The AI Contract Big Model officially enters the era of the "Brainpower Revolution".
At the beginning of 2025, the global AI battlefield is filled with smoke and dust.
ChatGPT has quietly iterated to GPT-6. After DeepSeek emerged and made great achievements in multiple fields, the artificial intelligence company under Elon Musk followed closely and released the Grok 3 series of models with a heavyweight.
China is also embracing new technologies more actively and openly. Up to now, the 12345 hotline in Liaoning Province and the 12345 hotline in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province have successively connected to DeepSeek. Shenzhen Longgang, Wuxi in Jiangsu, Ganzhou in Jiangxi and other places have also announced the completion of the deployment of the DeepSeek series of large models in the government affairs environment one after another.
While Deepseek is stirring up the global AI world as a dark horse, few people have noticed that the aftershocks of this storm have already quietly permeated the capillaries of China's private technology enterprises.
In an unremarkable office building in Binjiang District, Hangzhou, a quieter but more revolutionary change in the industry is taking place - the "Chinese standard" in the global electronic signature field has been hatched here, and the first AI contract large model has also recently been born.
When everyone thought that the AI revolution belonged only to technology giants, eSign has completed a triple jump from "electronic seal" to "AI contract large model" in 23 years, becoming a veritable "invisible champion".
When others are chasing the AI trend, it has already planted the seeds of revolution in the cracks of the contract.
01. The Vigorous Binjiang District, the "Golden Incubator" for Technology Enterprises
If you know about Binjiang District in Hangzhou, it is not difficult to infer the temperament of eSign.
Binjiang District, a place known as the "Paradise Silicon Valley", almost condenses the code for the rise of China's technology.
In June 2002, the Hangzhou High-tech Industrial Development Zone and Binjiang District were merged into one, making Hangzhou move from the "West Lake Era" to the "Qiantang River Era" and embark on a road of technological innovation.
From Hikvision to Dahua Technology, from Ant Financial to eSign, Binjiang District has gathered a group of invisible champions in the subdivided fields that "choke the neck" - and their common points are the adherence to technology and the obsession with "solving real problems".
In 2002 in the Chinese Internet, Taobao had not yet been born, and QQ users had just exceeded 100 million. In a civilian house in the west of Hangzhou, Jin Hongzhou, the founder of eSign, wrote the first line of code that changed the fate of the industry in the face of mountains of paper contracts.
They may not have thought that this seemingly marginal field would eventually evolve into the "trust infrastructure" in the digital economy era.
"At that time, even the term 'electronic signature' did not exist," Jin Hongzhou, the founder of eSign, once recalled. At that time, it took an average of 47 days for enterprises to go through 7 departments and affix 14 official seals to handle business changes. Once, in order to catch up with the project progress, the team rushed 800 kilometers by green train with the official seal, but was rejected at the last moment due to the color deviation of the inkpad.
This extremely inefficient reality that seems to be nowadays gave birth to the prototype of China's first electronic signature system. In 2005, eSign first launched an online electronic contract signing platform, allowing enterprises to bid farewell to paper contracts, but the user experience at that time could be described as "disastrous" - complex installation, stuck interface, and even the need to manually insert a U Shield for verification.
But the real turning point occurred in 2014: The State Council promoted the "Internet + Government Services", and Zhejiang Province took the lead in launching the "Run at Most Once" reform.
In 2014, eSign revolutionized through the SaaS model and launched a cloud-based electronic signature interface to achieve "instant use". This breakthrough not only defined the prototype of the industry, but also promoted electronic signatures from a luxury to a necessity.
According to 36Kr, after Hikvision put eSign's electronic signature into use, the personnel input of its corresponding department was reduced from 8 to 1, and the contract cost input was reduced from 3 million yuan per year to several hundred thousand yuan.
After Huaxia Bank launched the eSign electronic signature service, the document signing efficiency was increased by 90%, the personnel input was reduced by 60%, and the paper cost, mailing cost, and document management cost were reduced by 85%.
What is even more valuable is that the relationship between Binjiang and eSign is not only nurturing, but also a two-way pursuit.
The location advantage by the Qiantang River makes Binjiang the "golden node" of the Yangtze River Delta Digital Economy Corridor; and the courage of the government's "Run at Most Once" reform makes this land a testing ground for policy innovation.
In 2015, eSign signed a contract with the People's Government of Zhejiang Province, actively responding to the "Run at Most Once" policy, and developing multiple online application scenarios for the provincial government departments. For example, Tonglu City reached a cooperation with eSign and launched the first online business registration platform in the country, where entrepreneurs can register a company with their mobile phones with the help of technologies such as face recognition and electronic signature.
In 2018, the Hangzhou Talent Service Bureau launched the eSign electronic signature, allowing fresh graduates to get the Hangzhou College Graduate Employment Receipt with an electronic seal in less than a minute. In this process, eSign has also become the only electronic signature supplier for the "Run at Most Once" in Zhejiang Province.
The logic behind this reform is a "two-way pursuit" between the government and enterprises - the government provides the institutional soil, and enterprises use technology to feed back the industrial upgrading.
02. The AI Revolution of eSign Has Already Arrived Quietly
For an enterprise, AI is not a single tactical action, but a set of digital connection systems.
