The return-on-investment results are so promising, the study says, that 61% of respondents said their companies are expanding their budgets around agreement management.
The new study, "Capitalizing on AI: How Automated Agreement Workflows Drive ROI," was released by Deloitte and DocuSign, which offers its own agreement management platform powered by artificial intelligence. Other major companies, such as Sirion, Ironclad, Agiloft and more, also offer AI-driven platforms.
"This is the third year we've done the study," Rohan Gupta, a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, told Law360 Pulse. While the first year involved recognizing that the opportunity for AI use was out there, the second year found people starting to explore it, Gupta said.
"But this year, we found that people are beginning to see real results, and that the actual adoption of AI in agreement management is very real. I think that's the biggest take away," he said.
For example, Gary Sonnethal, vice president at Experian, a global data and technology company, said in a statement through DocuSign that it has "significantly reduced contract cycle times from roughly 10 days to hours, made contract data easier to access and understand, and enabled our teams to serve clients more quickly and make better‐informed decisions."
Even Milky Moo, a Brazilian milkshake franchising company that also operates in the U.S., reports that digitizing its legal and sales workflow saved over 1,000 hours of manual work in 2025, according to DocuSign.
Silvia Mundim, legal director at Milky Moo, said in a statement that the change also "has strengthened legal security for Milky Moo and our entire franchise network, while streamlining the closing of new business deals."
The 2026 Deloitte survey included over 1,100 respondents at organizations with some agreement workflow automation in place. It included six countries and covered employees within six functions: legal, sales, procurement, customer experience, human resources and information technology.
Deloitte's Gupta noted that 37% of the legal respondents reported reclaiming time, with one team scaling from about 100 to 200 contracts per year, to 1,000 contracts.
Of the respondents, 33% said they achieved efficiency in time savings and reduced cycle time; 32% said they achieved reduced labor costs and outside counsel spend; 29% saw a reduction in risk exposure, errors, and compliance-related costs; and 6% reported an increase in revenue through more renewals and closed opportunities.
About 65% of senior leaders with direct responsibility for agreement management reported seeing the highest ROI in the pre-signature phase of the agreement, particularly in routing, editing and approval.
"Routing, editing and approval sits at the center of the lifecycle," the report explains, "connecting functions such as legal, procurement, finance and sales. When these are automated, agreements move more efficiently between stakeholders, reducing coordination friction and accelerating workflows that would otherwise be impacted by handoffs."
Peter Emmi, a partner in the corporate technology practice at Reed Smith LLP in New York, said he found the 65% figure particularly telling because it was derived consistently across respondents from different companies and functions.
"What that signals may be somewhat obvious," Emmi told Law360 Pulse, "that friction, and not agreement complexity, is the dominant cost driver. And the largest impact on cost savings is derived from reacting to it in an automated fashion using agentic AI tools, thus saving a great deal of time" by eliminating bottlenecks in the process.
He noted that another 59% of respondents identified review and risk evaluation as a factor that elicits a high return on investment from cost savings. The biggest gains came from reducing cycle time from automated drafting and standardizing decision-making, "in which people and their schedules historically slow things down," Emmi said.
Another 50% of respondents mentioned enterprise integration of AI tools and capabilities as a way to achieve strategic advantage.
But Emmi said he found it surprising that only 16% of respondents reported currently using advanced analytics and AI to analyze agreements.
That number also struck Lucy Bassli, chief legal strategist at LawGeex, as surprising. Bassli, a former assistant general counsel and head of legal ops at Microsoft, also serves as founder and principal of InnoLegal Services in Bellevue, Washington.
"What surprised me most is how little AI value is showing up in the 'analyze' phase," Bassli told Law360. That only 16% report using AI for intelligence and insights "tells me most companies are still treating [the contract management platform] as a faster way to get to signature, not a smarter way to run the business," she said.
However, 74% of respondents said they are planning to deploy agentic AI within two years.
Deloitte's study reported that "AI is everywhere, but results aren't equal." In other words, the study found a gap between organizations using fragmented AI tools and those adopting end-to-end platforms.
As Bassli implied, more value will come to companies that move the intelligence and insights phase to the front of the contract management process, according to Deloitte, "and use this data to not only help inform future contracts, but also to shape all subsequent steps of the contract management process."
Along that same line, Emmi noted that only 3% of respondents who used "AI-assisted workflows" cited an increased ROI over 12 months, but 29% of respondents using "agentic AI workflows" saw an increase. Agentic AI can plan, make decisions and execute workflows without step-by-step prompts.
From a legal-focused deal perspective, he said, "the broad implication is that agentic AI processes must be embedded at all stages of the agreement cycle in order to remain competitive, and that the roles of the attorneys in the process must be shifted such that they still control and oversee the processes that are taking place."
--Editing by Alyssa Miller.
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