Recap: Momentum 2020

We hosted our annual San Francisco Momentum customer event as a livestream this year. We shared our latest products and features, as well as our vision for where the DocuSign Agreement Cloud is going next. Here are the highlights.

The Agreement Cloud company

DocuSign CEO Dan Springer and COO Scott Olrich kicked off the event with a review of our progress since announcing the DocuSign Agreement Cloud a year ago. In that time, we have dramatically broadened our offerings of products and services—addressing a clear market need to not only automate the signing of documents but to also transform the entire agreement process.

As Scott summarized, “The world needs an Agreement Cloud company.” Organizations are adopting cloud software suites in areas like sales, services, marketing, HR, operations, and finance. None of these clouds are specialized for agreement processes, yet agreements touch them all. What organizations need is an Agreement Cloud, acting as a platform of record for agreement processes, connected to the other clouds. With the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, Scott concluded, we have upleveled our company to deliver on that need.

To provide a customer perspective, we debuted a new video featuring one of the world’s largest companies, Unilever. As part of its “Smarter Contracting” initiative, Unilever is using three Agreement Cloud products—eSignature, CLM, and Click—to make it easier and faster to conduct business with thousands of suppliers globally. With Smarter Contracting, the average time to complete a contract was cut in half.

Finally, we celebrated our latest big step as the Agreement Cloud company, having announced our intent to acquire Seal Software just last week. In a Q&A with Seal CEO John O’Melia and Seal President Jim Wagner, Scott reinforced the strategic importance of Seal’s AI technology to DocuSign. As partners, we were already succeeding in offering Seal’s technology as DocuSign Insight. When Seal is fully part of DocuSign, we expect to drive Seal’s technology further into our other offerings, allowing customers to benefit even more widely.

New eSignature features

A tradition at Momentum is demos of new products and features. Of course, we started with our core, eSignature, where we continue to deliver new innovations, many driven by customers’ requests:

• Auto-Tagging: Auto-Tagging uses AI to automatically place tags for signatures, dates, and other fields. Instead of manually dragging and dropping tags onto an agreement document one at a time, Auto-Tagging can do it for you, all at once. This technology has been so popular with DocuSign’s mobile users that it is expanding to desktop users and new segments.
• ID Evidence: For customers using DocuSign Identity Verification, this new feature allows you to capture information from a signer’s government ID—including text values such as ID numbers and, optionally, images of the ID. You can securely store the captured information in DocuSign to support compliance processes and auditability. As an example, we highlighted ID Evidence for new-employee onboarding, where a passport is provided as proof of citizenship.
• Drawing: Allow your signers to electronically draw on an image in an agreement. The sender can include the image in the agreement or allow the signer to upload the image, then draw on it. In our demo, we showed a customer signing-off on an installation of rooftop solar panels. The customer was able to report damage to one of the panels by marking it on an overhead photo of the roof. 
• Advanced Recipient Routing: Automatically route envelopes to different recipients based on rules you define. In the demo, because the customer identified a damaged solar panel, we showed how the sign-off would automatically route to Customer Service.

DocuSign Gen, Negotiate, and CLM

Building on our core of eSignature, we showcased a set of products for other parts of the agreement process:

• Gen allows sales reps to automatically generate agreements from data in Salesforce. For example, from an opportunity record in Salesforce, a rep can click a button to generate a contract or order form. Gen automatically merges and formats the relevant Salesforce data into an eSignature-ready document. We shared a customer story about how Gen reduced the number of steps to create an order form by 70% while also simplifying management of order-form templates.
• Negotiate includes Gen’s functionality plus support for review, negotiation, and approval workflows. We demonstrated Negotiate by showing a sender routing an agreement for external review. The signer opened the agreement in Microsoft Word, made a change (without Word’s change-tracking feature on), then routed back to the signer. Negotiate automatically detected the change as a redline, which the sender approved. Everything was centrally tracked, version-controlled, and integrated with Salesforce and eSignature.
• CLM includes Negotiate’s functionality plus an advanced workflow builder, a clause library, an agreement repository, configurable dashboards, and more. We demonstrated the latest versions of these features. We also congratulated the DocuSign CLM team for recently being named a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Contract Lifecycle Management.

Making the Agreement Cloud smart

We concluded our demos with a look at work under development to make the Agreement Cloud increasingly smart:

• A new editor that allows senders to define “smart clauses” that can monitor and fulfill their own terms. A Smart Clause® powered by Clause.io consists of natural language text, parameters, and code. It can be incorporated into any document being sent via DocuSign to perform operations such as adding data to an audit trail or triggering specific events. In our example, we dragged and dropped a Smart Clause® for automatically tracking when a shipment arrives. We then added rules to trigger payment based on a timely or late shipment.
• New ways to ingest, search, and filter agreements, including those that were not executed via DocuSign eSignature.
• An Agreement Analyzer that uses Seal’s AI technology to analyze inbound agreements, identifying areas of risk and triggering actions based on clauses’ content.

DocuSign for Forests 

We closed MomentumLive 2020 with a very special guest: singer/songwriter Colin Hay, leader of Men at Work. Famous for singing of “the man from the land down under,” Colin is closely associated with Australia—including lately the relief efforts for the Australian bushfires. Dan talked with Colin about the devastation and the rebuilding that’s necessary, including the extensive replanting of trees.

As part of our DocuSign for Forests initiative, we were pleased to join Colin in donating $75,000 to Greening Australia. And we were thrilled to have Colin play us out with acoustic versions of his classics “Who Can It Be Now?” “Overkill,” and “Down Under.”

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the livestream. If you missed it, we will have a playback link available soon at our DocuSign Momentum website.

Learn more about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

Read more about our latest products and enhancements.