While we believe recent technological advances complement Docusign’s strategy and will ultimately benefit our business, AI and other technological advances are unpredictable, and there can be no assurance that our strategy will succeed. We may fail to predict or respond effectively to market demand for AI-powered solutions, or customer concerns regarding those solutions. Even if we successfully create, market and sell AI-based offerings that meet customer demand, the costs of developing and operating such solutions (including initial training costs and ongoing processing and inference costs) may reduce profitability and adversely affect our results of operations.
Advances in AI have made and may continue to make some foundational capabilities for agreements (such as analyzing, summarizing and comparing text) cheaper and easier to replicate, enabling companies not previously focused on agreements to provide solutions that compete with some or all of ours. In addition, advances in AI may significantly lower the cost of developing software, enabling companies to quickly and cheaply create agents or other homegrown alternatives that perform some or all of the functions they currently obtain from Docusign.
If providers of large language models, data platform companies, enterprise software companies, “hyperscalers,” or other businesses develop solutions that provide comparable functionality at lower cost or in more convenient formats, demand for our products would suffer and our business, financial condition and results of operations would be adversely affected.