Adobe Acrobat's AI Assistant can now decipher complex contracts for you

We all have to deal with contracts and agreements as consumers or business professionals. However, as most contracts are written in legalese, understanding them can be challenging. To ease the pain, Adobe has added a new skill to its Acrobat AI that tries to interpret complex contracts for the average person.

Automatically detecting when a PDF is a contract, the AI can summarize the information, suggest questions for you to ask, and even find differences between multiple versions of a contract. To access the new contract-reading superpower, you’ll need to purchase Adobe’s AI Assistant for Acrobat, a $5 per month add-on for the paid Adobe Acrobat and the free Acrobat Reader.

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Recognizing regular PDFs and scanned documents set up as contracts, the AI will generate an overview and highlight keywords and terms for you. After analyzing the document, the AI provides a brief summary of the details with cleaner, clearer language and citations. Selecting a specific citation takes you to the source document for review.

The AI will also help if you have to deal with multiple versions of the same contract. Here, it can scan for differences among them and find inconsistencies and discrepancies across as many as 10 versions. When you’re done, you can review the contract with other people and parties involved and request e-signatures directly from Adobe Acrobat or Reader.

You can use the new skill for a variety of contract types, including credit card and vendor agreements, loyalty programs, purchase orders, and business agreements. For example, a business owner could use the AI to review a partnership agreement with their attorney. A financial analyst can review sales contracts. Consumers could use it to analyze changes in everything from apartment leases to mobile phone plans.

Sounds helpful. But what are the potential pitfalls? Well, AI is far from perfect. How do you know that Adobe’s AI is analyzing and interpreting the contract correctly?

To address that question, Adobe says that its AI assistant combines its large language models (LLMs) with the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind its Liquid Mode technology. The goal is to offer a more accurate analysis of the document’s structure and content to improve the quality and reliability of the output.

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AI is also infamous for training itself on user data. Will your contracts be on the training list? To address this concern, Adobe says that the AI is governed by data security protocols and developed in line with its AI ethics processes. The company promises that it will never train its generative AI models on customer data and restricts third-party LLMs from similar training.

“Customers open billions of contracts in Adobe Acrobat each month and AI can be a game changer in helping simplify their experience,” Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud, said in a news release. “We are introducing new capabilities to deliver contract intelligence in Adobe AI Assistant, making it easier for customers to understand and compare these complex documents and providing citations to help them verify responses, all while keeping their data safe.”