The wrong question is whether an agent can sign
Most teams do not need an AI agent to become a legal actor. They need the agent to move repeatable paperwork forward without making new legal choices. The agent can collect recipient details, choose an approved template, run a dry run, and send the packet once a human operator has approved the send.
That is very different from letting the agent draft terms, negotiate risk, or consent on behalf of a company. The product boundary should be visible in the workflow: the contract language is approved before the agent touches it, and the final signature comes from a person in the browser.
The agent should handle ceremony, not judgment
Contract workflows have many mechanical steps: pick the packet, fill known variables, email the signer, track status, send reminders, and download the executed record. Those are good jobs for software agents because they are repetitive and easy to audit.
The judgment steps stay human. Someone decides which packet applies, whether the recipient should receive it, whether the dry-run output is acceptable, and whether a signed document should unblock the next business action.
A safe workflow has a dry run
A dry run turns the agent's plan into inspectable JSON before any email goes out. The human can see the recipient, template, fields, webhook metadata, and document title. If something looks wrong, nothing has been sent yet.
That checkpoint matters because agents are fast. A fast mistake in a contract workflow is still a contract workflow mistake. Dry-run-first keeps speed from becoming surprise.
The output should be machine-readable
After a human signs, the next system needs more than a screenshot. It needs a status, signed PDF, completion timestamp, audit events, and a hash that can be stored beside the application's own record.
That is the shape AgentContract optimizes for: agent sends approved packet, human signs, application receives a durable record.