record. 

We have introduced IAM to help organizations break free from the Agreement Trap and regain lost productivity and revenue. It uses artificial intelligence to modernize the entire agreement management process, enabling businesses of all kinds to transform agreement data into insights and actions, accelerate contract review cycles, and boost productivity organization wide. 

DQ: How does the new engineering hub in India fit into Docusign's global strategy? How will this work impact Docusign’s global clients?

Apurva Dalal: Docusign India is a tech and growth hub that will be a driving force of product innovation development, creating global impact in technology areas, such as data platform, partner integrations, artificial intelligence/machine learning, workflow orchestration and cloud engineering. 

The teams in India will own the entire value chain of product development -- from ideation and creation, to testing and deployment, as we build new solutions to modernize the entire agreement management process. 

DQ: What kind of talent are you looking to hire for the new office? Are there specific skills or experiences that are particularly in demand for your operations here?

Apurva Dalal: At Docusign India, innovation is embedded in our DNA. Since establishing our presence here in 2023, we have grown to more than 250 employees locally. We have been able to attract top tech talent and hired not only engineers, but also product managers, product designers, product researchers, IT and data science engineers.  

We are hiring at all levels including freshers, mid, and senior level roles (architect, senior managers, directors). In terms of technology stack, we are looking to hire backend, frontend, fullstack, data and AI/ML engineers.

These technologists will work on core agreement management areas of data platform, cloud engineering, AI/ML, workflow orchestration, Enterprise partners and developers platform, and digital identity/notary services. 

We are aiming for continued significant growth over the next several years across our engineering, tech and professional services teams as we build centers of excellence for technology and other teams in India and help Docusign build out the intelligent agreement platform.

DQ: Can you highlight some of the India-specific projects or innovations being done for global clients?

Apurva Dalal: As part of our commitment to build out a tech hub in India, we are looking for core areas of IAM to be built and delivered from India. End to end ideation, design, development, deployment and support -- all from India, for Docusign’s IAM customers globally, is already in the works.

We are already working on several core center of excellence areas from India: 

* The vision of IAM platform is to allow third party developers and partners to extend and embed into the Docusign agreement platform and to that end, India engineers are building extensibility and integration capabilities into IAM such that Enterprise developers and partners can integrate and extend Docusign’s IAM platform seamlessly. 

We are developing Docusign’s API platform as well as our app center constructs. Several India teams are working on agreement intelligence and interoperability within strategic software partner ecosystems of Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP et al.  

* We are helping drive the no-code orchestration workflow platform “Maestro” to help customers define and automate their agreement workflows for department and enterprise use cases.

* Further, we have teams working on AI/ML for contract analytics, data platform areas of data modeling for agreements, agreement insights and reporting, data ETL pipelines and more.

* We are also working on delivering the next generation cloud infrastructure buildout as well as core trust and identity services like digital notarization.   

DQ: Given the sensitive nature of digital agreements, how does Docusign ensure the security and compliance of its solutions, especially when serving global clients from India?

Apurva Dalal: Our customers trust us to manage the billions of mission-critical agreements they need to run their business every day. Trust and security are core to our company, and we consistently meet the stringent security requirements of some of the world’s largest financial institutions and more than 87% of Fortune 1000 companies that use Docusign. 

Docusign offers a robust set of product capabilities to empower customers in further safeguarding their own data - from no-code workflow automation so the right people can see or sign the agreement, to two-factor verification, phone authentication, advanced administration, and Docusign Monitor to automatically send alerts about suspicious activity.