Adobe Introduces AI-Powered Contract Analysis in Acrobat: A Game-Changer for Document Review

Adobe's New AI Promises to Help Your Company Tackle Tricky Contract Language. Should You Let It?

This sounds great, because you're offloading some of the boring duties of decoding legalese to an AI system that summarizes those terms for you in normal language. And since it's pretty typical to skip reading every clause of a contract before signing it, the tool sounds even more useful, with the potential to save your workers precious time. But as with every novel AI system, it's worth remembering the technology isn't infallible. Like other AI chatbots, Adobe's system looks at a contract's language and distills it down to a shorter, more readable format. It can also work on scanned material if the originals aren't in digital format. It can also compare different versions of a contract and point out where clauses have changed. By asking it the right questions, you could, for example, search for language relating to a particular subject. But it doesn't give legal advice, of course -- not least because chatbots aren't quite that smart yet, nor is it legally allowed to do so. Nevertheless, it's clear that if your company drafts or otherwise deals with contracts on a regular basis, this tool could certainly save time, boost your understanding of the deals you're making with third parties, and possibly save you from making an expensive contractual mistake.

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

The new skill aims to help you understand complicated terms and catch differences between multiple agreements. 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. Also: Business leaders are embracing AI, but their employees are not so sure 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. Also: Perplexity lets you try DeepSeek R1 - without the security risk 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."

Adobe Acrobat AI now reads and explains your contracts in minutes -- here's how it works

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Adobe is expanding its push into artificial intelligence with new features that aim to demystify complex contracts and legal documents for both businesses and consumers, as the company seeks to maintain its dominant position in the document management market. The software giant announced today that its Acrobat AI Assistant can now automatically detect contracts, summarize key terms, and compare differences across multiple versions -- capabilities that Adobe says could help address a widespread problem: Most people don't fully read agreements before signing them. According to Adobe's research, nearly 70% of consumers have signed contracts without understanding all the terms. The problem extends into the business world, where 64% of small business owners have avoided signing contracts due to uncertainty about the content. "Control F is dead," said Lori DeFurio, a product executive at Adobe, referring to the traditional way people search documents. "Why would I ever search again when I can just ask?" The shift from keyword searching to conversational AI reflects Adobe's broader vision for making complex documents more accessible to everyone. How Adobe's AI actually reads your contracts The new features represent a significant enhancement to Adobe's AI capabilities, but notably stop short of providing legal advice. Instead, the system acts more like an intelligent research assistant, helping users locate and understand important contract terms while providing clear citations back to source material. "This is not a replacement for legal advice," emphasized Michi Alexander, vice president of product marketing at Adobe, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "This is just to help you understand as a starting point your contracts and then where you potentially might want to ask questions." The technology works by analyzing contract text and presenting information in more digestible formats. For example, users can compare up to 10 different contract versions in a table that highlights specific changes. The system can also process scanned documents, even if they're wrinkled or imperfectly captured. A key differentiator, according to Adobe executives, is the system's ability to provide specific citations for its analyses. "The answer AI Assistant gives you is your guide on where in the document you should find the answer," Alexander said. Your documents are safe, Adobe says: Inside the security architecture As AI features become more prevalent in enterprise software, questions about data security take center stage. Adobe emphasizes that all contract analysis happens in a transient fashion -- documents are processed in the cloud but aren't stored or used to train AI models. "Your data is always your data," explained Lori DeFurio, a product executive at Adobe, during a product demonstration. "We do not look at any of the documents that you don't tell it to...your content is never used to train AI models." The feature integrates into Adobe's existing Acrobat ecosystem, which the company says serves over 650 million monthly active users. It's available for an additional $4.99 monthly fee for individual users, with enterprise pricing available for larger organizations. The real-world impact: How businesses are already using contract AI The release comes at a time when companies are increasingly looking to AI to streamline operations. According to Adobe's survey, 96% of technology leaders believe AI would make them more confident in employees' ability to handle contracts responsibly. In interviews with three dozen early users, most reported cutting their contract review time by 70-80%. "I used to spend 45 minutes on initial contract reviews. Now I typically finish in under 10 minutes," said Austin Bailey, a real estate development executive who has been testing the feature since January. While Adobe isn't the first company to apply AI to contract analysis, its massive user base and deep integration with existing document workflows could give it an advantage in the growing market for AI-powered business tools. The move also reflects a broader trend of traditional software companies embedding AI capabilities into their core products, rather than treating them as standalone features. For Adobe, which has invested in AI development for over five years, the strategy appears to be paying off -- the company reports that customer conversations with its AI assistant doubled quarter over quarter in late 2024. The future of contract analysis may increasingly rely on AI assistance, but human judgment remains crucial. As Alexander puts it, the tool is meant to "guide you to the parts of the document" rather than replace careful review entirely.

