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2 days ago
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Docusign's new AI aims to explain a document you need to sign.
- The AI can also help document creators prepare a form.
- But always verify the information you receive from an AI.
Have you ever received a long and complex document that you needed to sign via Docusign? Did you take the time to read and understand all the finer legal points? No? I didn't think so. Often such documents are steeped in complicated and confusing legalese, challenging us to interpret them. Now, Docusign has a new AI-powered feature that strives to help.
Launched on Tuesday, DocuSign's new contract-specific AI aims to cut through the legal jargon in contracts, forms, and other documents so you can better understand what you're signing before you sign it. With this goal in mind, the AI in the latest version of eSignature serves up a simple summary of the agreement with all the key terms used throughout. You can also ask the AI specific questions, such as "What happens if I need to cancel the agreement?" or "When does this contract expire?"
And there's more. Beyond assisting document signers, the AI is also there to help document creators. Endeavoring to put together all the text, the fields, the formatting, and the other parts of a form can be challenging. Here, the AI tries to automate the process by identifying different types of agreements, confirming the recipient details, and putting the signature and information fields into the right places.
"AI is transforming the way people work, but agreements demand an extra level of clarity and trust," Mangesh Bhandarkar, GVP of Product Management at Docusign, said in a news release. "Our customers tell us manual agreement preparation is time-consuming, and signer confusion causes delays. We're applying AI to solve both challenges by removing the contract busywork for preparers and using features like AI-powered summaries to eliminate signer hesitation. This directly drives faster completion rates and a more trustworthy process."
This all certainly sounds helpful. But it's still AI. And that means it can make mistakes. Can you trust Docusign's AI to interpret all the points of a document and answer your questions correctly? That trust is especially crucial if you're signing a legal document that you need to fully understand before signing it.
How to fact-check the AI
There are no easy answers to that question. But you can take a few steps.
- First, verify any sources referenced in the AI-based summary by following them to confirm the information.
- Second, ask challenging follow-up questions. If a response from the AI doesn't sound quite right, challenge it to verify that the information is correct.
- Third, try to extract all or part of the document and run it through other AIs to see if the details match. Request a summary and ask the same questions across the board.
- Fourth, independently research any questionable or confusing points in the document. That means searching on the web yourself.
AI can certainly be a time saver. And this new feature from Docusign sounds promising. But you still need to do your due diligence to make sure the information you receive is accurate and reliable.
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