Agreements in the Era of Agentic AI: The UK’s Chance to Lead
Read this guest blog by Jim Shaughnessy, Chief Legal Officer at DocuSign, for Tech and Innovation Focus 2026.
The era of agentic AI has arrived, and it changes the core question for agreement workflows. The issue is no longer how much productivity we can gain. It is whether businesses, regulators and courts can trust the way AI-driven systems exercise delegated authority.
Without trust, agentic AI will stall at the pilot stage. With trust, it can scale across sectors and deliver real growth. That is why we should be talking not only about models and use cases, but about evidence and accountability. Internal policies are no longer enough, and the UK is uniquely positioned to lead on a shared evidentiary framework. At its centre is a new concept: the agentic certificate.
The trust deficit: from permission to proof
AI in the agreements domain is evolving quickly, from simple text generation to coordinated actions: systems can now analyse counterparty terms, apply playbooks, propose redlines and route exceptions. Once systems act on their own, the question shifts from speed to authority. When an AI agent operates across a workflow, what was it allowed to do, under whose authority, and how can the organisation prove that in a way a court or regulator will accept?
A policy describing an agent's remit is only part of the answer. It must be paired with a way to enforce those limits and prove afterwards that they were respected. Today that link is weak: policy sits in one place, fragmented logs elsewhere. The result is a trust deficit that slows adoption.
To close that gap, industry must move from ad hoc logs to a standard, evidentiary record: the agentic certificate. Much like a certificate of completion proves the integrity of a signing process, it would be a secure, tamper-evident record of an AI agent's work, a chain of custody for digital decision-making designed to meet familiar tests for authenticity, integrity and reliability.
It would capture, at a minimum: the parameters and constraints given to the agent, the data and context it relied on at a point in time, and the actions and outputs that followed.
This turns opaque behaviour into transparent, verifiable events, enabling an organisation to demonstrate what was done, under whose authority, and with what rationale, without exposing proprietary models. It gives courts and regulators a basis to judge whether a firm met its duties of care and control while giving firms the confidence to deploy at scale, proving compliance rather than asserting it.
The UK's strategic advantage
For the UK, agentic contracting is a strategic opportunity. English law governs a large share of international commercial transactions, 1 and UK legal services generate tens of billions of pounds in value. 2 Banks, manufacturers, infrastructure operators and public bodies all rely on agreements built on the UK’s legal foundations. If agentic AI changes how agreements are negotiated, approved, and enforced, it will reshape how those sectors experience risk and value, giving the UK a direct stake and a natural leadership role.
Regulators are already framing the problem: the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum has described a spectrum of agent autonomy and made one principle clear, that delegating work to an autonomous agent does not move legal responsibility away from the organisation that deployed it.
In practice, any dispute will come back to the audit trail. Is there a complete, tamper-evident record? Is it admissible? Who must show the agent acted within its mandate? If each firm answers alone, the result is a patchwork of incompatible approaches that slows adoption.
The alternative is a deliberate design exercise. The UK can define basic trust primitives for agentic work, shared evidence elements that make AI-driven workflows verifiable, whatever system produced them. Anchored in English law and regulatory guidance, they would travel with the cross-border contracts that already look to it. The UK can export an infrastructure for agentic trust rather than import standards defined elsewhere.
Human commitment at the core
For high-value, high-risk commitments, fully autonomous execution is not a sensible near-term objective; the opportunity is to augment human decision-making, not replace it. Operating models should reflect graduated autonomy. AI agents can gather information, prepare drafts, apply playbooks, validate data and route issues at speeds no human team can match. But the final act of commitment should remain with clearly identified, authorised individuals: signatures, authorisations and irrevocable transfers should still be made by humans who own the decision. Agentic certificates provide the proof needed to trust the steps leading to that act.
The standard behind the shift
What should happen next?
Legal and professional services firms, technology providers and regulators have a narrow but important window to pilot a shared framework for agentic certificates. The most obvious proving grounds are environments where both productivity and risk reduction matter: high-volume commercial contracts, public sector procurement, and regulated financial services agreements.
Those are the places where evidentiary records will shape not only internal governance, but also litigation, arbitration, and regulatory outcomes. They are also the places where trust in AI will either accelerate adoption or stall it.
To make progress, three elements need to come together:
- Technical foundations. Agreement data and workflows must be structured in ways that support secure, auditable records. Systems must be able to produce agentic certificates as a standard output, not as an afterthought.
- Organisational change. Firms need clear playbooks for where and how agents may act, when they must escalate, and how responsibilities are allocated between humans and systems.
- Policy clarity. Regulators should provide proportionate, interoperable expectations on evidence and accountability, so that firms can build once and satisfy multiple obligations.
If the UK can align those elements and use them to demand verifiable, certificate-backed accountability for AI, agentic contracting can scale in a way that is both safe and commercially attractive. That, in turn, will support broader adoption of agentic AI, stronger confidence among counterparties and regulators, and real productivity gains across the economy.
Author
Jim Shaughnessy
Jim Shaughnessy
Refrences
- The Law Society (2025), Global position of English law in 2025 – International Data Insights Report - https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/research/international-data-insights-report-2025
- The Law Society (2024), Legal sector grows by 50% in the last decade. - https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/contact-or-visit-us/press-office/press-releases/legal-sector-grows-by-50-per-cent-in-the-last-decade
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