The agreement gap: how AI is transforming cross-border trade, identity, and contract intelligence in APAC

Asia-Pacific (APAC) businesses accelerating digital transformation often discover that their agreement processes remain stubbornly manual and fragmented. With cross-border trade intensifying across APAC's diverse regulatory landscape, businesses are grappling with how to verify identities, enforce agreements, and maintain audit trails without slowing down deal velocity.

Kartik Krishnamurthy, VP of Docusign Asia, shares how businesses can navigate cross-border regulatory complexity, unlock intelligence trapped in legacy contracts, and deploy AI-powered agreement tools responsibly. 

Q: Asia Pacific is home to some of the world's most digitally-advanced economies, yet many businesses still struggle with manual, fragmented agreement processes. What's driving this gap, and what is it costing organisations across the region? 

Krishnamurthy (KK): The paradox is striking. APAC leads globally in AI adoption, yet organisations across the region are losing an estimated US$600 billion every year to outdated agreement processes. That's the cumulative cost of delays, manual handoffs, compliance risks, and lost deals tied to how agreements are created, signed, and managed.

The root cause isn't a lack of digital ambition. It's that agreements have historically been treated as administrative necessities rather than strategic assets. A contract gets signed, filed away, and forgotten about until something goes wrong. That reactive approach doesn't scale in a region where businesses operate across multiple languages, distinct legal systems, and rapidly shifting regulatory environments. 

Agreement management isn't back-office anymore; it's a source of competitive advantage.

Q: Cross-border trade is a defining characteristic of doing business in Asia. How are companies navigating the regulatory complexity that comes with operating across multiple jurisdictions — and what advanced technologies can they consider to do it better?

KK: Cross-border complexity in APAC is a daily operational reality. For example, a regional enterprise might need to comply with MAS regulations in Singapore, PDPA in Thailand, and China's data localisation rules, all while maintaining audit trails that satisfy each jurisdiction. And it's not only compliance. A contract that's valid in Singapore may need to be structured differently for a counterpart in Indonesia or Vietnam, with different identity verification standards applying in each market.

This is where intelligent agreement management (IAM), the next generation of agreement technology, comes in. Where e-signatures solved the problem of getting a document signed, IAM addresses the entire agreement lifecycle. How agreements are created, committed to, and managed afterwards, with AI built into every step. It's a single platform that handles identity verification, automated workflows, compliance routing, and intelligent contract analysis, rather than forcing businesses to stitch together separate tools.

In practice, that means altering agreements to adhere to local law and other compliance issues easily with AI-assisted review, and identity verification for cross-border security, are built into the workflow itself, not bolted on after the fact. 

A good example is Docusign’s integration with Sign with Singpass to enable real-time, government-backed identity verification in Singapore. For markets where national digital identity infrastructure is still maturing, IAM can also support alternative verification methods and adapt to local compliance requirements automatically. The bottom line: businesses shouldn't retrofit compliance after the fact. They should make it native to the agreement process.

Q: Many businesses have years or even decades of agreements locked away in filing cabinets or scattered across servers. How can small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and enterprises alike start turning these static files into actionable business intelligence?

This is where the conversation shifts from digitisation to intelligence. Most organisations have agreements in digital format: PDFs in shared drives, scanned contracts in legacy systems. The problem is that these files are "dead data." You can store them, but you can't query, analyse, or act on them without manual review. 

IAM platforms use AI to transform static files into structured, searchable data. They can instantly identify contracts up for renewal, agreements with non-standard clauses, or vendors with rate escalation terms. The practical starting point would be to begin with a single high-value use case to accelerate contract approvals, automate renewals, or build a centralised compliance repository. Once businesses see ROI from one workflow, expansion becomes easier. 

Q: Compliance frameworks across APAC are tightening, covering digital identity, cross-border data flows, and increasingly AI itself. How does AI in agreement management help with this, rather than create new risk?

KK: This is the question I'd most encourage business leaders to be asking. The instinct is to see AI and compliance as competing forces, but in agreement management, they actually pull in the same direction. 

Regulators across the region are converging on the same expectation: organisations need to demonstrate not just that an agreement was signed, but also who authorised it, when, under what conditions, and whether the process met applicable legal standards. That kind of audit-grade record is almost impossible to produce manually at scale, especially across borders. 

AI-driven workflows, on the other hand, can capture identity, intent, and context at every step automatically. The risk comes in when AI gets bolted onto existing processes without rethinking them, or when the AI itself isn't explainable. If a system flags a clause as high-risk, legal and compliance teams need to know why. 

Q: Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for organisations in Asia Pacific as they modernise their approach to agreements?

KK: The biggest opportunity is convergence. Businesses that bring identity verification, contract intelligence, and workflow automation together into a single platform will have a structural advantage over competitors stitching together disparate tools. Singapore is already leading the region in IAM adoption, and the trust layer provided by Singpass is a big reason why.

The second is agentic AI, systems that take action, not just provide recommendations. Imagine workflows where AI agents automatically route non-standard clauses to legal reviewers, schedule reminders based on contract milestones, and flag renewals with negotiation points pre-prepared. That's not a future-state hypothetical, but the direction we're heading, and APAC organisations that move now will set the terms for how the rest of the market follows.

The window for moving deliberately is narrowing. But the bigger shift is one of mindset: treating agreement management not as an administrative function, but as a strategic one. Every signed document is a source of accountability and insight, and they can be a competitive advantage when managed well. The businesses that internalise that first are the ones that will define how APAC competes over the next decade.

Editor's note: Docusign offers monthly and annual plans for both e-signature and combined e-signature and IAM.