How Docusign Uses Elasticsearch to Power Generative AI Agreement Management
Docusign, the Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform serving 1.6 million customers and over 1 billion users across 180 countries, built its AI-powered Navigator repository on Elasticsearch to index and search billions of agreements in real time. The deployment enables customers to find specific documents in under a minute—tasks that previously took hours—while handling millions of new agreements added to the platform each day.
Impact
Under 1 minute
Document retrieval time
Millions per day
Daily agreement volume handled
Challenge
Docusign needed a search infrastructure capable of indexing and querying billions of agreements in real time as it built its AI-powered Intelligent Agreement Management platform—with customers previously spending hours searching across disconnected systems to locate a single document.
Solution
Elasticsearch was deployed as the indexing and search foundation for Docusign Navigator, running on Microsoft Azure, enabling natural language document retrieval, AI-powered agreement insights, and proactive renewal identification across billions of customer agreements.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Elasticsearch is the only solution that can handle billions of new agreements every day while enabling Docusign to deliver the benefits of generative AI to its customers.”
“Imagine a legal team receiving a 9 PM request to find a specific vendor agreement. Traditionally, this could take hours. With Navigator and Elasticsearch, it now takes less than a minute, dramatically improving efficiency.”
“Generative AI is revolutionizing every part of the agreement process. With Elasticsearch, we’re able to turn this disruption into business value and competitive advantage for our customers.”
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Full Story
Docusign processes an extraordinary volume of agreement data across its customer base of 1.6 million organizations. Before its AI-driven IAM platform, users routinely searched across disconnected systems—Google Drive, SharePoint, email archives—to locate a single agreement. For a procurement professional verifying whether an NDA existed or confirming compliance terms, this could mean hours of manual search across multiple platforms and reading entire documents to extract a single relevant clause.
The operational gap was structural. As Docusign expanded from e-signature into full agreement lifecycle management, the company needed a search foundation capable of handling billions of documents at production scale while enabling AI to surface specific insights from the content. No general-purpose database could index and query at that volume with the performance agreements management demands. The solution needed to handle semantic understanding, not just keyword matching.
Docusign built its Navigator repository on Elasticsearch, running on Microsoft Azure. Elasticsearch indexes every agreement stored on the platform, enabling users to ask natural language questions—“Find me all agreements with termination clauses”—and receive instant, contextually relevant results with highlighted content and surrounding context. The Elastic platform also powers proactive features: as renewal deadlines approach, the system automatically identifies and notifies customers about upcoming expirations, including surfacing unused vendor services that customers are paying for but no longer using.
The operational results are direct. Customers who previously spent hours locating a single agreement at 9 PM under deadline pressure can now retrieve it in under a minute. Docusign’s legal teams and procurement professionals can complete research tasks that once consumed hours in seconds. Financially, Navigator’s proactive renewal identification helps customers avoid waste on unused contracts and capture savings on services they’ve forgotten they’re paying for.
Docusign is actively expanding the AI layer built on Elasticsearch. Hiral Shah’s team is exploring semantic search with Elasticsearch’s vector database and RAG capabilities to enable question-and-answer workflows across agreement data. The company is also migrating toward Elastic Cloud Serverless for cloud-native architecture at scale. For Docusign, Elasticsearch is the infrastructure layer that makes generative AI usable across the entire agreement lifecycle—from creation through execution and ongoing management.