Adobe now helps users understand contract jargon with AI-powered Acrobat tools

In a nutshell: Far too many people have found themselves signing a contract without fully understanding its terms and conditions. This is a pain point Adobe is aiming to address with its new contract intelligence tools that it has added to the Acrobat AI assistant. The AI-powered features are designed to untangle the jargon found in most contracts. These new tools generate contract overviews, highlight key terms, and offer summaries. Additionally, the AI can recommend questions users might want to explore further in the contract. One of the most notable features is the ability to compare up to ten different versions of a contract simultaneously, allowing users to identify discrepancies and check for consistency across multiple iterations of an agreement. The new features leverage a combination of LLMs and Adobe's proprietary AI models. The Acrobat AI Assistant is offered as an add-on service for both free and paid individual Acrobat accounts at $4.99 per month. Adobe has made these new features available worldwide on desktop, web, and mobile platforms. Currently, the service supports only English, with plans to expand to other languages in the future. Adobe's decision to focus on contract analysis stems from a recent survey that revealed 70 percent of consumers had signed agreements without fully understanding all the terms. Adobe said that the company does not train its generative AI models on customer data. Furthermore, the company prohibits third-party LLMs from accessing Adobe customer data or using it for training. Additionally, a series of security measures have been put in place to protect the data used by the AI Assistant in Acrobat and other products. All user content, prompts, and responses are encrypted in transit using HTTPS with TLS 1.2 or higher. Any data stored by the Acrobat Generative AI Service is encrypted at rest using SHA-256 encryption. Also, most uploaded documents, prompts, and responses are automatically deleted from Adobe cloud services after 12 hours, except for chat history and user-reported content. Users retain control over their chat history, allowing them to delete it or continue queries as needed. Adobe says that access to reported content, bugs, or vulnerabilities is restricted to a small group of trained Adobe employees. The Acrobat AI Assistant was introduced a year ago. One of its main selling points is its integration into Adobe's products - AI chatbots generally require PDFs and other files to be uploaded first.

Adobe's latest tool reads contracts so you don't have to

Summary Adobe Acrobat's AI Assistant simplifies complex legal documents and generates summaries with clickable citations. The AI tool can compare contract versions side by side to help users spot differences before signing. The feature is available as a $4.99 per month add-on subscription for Acrobat desktop users and currently supports English documents only. Hopping onto the AI bandwagon, Adobe launched its AI Assistant in Acrobat in February 2024 to help users summarize lengthy documents and interact with the content by asking the chatbot questions. Now, Adobe is updating its Acrobat AI Assistant with new generative AI features, dubbed "intelligent contract capabilities," designed to help users better understand contracts and legal documents. RELATED 10 Adobe tools you can use without a subscription All the Adobe greatness with none of the Adobe cost Posts Let Adobe Acrobat's AI do all the work for you As announced via Adobe Newsroom, Adobe's contract intelligence capabilities are now integrated into Acrobat's AI Assistant. Since legal documents and contracts are often filled with complex language that many users struggle to understand, the AI Assistant simplifies and humanizes legal jargon in PDFs. It can automatically recognize contracts, generate summaries, and even suggest relevant questions based on the document at hand. The issue with AI-generated summaries has always been AI's tendency to hallucinate facts, often altering information as it sees fit. In most cases, this makes an AI summary useless, as you'll need to sift through the content to verify its accuracy. Acrobat's AI Assistant tackles this issue by generating clickable citations, allowing users to quickly verify information at the source. The tool can also compare up to ten different contract versions side by side, making it easier to spot even the smallest differences before signing. These new contract capabilities are available across Adobe Acrobat's web, desktop, and mobile apps. The AI Assistant is offered as an add-on subscription for Acrobat desktop users, priced at $4.99 per month at the time of writing. While they're accessible worldwide, they currently support only English documents. Adobe has confirmed that support for additional languages is on the way. Thankfully, you don't need to worry about your data being used for AI training, as Adobe's intelligent contract capabilities are governed by strict data security protocols. While this is exactly the kind of AI feature many users would appreciate, it's still not a good idea to blindly trust AI summaries. So, while Adobe Acrobat's latest AI features are impressive and I can definitely see myself using this feature to read the fine print of a contract, it's still best to read through the contract yourself, at least briefly.

