New Year, New Workflows: A Fresh Start for Your Agreements

It's that time of year again—the calendar is flipping, and we're all taking a deep breath, looking for ways to be just a little bit smarter, a little more efficient in the year ahead. Maybe you're organizing your desk, or maybe you're finally tackling that messy agreement process that's been haunting your team all year. 

We've been listening closely to our customers, and what we keep hearing is this: The secret to AI success isn't just the AI itself; it's using the right platforms to build rock-solid workflows that unlock value for the AI deployment. Think of your business like an Olympic relay race. You can have the fastest runners, the most powerful enterprise agents, but if the baton pass (the handoff between teams) is fumbled, you lose.

Perceptyx, an employee experience platform company, saw this firsthand when it automated its manual, fragmented workflows using Docusign IAM. This shift delivered dramatic efficiencies, including 99% less time spent generating documents and reducing NDA processing from days to minutes.

Agreements are foundational to how business gets done, but the processes around them are often messy. So as we head into the new year, let’s dive into how our Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform — with new features like Agreement Desk and AI contract agents — is designed to not just automate tasks, but to fundamentally change the way teams work and drive real business value in 2026.

Here are three New Year's resolutions for agreement workflows in 2026:

Gather more in shared spaces

Agreements rarely come to life through the effort of a single team: They’re the product of a coordinated journey across departments. Each team brings its own expertise, priorities, and processes, yet all are working toward the same outcome: a clear, enforceable agreement that’s aligned with company policies and moves the business forward. When these handoffs aren’t seamless, agreements can stall. But when teams are aligned and supported by intelligent workflows, contracts become a powerful thread that connects the entire organization.

Agreement Desk is our new centralized space where every team can collaborate across agreement intake, review, and signature.

• Visibility for everyone: Transform simple email requests into trackable tasks on a dashboard, so everyone involved — from the requester to the approvers — has a clear, real-time view of the status. No more frustrating email threads to figure out who has the ball or the latest version!

• Seamless negotiation: All stakeholders across sales, legal, and procurement can redline, comment on, and collaborate in one place.

Say goodbye to busywork

Handling a high volume of agreements often means teams spend countless hours on work that feels more repetitive than strategic. Quickly starting the intake of new agreement requests is essential, but it doesn’t require deep expertise every time it happens. That’s exactly where AI agents can step in.

AI contract agents are your new helpful teammates, purpose-built within Agreement Desk to automate repetitive steps across the agreement lifecycle. They operate under human supervision to ensure accuracy, while continuously learning to achieve greater autonomy in the future.

Work smarter, not harder

You don’t have to burn more hours to get more done. Instead, you can work smarter with AI-powered tools that dramatically accelerate manual agreement reviews.

AI-Assisted Review analyzes contracts against your company's approved playbooks and surfaces issues that need a closer look. This means faster review cycles that keep up with the pace of business.

So, as we head into a new year, the question isn't whether your organization is ready for AI. It's whether your processes are ready for AI to make them extraordinary. By focusing on rock-solid workflows, Docusign IAM is here to help you turn agreement chaos into calm, making 2026 the year your business finally works smarter.