[magnusss]

Why does docusign need such sophisticated and powerful AI models, to the point that they’re willing to risk their customers’ ire by training on their data (yes I know, even though it’s anonymized per “industry best practices”)? Are they in some additional line of business besides making it possible to sign a contract electronically?

[teeray]

The AI gods smile favorably upon worshipers that invoke them at the shrines of finance these days. They shower them with the same good fortunes that once came from the blockchain false gods.

[suzzer99]

And before that the Big Data false gods, and before that the Web 2.0 false gods, and before that the microservices false gods.

[initplus]

The obvious angle is AI contract generation. Docusign are uniquely positioned to build up a real training set of contracts.

[SteveNuts]

Going to be absolutely wild the first time it spits out a specific enough paragraph to identify the company whose data was used to train the model.

[anon373839]

Or spits out the terms of someone's confidential settlement agreement.

[zubspace]

Yes, and extending existing contracts based on new requirements.

But also contract validation, like check if something missing or finding loopholes. If they are sneaky, they could sell that information to lawyers, who can definitely make use of it.

I'm not inherently pro-AI, but there are indeed valid and interesting use cases for such models, if the data can be anonymized correctly. And I'm not sure if it makes sense to single out DocuSign, because there are probably many companies which train their models on similar data.

[ironmagma]

If they're uniquely positioned to do it, it probably doesn't need to be done. Who is going to usurp them if they don't?

[adamisom]

I find this comment interesting in the context of having read a lot of brain-dead takes on "capitalism", some of which it liken it to feudalism.

I find it interesting because it shows how different those two are.

Under feudal zero-sum world your question would make complete sense, but under a capitalist positive-sum world, it seems to me the answer is just "a lot of profit would be left on the table" (ie positive-sum mutual-benefit transactions), which explains why docusign would do it.

[ironmagma]

I think a lot of danger can come from competing against imaginary forces. You get things like atom bombs and paranoia.

[dorkwood]

You can get more people to invest in your company if you put out a press release that says you're using AI.

[Scoundreller]

I feel so small when a company that... does documenting signing... already has investors thinking it's worth $11b (down from over $50b when many were convinced touching a piece of paper was a common covid vector of transmission...)

[xyst]

It’s not a “need” but they are just riding the coat tails of “AI”. Probably getting a fat check in b2b by selling to OpenAI or many of the VC funded AI companies.

Throw in any AI into a company and the vulture capitalists will load you up on cheap money

[bozhark]

Data the new $