Adobe's Acrobat AI Assistant digs into contracts to help users understand what they're agreeing to - SiliconANGLE

Adobe Inc. is beefing up its Acrobat AI Assistant tool with a new artificial intelligence capability that's focused on analyzing contracts. Called Contract AI, it can ingest hundreds of contractual documents and analyze them in seconds, so users can understand complex terms, identify differences between agreements and verify information within them. The Acrobat AI Assistant is a generative AI chatbot for the popular Acrobat tool, which is used to create and edit PDF files. Available as an add-on, it allows users to "chat" with their documents, get a summary of their contents, and ask questions about them in order to save time that would otherwise be spent reading through them. A large number of contracts happen to be stored as PDF files, ranging from credit card and vendor agreements to purchase orders. Although they're a fact of life for almost every business, and most consumers too, they tend to be extremely long and complicated, to the point that very few people will attempt to read through them properly. Indeed, Adobe says that a recent survey found that almost 70% of consumers, 61% of knowledge workers and 62% of small business owners admit to signing contracts without properly reading through and understanding all of the terms within them. Clearly, it would be more advantageous for those people if they did understand the things they're agreeing to, and that's what the new Contract AI capability sets out to achieve. Users can simply upload any new contract and immediately get a breakdown of the terms and conditions within it, in language they can understand. Moreover, they'll be able to ask questions to find out the most relevant details within contracts, Adobe said. For instance, a business could use Contract AI to quickly identify the most important dates in a vendor agreement, while marketers can use it to discover deliverables in their brand and advertising partnerships. Finance teams will be able to accelerate sales contract reviews, and small business owners can use it to understand what is and what isn't covered by an insurance policy. Adobe said the Contract AI feature means Acrobat AI Assistant will automatically identify any PDF that is a contract, and tailor its analysis of the document accordingly. It will summarize the key information within it, and recommend questions that the user might want to ask. In every case, it will disambiguate any of the complex terminology used in contracts, spelling out exactly what things mean in clear language, making it easier for users to understand what they're agreeing to. It also offers a comparison tool, so users can check for differences between newer and older versions of what appears to be the same contract, ensuring they don't miss any new clauses within them. Ray Wang of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that contracts are one of the biggest use cases for AI, because they are something that every business has to deal with. "This is a great tool for both the companies that issue contracts, and the users that must agree to them," he said. "It will help to increase transparency over what these agreements really mean, and everyone will welcome this." Adobe Document Cloud Senior Vice President Abhigyan Modi said the company's customers deal with billions of contacts in Adobe Acrobat every month. "AI can be a game-changer in helping to simplify their experience," he said. "Contract AI makes agreements easier to understand and compare, and citations help customers to verify responses, all while keeping their data safe." With regard to the last point, Adobe said Acrobat AI Assistant is governed by strict data security protocols that were developed in alignment with its AI Ethics processes. As such, the company promises it will never train its generative AI models on its customers' data, and it also prohibits third-party large language models from doing the same. Adobe isn't the only company looking to apply generative AI to try to help users get a better handle on their jargon-laden contracts. The e-signature software firm Docusign Inc. offers similar capabilities with its Intelligent Agreement Management platform, bolstered by its acquisition of an AI startup called Lexion last May. Contract AI is available now to all Acrobat AI Assistant subscribers. A subscription for the add-on costs $4.99 per user per month. It's currently available in English, though the company plans to add support for additional languages soon.

