How Docusign and ServiceNow are Powering AI-Driven Workflows

Companies today are under immense pressure to accelerate operations, streamline complex processes, and deliver exceptional experiences for both employees and customers. These organizations are eager to understand how advancements in technology and AI can work as an engine to drive tangible business transformation right now.  

At ServiceNow Knowledge conference, this relentless pursuit of speed and intelligence is put on full display. We recently attended the conference, and our most impactful conversations throughout the week centered on a powerful synergy: how agreement management solutions, powered by AI, can seamlessly integrate with ServiceNow to help customers solve real-world problems. The Docusign IAM platform integrations help customers transform how they manage critical agreements to drive speed and efficiency across their organizations.

We spoke with Amit Saxena, GM and VP of Workflow Data Fabric at ServiceNow, to discuss how this synergy is shaping the future of work and, more importantly, how it's helping our customers solve their most pressing operational challenges.

The foundation of AI: Solving the data problem for agentic workflows

Saxena underscored a critical factor for AI's triumph, especially for autonomous "Agentic AI": the need for a strong data foundation. 

"Every AI agent feeds on data," Saxena explained. "Unless you get your data strategy right, it's going to be difficult for you to get the success you're looking for out of your AI agents."

This insight refers to a common pain point for many organizations: fragmented, siloed data. ServiceNow's answer to this challenge is their Workflow Data Fabric, a product suite meticulously designed to provide the connectivity, understanding, and actionable insights needed for AI agents to truly thrive. 

This isn't a new reactive trend for ServiceNow. They've been strategically investing in AI since 2018. What has evolved, especially with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, is the focus on delivering enterprise-grade AI with the necessary security and governance to meet the rigorous demands of customers.

A key differentiator for ServiceNow, as highlighted by Amit, is their newly announced AI Agent Fabric. This innovative layer is designed to unify and extend the capabilities of AI agents across the enterprise. This powerful framework enables organizations to not only build intelligent agents natively within the ServiceNow platform, but also to seamlessly integrate agents operating on external platforms like Microsoft and UKG. By serving as a central orchestration engine, AI Agent Fabric connects disparate systems, data sources, and workflows, enabling these agents to collaborate fluidly across functional and technological boundaries. The result is a truly interconnected and intelligent ecosystem, where digital workers operate in harmony to deliver end-to-end automation, elevate productivity, and drive smarter business outcomes. 

How Docusign and ServiceNow solve agreement friction

Saxena shed light on the immense opportunity arising from the intersection of Docusign’s Agreement AI—Docusign Iris—and ServiceNow's AI Agent Fabric.

"We already have a good partnership with Docusign because of thousands of customers using eSignature," Saxena noted, highlighting the established trust and integration. With the launch of the Docusign IAM platform, the partnership has deepened significantly, offering even greater problem-solving capabilities. ServiceNow is not only using Docusign to streamline its own operations with IAM, but is also witnessing its customers leveraging the platform to manage their most complex agreement workflows, which are often a source of significant friction.

Saxena described a mutual customer utilizing data from ServiceNow to trigger a Docusign Maestro workflow. This initiates an IAM flow that intelligently handles the complete agreement process, from automated generation to routing, negotiation, and execution. Once the agreement process is complete, the updated status is seamlessly fed back into ServiceNow, creating a truly end-to-end, automated process. This integration not only meets the customers’ need for speed, accuracy, and reduced manual effort but also showcases the power of orchestration across platforms. With ServiceNow’s AI Agent Fabric serving as the connective tissue, this workflow becomes part of a broader agentic architecture where intelligent agents work in concert across systems.  "This is a good marriage made," Saxena affirmed. “And when you embed it in an agentic architecture powered by AI Agent Fabric, it becomes a living, learning system that can adapt, orchestrate, and scale with the business.”

"English is the new coding language in the US": Empowering business users to automate

One of the most exciting advancements discussed was the shift in how AI agents are built, specifically targeting the democratization of automation. While Saxena clarified it's not "no-code," he brilliantly reframed the concept: "The new language for coding is English."

Through ServiceNow's AI Agent Studio, users can write prompts in plain English, which are then interpreted into the necessary functions to build powerful AI agents. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for building sophisticated automations, empowering business users and AI developers alike to solve their own departmental challenges without needing deep coding expertise.

These agents, when integrated with AI Agent Fabric, are no longer standalone. They become part of a broader, cohesive agentic system—one where tasks, data, and decisions flow seamlessly across platforms. 

Building a Docusign-powered AI agent on ServiceNow

Imagine you're a Docusign customer managing field service contracts and you face the challenge of automating the process of sending a contract to a third party for signature, then uploading the signed contract back into ServiceNow, eliminating manual handoffs and errors. Saxena outlined precisely how a ServiceNow customer could build this, demonstrating concrete problem-solving:

• Workflow Data Network: Docusign is already part of ServiceNow's Workflow Data Network, a set of integrated data partners. This ensures seamless access to Docusign data and other relevant third-party data via the Workflow Data Fabric, solving the problem of disparate data sources.

• AI Agent Studio: Users would then leverage AI Agent Studio to create prompts in plain English to construct agreements, tackling the need for intuitive, accessible automation building.

• Docusign spoke: A readily available Docusign spoke—an integration component developed by Docusign and ServiceNow—makes it easy for ServiceNow to communicate with Docusign and initiate agreement processes. 

• Natural Language Invocation: ServiceNow is building metadata on top of this spoke, allowing AI agents to call the spoke using natural language. This means an AI agent can simply be "told" in English to initiate a Docusign agreement process, further simplifying automation for business users.

This entire process enables an end-to-end workflow: an action triggers in ServiceNow, relevant data is compiled and sent to Docusign, Docusign intelligently handles the complex agreement execution, and the final status is seamlessly brought back into ServiceNow. This works throughout the entire cycle of agreement management, from initiation to completion, ensuring data accuracy and process efficiency.

Continuous innovation for customers

The Docusign spoke is already available today on the ServiceNow Store, offering best practices built-in to help customers quickly derive value. And there's even more to come: Saxena teased that the first ServiceNow AI agent specifically for the Docusign IAM platform is just around the corner, promising even deeper integration and automation capabilities.

The collaboration between Docusign and ServiceNow is a powerful testament to the impact of connected platforms and intelligent automation when focused on customer needs. By leveraging AI-driven workflows and seamless integrations, our joint customers can eliminate bottlenecks, enhance accuracy, and significantly increase the speed of work across their entire enterprise, ultimately delivering superior experiences for everyone involved.

You can learn more about how Docusign and ServiceNow can help your team here.