As a major move towards developing digital governance and regulatory compliance in Indian corporate, SignDesk organised a special roundtable on Digital Contract Transformation yesterday, at the Radisson Blu, Mumbai. The session saw more than 20 top legal and compliance professionals from some of India’s top organizations, such as Bisleri, Tata CLiQ, and The Whole Truth Foods.
Focusing on SignDesk’s recent industry report, Beyond the Signature, the roundtable discussed shifting contract management landscapes, increasing expectations of automation, and the practical challenges that organisations are still experiencing in their digitisation efforts.
Krupesh Bhat, SignDesk Founder & CEO, opened the evening with a presentation that captured key findings from the report. Based on in-depth market research, Bhat reported that electronic signatures are universally accepted, yet only 18% of Indian organisations have end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems in place. More than 57% use manual processes in contract drafting, onboarding, compliance, and certification workflows.
“Contract workflow digital transformation is not just about paperless—it’s about supporting business outcomes at speed with appropriate regulatory rigour. AI is assisting legal and compliance functions to keep up with business speed, particularly when such roles do not scale as quickly as operations,” said Krupesh Bhat. “Through collaborative AI platforms, we can derive, validate, and map contract data against business rules in real time, cutting turnaround times from weeks to minutes.”
Roundtable participants exchanged personal anecdotes and debated about operational issues frequently holding back contract transformation initiatives. Leaders’ most common concern was the disjointedness of automation—where finance or legal departments can use a stand-alone digital tool, but onboarding, vendor due diligence, or contract approval processes remain paper or email-based.
A legal head from a large FMCG company highlighted the communication gap between business and legal teams, which often leads to multiple versions of agreements being passed around. “Drafts go back and forth several times because the business team starts the contract without involving legal upfront. By the time legal gets involved, key elements may already be negotiated informally, leading to compliance bottlenecks later.”
E-commerce platform representatives mentioned the number of contracts they handle that falls between 1,000 to 2,000 agreements per year and that it is challenging to keep track of expirations, commitments, and audits in a manual environment. “It is really impossible to have physical contracts at scale,” said one executive, “and when auditors come, finding signed documents or knowing critical clauses is a time waste.
There was a near-consensus on the necessity of an integrated system bringing together CLM, digital signing, archiving, and compliance notifications. There were some who highlighted the compliance impetus imposed by regulators like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which now mandates integration between contractual systems within a company and regulatory dashboards like the DAKSH portal. There were others who spoke about the utility of AI-powered milestone monitoring, post-execution compliance notices, and obligation mining to proactively manage long-term contractual obligations.
In the discussion, a number of participants highlighted that digital contract transformation success depends less on technology and more on readiness in terms of culture. Even knowing the long-term rewards, most organisations will still fight adoption because they perceive short-term disruption or expense. Leadership buy-in and cross-functional commitment were cited as drivers for change.
The report Beyond the Signature was used as a starting point for the discussions, and in consensus, attendees believed that contract transformation needs to shift away from superficial digitisation to intelligent automation. Capabilities like clause playbooks, face-matching for identity confirmation, contract summarization, and AI-powered redlining are no longer future plans; they are now baseline requirements for high-speed organisations.
The session ended with an introduction oft their latest AI-powered platform, Melento, which offers a collaborative intelligence layer for workflow automation between compliance, legal, sales, and finance functions. Intended to make complex contract experiences easy, the platform embodies the company’s vision to facilitate scalable and secure digital operations.
As businesses keep adapting to a changing regulatory landscape, such sessions are an indication of the pressing need for discussions, cooperation, and innovation in legal and compliance tech.
The roundtable served as much a source of knowledge sharing as it was a clarion call to reimagine contracts—not as documents, but as strategic instruments that can unleash competitive edge when digitised.