Guest opinion: Across Australia, boards are approving AI strategies with urgency. Productivity is stagnant, costs are rising, and labor is tight. AI should be a way to get more out of existing teams, but many organizations don’t have the foundations for AI productivity in place.
Most work is still done on email and shared drives. Decisions take time and contracts are kept in folders with confusing names. Approval often relies on someone transferring the PDF and tracking the final version of the agreement across multiple copies.
This is most noticeable in small and medium-sized enterprises. In small businesses, owners wear many hats and have little time to redesign work flow. Large organizations also struggle with years of legacy processes, duplicate tools, and half-baked digital projects. The scale of fragmentation is measurable. According to Docusign, nearly three-quarters (72%) of organizations use multiple tools to manage contracts, and nearly two-thirds (65%) use four or more tools together. Utilization of AI Report.
Models require structured, reliable data and clear rules. There should be a simple process to follow. All too often these basics are missing.
prepare the basics
Many organizations still cannot readily answer basic questions about contracts. “Where are my contracts stored?” When do important terms expire? How consistent are terms across deals? Until companies can quickly identify key agreements with a single source of truth, AI will remain more of a promise than a tool. However, only 7% of organizations currently use a single unified contract management solution, with the remainder piecing together a patchwork that AI models cannot reliably read.
This is important not only for managers but also for the economy. All employment, sales, suppliers, and partnerships rely on some form of contract. When internal processes are slow and error-prone, costs increase and transactions take longer.
productivity tax
Weak foundations also increase risk. Contracts left unread in crowded inboxes can slow down decision-making and drive customers away. Similarly, having multiple versions can lead to someone signing the wrong version or missing important provisions. It becomes unpaid labor and avoidable conflict.
At the same time, Australia’s rules around privacy, data security and consumer protection continue to tighten, but many leaders remain unaware of what they have agreed to, with whom, and on what terms. When these frictions add up, they put a huge strain on quiet productivity.
We talk about AI as Australia’s new growth engine. When critical data and workflows are left in a disorganized system, the engine will not perform properly.
where to start
The first change is moving agreements from your inbox to a shared workspace. Email is useful for conversations, but it’s a poor record system. All contracts should be in a shared environment where they can be drafted, reviewed, approved, signed, and updated in one place. People need to be able to see who owns their next steps and what’s stopping them. Once agreements are traceable and searchable, AI can assist with next actions.
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The second shift is to standardize and mine data. Many organizations still write contracts from scratch, creating a patchwork of clauses and forms that slow reviews and hide risks. Standard templates and clear approval rules speed up your work while giving your AI a predictable structure.
Next, get payment terms, notice periods, and liability limits, compare them to your desired position, and flag any anomalies. Leaders can ask things like what the actual payment terms are, what deals most often lead to disputes, and how long it actually takes from proposal to signature.
The third shift is the disciplined use of AI on a foundation with strong governance. A good starting point is to create a first version of a standard document from a template, extract important fields into your CRM or financial system, and help your legal team prioritize which contracts to review first each day.
Decisions that affect someone’s livelihood or legal rights, or that rely on sensitive data, still require clear human judgment and accountability. Boards and regulators also want firm answers about where consent data resides, who can see it, and how AI will use it. Contract systems that store data in Australian data centers, provide granular access controls, and record AI-assisted decision-making have both a compliance and trust advantage.
Achieve substantial productivity improvements
Australia has the skills, capital and desire to lead in AI. But leadership will not be awarded to those who implement the greatest models, but to organizations that implement the basics best. Once you have these basics in place, your daily work experience will change. Vague emails become structured requests on a shared dashboard, ownership and next steps are clear, and legal and commercial teams work in a single workspace where all drafts, comments, and redlines are visible.
In that environment, the AI performs the first pass of review. This means checking language against the playbook, highlighting risky clauses, suggesting alternative language, and extracting key fields that need to be captured in your finance or CRM system. Reviewers can open the document and ask, “Where does this deviate from the standard terms?” How does this compare to similar deals? While routine contracts can be expedited with AI-suggested edits, people focus their time on really complex negotiations. After signing, the same system can show which requests are stuck, which contracts are up for renewal, and where spending isn’t worth it.
For small businesses, this means bringing contract workflows into an AI-enabled system. For large organizations, this means dealing with complex legacy processes between AI strategy and day-to-day operations.
If we fix the unglamorous plumbing based on agreements now, AI will run on solid rails and deliver real productivity gains. Otherwise, while other countries turn technology into sustainable growth, we will continue to add powerful tools to unreliable systems.
The choice and the basis are up to us.
by Sean McLaganGroup Vice President and GM APJ, docusign
