Share
The future of business and technology will not be shaped by developers or programmers, or product and marketing specialists, but by the ever-evolving expectations of consumers, said Jerome Levadoux, group vice president, during the REALTORS® Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
Levadoux, who spoke during the Emerging Business & Technology Forum on Saturday afternoon, said DocuSign—known best for their e-signature innovations—has expanded their offerings to better serve the needs of business professionals. “We realized there are a lot of other legacy systems beyond signature” that needed updating, Levadoux said. Their response is the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, a suite that includes 15 separate products across four categories:
- Prepare products generate agreements, contracts and forms;
- Sign encompasses the traditional e-signature products, which now includes an electronic notary option;
- Act products automate agreement workflows and collect payments;
- Manage products track tasks and documents and foster collaboration among the parties involved in a transaction.
Emerging artificial intelligence products are also under the manage umbrella and these advancements could bring the most change to agreement technology, said Levadoux. DocuSign’s AI products can now read forms and automatically identify the fields that are required for signature or action. In the past, those creating the agreement had to drag and drop to create each individual field.
When asked how long it would take for the company to go a step further to scan documents and identify liabilities or errors, Levadoux predicted that technology could be coming in as little as 1-2 years. The first step is to figure out what is in the document, and to see if fields are missing or not filled out, he said. The next is to leverage that information to provide practitioners with automated risk reduction. DocuSign is a partner with the REALTOR Benefits® Program. Learn more about this member benefit.
4 More Highlights from the Emerging Business & Technology Forum
- Brivity. Chief Evangelist Bob Stewart predicted that in the future, real estate pros will spend less time maintaining their CRM databases. Instead of manual data and contact entry, big data storehouses will be able to fill in and update contact information and other personal details. Today, Stewart said that tools like BeenVerified are already able to pull public record information for practitioners who want more information about their leads or sphere contacts.
- Broker Assist. Co-founder Dan Spillane believes that his company will be the answer to a question the industry has spent years asking: “What will be the Uber of real estate?” Leveraging the concept of the gig economy, Broker Assist is a collaboration and referral network that helps agents facilitate everything from showing and open house coverage to in- and out-of-network referrals. The product also provides a secure platform for agent-to-agent payments.
- Curbio. A pre-sale renovation startup, Curbio allows homeowners to “flip their own properties and cash in on their biggest asset,” said Rikki Rogers, the company’s vice president of marketing. Homeowners who use Curbio get a dedicated project manager who handles all aspects of the home renovation, which is designed to reflect the tastes of current buyers. Curbio reduces the financial burden on homeowners by collecting payment at the close of the transaction. Curbio is a member of the 2019 REACH Accelerator Class.
- Torch. CEO Antony Falco made the case for using augmented reality within the real estate industry. AR, which is the process of “superimposing data on the real world,” can offer context to otherwise flat spaces. Torch’s platform allows users to easily build AR experiences that draw out both fact and emotion—two factors that Falco says are required for making a home buying decision.
