Digitizing the infrastructure of public service delivery

Government depends on agreements. Employees request equipment, complete vendor procurement or submit time-off requests. Constituents determine benefit eligibility, enroll in health plans or apply for permits and licenses. No matter the purpose, more than 75% of government business processes begin with a form. These transactions are so ubiquitous they often fade into the background, but scale tells a different story.           

“At the federal level alone, there are 10,000 unique forms, whether it’s 1099s, W2s, you name it. Each of those gets processed thousands of times per day. So you do the math, and that’s 106 billion transactions a year,” said Michael “MJ” Jackson, global head of industries at Docusign. 

This volume illustrates both a challenge and an extraordinary opportunity. Despite significant modernization efforts, agreement processes remain one of the last — and often most stubborn — manual frontiers inside government. Paper packets still circulate. Staff swivel between email threads, PDFs, spreadsheets and legacy systems. Outcomes hinge not on mission ntent, but on how quickly the right form reaches the right person in the right sequence. 

When an agreement process breaks down, mission delivery slows, which can mean longer waits to access housing or health care, or a delayed public safety response because a warrant is stuck in a queue. 

“It’s public-sector outcomes that really impact all of us as constituents,” Jackson said. “That’s the problem we’re aiming to solve, making agreement processes more efficient, more effective, to ultimately improve outcomes. When we talk about the future of forms or agreements, we’re really talking about the future of government.”

Digitizing the agreement lifecycle has the potential to greatly reduce administrative burdens, collapsing weeks of back-and-forth into hours. And today, the most significant advances in that transformation are coming from AI and automation. These technologies are reshaping every step of the process, starting with the most essential: finding the correct form.

Rather than navigating agency portals trying to memorize form numbers, a constituent can describe their need in plain, natural language. AI can also pre-populate relevant fields by pulling data from systems of record,minimizing redundancies and errors.

Inside the enterprise, meanwhile, AI brings the ability to turn static documents into a source of operational intelligence. Agencies can aggregate patterns across thousands of contracts and forms, gain more visibility into bottlenecks, workload distribution and emerging risks that would otherwise be siloed or even buried in filing cabinets.

“AI can help identify the needle in the haystack that would otherwise be lost and can do it immediately, and at scale,” Jackson said.

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