In this BSA series – “AI@Work” – enterprise software leaders explain in their own words how artificial intelligence (AI) is having a positive impact on people’s jobs and the workforce. In this submission, Docusign’s Deputy General Counsel, AI Innovation and Trust Jessica Nguyen talks about how AI can relieve employees from repetitive work with secure tools that can garner intelligent insights.
What is your AI@Work?
We encourage — and believe in — being early adopters and power users of our own products. It gives us a continual feedback loop with our product and engineering teams and cultivates a customer-first culture. Docusign’s procurement and legal teams use Docusign products powered by AI to take a first pass at reviewing and redlining supplier agreements based on our requirements and also automatically track, find, and get notified about key contractual obligations, such as supplier agreement renewal dates. Adopting AI-powered solutions have reduced the time spent on these processes by roughly 50-85% per task.
What distinguishes AI at work from other uses of AI?
In comparison to consumer applications of AI, AI at work creates different risks because it focuses on solving complex, large-scale challenges. These challenges often involve processing confidential, personal, or proprietary data or intellectual property. This distinction is critical because of the design, deployment, security and trust needed in the workplace are more sophisticated.
As such, organizations offering AI tools must be transparent about how they will address and manage these risks. This includes: telling users how their data is protected and could be used to train models, specifying the sources of data the provider uses to train its models, undergoing regular audits, and investing in resources to drive good governance.
For example, Docusign leverages the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework, a globally-recognized set of standards that help organizations of all sizes identify and address AI risk. As the foundation of our AI governance, Docusign follows the same robust privacy, security and data governance processes that have led over 1.6 million customers and more than 1 billion users to trust us with processing, storing, and managing their agreements.
How will AI@Work change how people do their jobs, and how should we prepare?
AI will gradually reduce repetitive, time-consuming tasks that people should not do or do not like to do so that workers can shift their focus to strategic, creative, and interpersonal work. The invention of email shifted notices to be sent electronically versus mail, but the need for humans to draft communications continued.
For example, many enterprises (including Docusign) process thousands of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) each year with various suppliers, partners, and prospective customers. When NDAs are negotiated, it’s often the same clauses that are negotiated. With a high degree of accuracy, generative AI can take a first pass to review those terms and suggest edits based on your requirements. AI may even catch issues that are missed by a human reviewer. On average, my legal peers are saving up to 85% of time reviewing NDA terms. As you can imagine, if my legal peers are spending less time reviewing NDAs, they’re able to process more NDAs faster, and they’re able to focus their work on more strategic and complex projects or agreements.
To prepare for this AI future that’s already here, organizations should invest in upskilling their workforce. For example, if NDA reviews become primarily done by AI, then a contracts manager that used to spend most of their time reviewing and editing NDAs should learn to review other types of complex agreements, become the AI tool administrator, fine tune and train AI models of such AI tool, and review any NDA analytics produced by the AI tool to garner valuable insights. Training programs, change management initiatives, and a focus on fostering a culture of adaptability are essential for a smooth AI adoption and integration.
What are some key takeaways for leaders using or planning to use AI@Work?
AI is here to stay because it has shown it can solve business challenges but we should not overlook the investment in our people to drive adoption and optimization. What we’ll see over the next few years creating friction to AI adoption at work will be: (1) earning user trust in output quality and data handling, (2) driving user adoption to learn new ways to work, and (3) upskilling employees as business needs and roles evolve.
About the author:
Jessica Nguyen is Deputy General Counsel, AI Innovation and Trust Chief Legal Officer at Docusign, where she helps build innovative features responsibly with a focus on customers.