DocuSign's artificial intelligence resources have reportedly been boosted as the company acquires Lexion, an AI-powered contract management firm. The firm revealed on Monday that it will acquire contract workflow automation firm Lexion for $165 million.
The acquisition coincides with DocuSign's growing expenditures in the contract management market. Most recently, the company introduced DocuSign IAM, a service that links several elements of the corporate agreement generation and negotiation process.
The nonprofit Allen Institute's AI-focused research division, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), served as Lexion's incubator.
Along with engineering guru James Baird and former Microsoft research software development engineering head Emad Elwany, Gaurav Oberoi started the business.
Before this, Oberoi co-developed the survey platform Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey purchased not long after it began.
DocuSign claims that businesses have benefited from the use of AI to consolidate and streamline the contracting process thanks to Lexion's incredibly straightforward agreement workflow platform.
Lexion's clientele includes in-house legal teams and users from sales, procurement, finance, marketing, HR, and other departments.
Lexion offers specific AI experiences and capabilities to help Docusign realize its goal of intelligent agreement management more quickly. Bringing sophisticated document comprehension skills, such as contract reviews, negotiation, and a Q&A session.
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DocuSign's AI-Powered IAM
DocuSign unveiled a new category, Intelligent Agreement Management, last month. To spearhead that category are new line-of-business apps and DocuSign IAM, an AI-powered intelligent agreement management platform.
It is anticipated that DocuSign's scalable agreement platform, AI team, and deep AI experience from Lexion will play a key role in bringing the company's vision to life and propelling rapid innovation on a larger scale in the future, enabling DocuSign to serve more customer use cases, industries, and sub-industries, sooner.
DocuSign, reportedly selling itself to a private equity firm, is valued at approximately $12.5 billion, and the acquisition comes at a critical juncture.
In February, DocuSign announced it would eliminate 400 jobs, or approximately 6% of its employment, to entice potential investors with its impressive books.
Other acquisitions made by DocuSign include the cloud-based sales contract management platform SpringCM (purchased in July 2018 for $220 million) and the AI-driven contract analytics startup Seal Software (bought in February 2020 for $188 million).
DocuSign's AI Policies
DocuSign AI continues to expand, but such expansion comes with several questionable policy changes. According to a March report, the company's updated FAQ states it can gather user data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) programs.
The paper states that some eSignature clients and users of DocuSign's Contract Lifecycle Management product are eligible for AI training.
An internal AI software being developed by the corporation is "based on open-source AI models that have been customized by DocuSign."
The corporation apparently intends to give user data, including the contracts people sign, to the AI software to enhance it.
This is in response to releasing a Generative AI "Agreement Summarization" tool, which scans long contracts for the essential elements.
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(Photo: Tech Times)