In 2019, eSign's All in AI contract strategy caused intense internal debates. Some people questioned, "Electronic signatures have not yet been popularized. Is AI too advanced?"
Facts have proved that the direction of eSign is correct. In September 2023, eSign released the PaaS platform exclusive to the electronic signature industry - ePaaS, which integrates the capabilities of several mainstream general large models in China. eSign's "Integrated Electronic Contract Cloud Platform for Signing and Management" is based on the ePaaS base, allowing AI capabilities to run through the entire life cycle of the electronic contract.
Now that eSign has released the industry's first AI contract large model, what kind of subversion can it bring to the industry in the end?
1. Breaking Through Technological Barriers to Solve Industry Dilemmas.
The contract large model is specifically designed to solve contract problems and requires more rigor than AI in other application fields - the reason is not difficult to understand. The contract scenario is particularly strict and cannot make mistakes. Therefore, the eSign model is composed of several specialized small models, and each small model has its own task.
In the process of self-research and development, eSign has also adopted a triple guarantee mechanism to ensure the security of contract data.
First, eSign's large model is completely independently developed without relying on any third-party technology or data. This step ensures eSign's absolute control over the large model and the security of the data. Secondly, the training process of the model is also carried out locally, which means that all data processing is completed on eSign's own server and will not be accessed by third parties. Moreover, only eSign can access the core data of customers, effectively ensuring the privacy of the data.
From contract upload to model processing to the final result output, the entire process achieves end-to-end double encryption.
According to the latest round of evaluation data, eSign's completely self-developed contract large model has surpassed some general large models in multiple contract fields. For example, the four basic capabilities of contract layout analysis, contract summary, contract information extraction, and contract clause identification have achieved very significant improvements, and the performance is far better than that of GPT.
2. To Truly Enable Cost Revolution for Enterprises on eSign.
AI + The key is the application scenario. Only when the users find it useful is it a real revolution.
The eSign AI contract large model is not a simple technical superimposition, but a profound remodeling of the contract processing logic. The contract agent based on the large model is a profound change from "electronic contract" to "intelligent contract".
For example, eSign's integrated signing and management function uses AI technology to parse the contract into structured data to achieve unified contract management. Just upload the contract file, and AI can intelligently extract the contract information and convert it into dynamic data for subsequent intelligent management.
The custom filing rule function allows users to set filing rules according to contract types, amounts and other conditions to achieve automatic filing and classified management of contracts.
From layout analysis to content parsing to risk identification, the AI contract large model can accurately control every step to ensure that every link of contract processing is efficient and error-free.
In this way, the time cost, labor cost, and financial cost of enterprises in dealing with contracts have been greatly reduced, while the security and accuracy have been improved, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to use AI with "zero threshold".
In this process, eSign uses the AI large model to truly achieve technological benefits for enterprises.
03. The Mission of the Invisible Champion: The "Chinese Answer" for Digital Trust Infrastructure
Jin Hongzhou, the founder and CEO of eSign, once said, "We want one quarter of the world's population to use eSign to sign contracts."
Nowadays, from the initially unnoticed business track to the industry "invisible champion", the social value of eSign is being increasingly magnified, thanks to an important key point:
From Tool Innovation to the Upgrade of the Trust System.
The core pain points in the digital economy era are very obvious, such as contract fraud, performance risk, legal disputes, etc., and eSign has built a trusted trading environment.
eSign made a huge progress in 2024, that is, it completed the upgrade from SaaS to TaaS - obtaining the CA license issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. This is a key step in the strategic upgrade, marking eSign's official transformation into a third-party commercial trust company.
The relevant person in charge of eSign summarized the three major strategies, also revealing the future direction of this company:
"First, we want to be the largest third-party commercial trust service platform in China, continue to expand our signing network, and create a business environment with trust as the top priority for China; second, on the road of AI, we will continue to increase investment to truly achieve the popularization of intelligent contract management services; third, going global, we want to build an electronic signature system led by China."
It can be said that with the support of AI capabilities, eSign's products are becoming more and more user-friendly. On the premise of strengthening the inclusive attributes of the products, it promotes the transformation of eSign to truly realize the third-party commercial trust service platform and builds the engine to achieve the largest global signing network.
It is understood that throughout 2024, eSign's intelligent contract completed 50 million contract comparisons, 200 million field extractions, 10 million clause identifications, and 50 million uses of intelligent templates, saving about 100 billion sheets of paper for the whole society.
This shows that AI should not only be the game of giants. eSign has proved that "small enterprises can also use top-notch technology".
At the same time, different from the "technology colonialism" thinking, eSign exports the "technology + culture dual standards" by jointly building an electronic signature alliance with Singapore, Malaysia and other countries.
Looking back at the 20 years of eSign, it is precisely the epitome of the evolution of China's digital economy: from imitation and following to defining rules, from technology application to reconstructing civilization. This is the technological spirit of Binjiang District, Hangzhou - foreign giants conquer the world with code, and Chinese technology enterprises plant trust with AI.
eSign is not chasing the times, but defining the trust rules of the next era.
This is the sexy power of Chinese technology enterprises.