Adobe's new AI assistant will finally demystify your phone contract

Adobe announced a new multimodal capability for its Acrobat AI Assistant that can analyze legal documents to "demystify complex language, summarize key terms and identify differences across multiple contracts," all with a single click. It's called, unsurprisingly, Contracts AI. Contracts is capable of interpreting both digital and scanned documents, automatically identifying contracts as such. The system then "tailors the experience, generating a contract overview, surfacing key terms in a single click ... and recommending questions specific to customers' documents," according to the announcement post. Recommended Videos The AI will also create summaries of the contract's contents, presenting that information to the user in clear and concise language with clickable, verifiable citations. The system can review up to 10 different contracts at a time, allowing the user to quickly find and address discrepancies between them. Users can even e-sign their completed contracts directly within the Acrobat app itself. The company recently conducted a "survey" of Acrobat users that found nearly 70% of consumers and more than 60% of small and medium business owners have, at some point, signed contracts without knowing or understanding all of the stipulated terms. "Contracts AI makes agreements easier to understand and compare and citations help customers verify responses, all while keeping their data safe," Abhigyan Modi, SVP of Adobe Document Cloud, said in a press release. Per Adobe, Acrobat's AI features "are governed by data security protocols and developed in alignment with Adobe's AI Ethics processes." As such, the company does not train its generative models using its customer data and bans third-party developers from using Adobe data on models of their own. The new Contracts feature is available as a $5 per month add-on subscription through either the free Reader app or the paid Acrobat app. It's currently only accessible on the desktop and web in English. The company is working to expand the AI's language options but has not specified a timeline for that yet.

Adobe's AI assistant can now decipher contract jargon in your PDFs

Contract intelligence will generate summaries and generate citations to validate them Adobe has updated its Acrobat AI Assistant with a handy new feature that will help its users break down and understand important contractual information in PDF files. The aptly-named contract intelligence update automatically detects contracts and summarizes complex language to make them easier to understand, highlighting key terms and generating citations as it goes to validate the summaries it produces. The AI tool is also designed to compare up to 10 contract versions, checking for consistency and any discrepancies. According to Adobe research, seven in 10 (69%) consumers have signed a contract without fully understanding what's inside, with nearly two in three finding unexpected contract terms after signing on the dotted line. In the announcement, VP for Product Marketing at Adobe, Michi Alexander, details how contract intelligence can reveal deposit rules and pet policies on apartment leases, cancellation policies within gym contracts and hidden fees in phone contracts. Apart from consumers, the tool is also designed for small business owners, 91% of whom work with contracts at least monthly. Just like consumers, three in five SMB owners have discovered unexpected terms in their contracts after signing. Common reasons for mistakes include the length and complexity of contracts, which are addressed with Adobe's updated service. The upgrade forms part of the wider Acrobat AI Assistant, which costs $4.99 per month with an annual commitment, and it's already rolled out to paying customers. Alexander summarized: "With AI, individuals and businesses can approach contracts with greater transparency, turning what was once a source of stress into an opportunity for inquiry, clarity and confidence." The launch of contract intelligence comes not long after Adobe upgraded its e-signature experience in Acrobat, by preserving document structure to improve reliability across all device types and adding new visual progress indicators to prevent users from missing fields.

Adobe Acrobat's AI Reads a Contract's Fine Print So You Don't Have To

Microsoft Word's Voice Typing Is a Game Changer: Here's How I Use It Quick Links Acrobat Introduces Contract Reading AI Features What Are Contract AI's Major Features? How Much Do Contract Intelligence Capabilities Cost? Contracts are packed with sneaky clauses and legal jargon that can trip you up. Instead of spending hours dissecting every sentence, let Adobe Acrobat's AI do the work. It reads, summarizes, and flags key details in contracts -- saving you time and potential headaches. Acrobat Introduces Contract Reading AI Features Adobe is adding a new feature to Acrobat: contract intelligence capabilities. It's integrated into Acrobat's AI Assistant to help its users read, understand, and summarize legalese within contracts, tax forms, and legal agreements. Not only does this tool work hand-in-hand with Acrobat's AI Assistant feature for summarizing documents, but it can also help you make informed decisions regarding job contracts or leases before you sign on the dotted line. Acrobat's AI contract reader simplifies legal jargon so the average person can understand it and make an informed decision before agreeing to contracts. It summarizes terminology, which is most beneficial for multi-page documents of wordy, high-brow language. It can be helpful in professional settings and your personal life when it matters. Adobe's AI Assistant and intelligent contract capabilities are governed by data security protocols and none of your content is ever used for data training. What Are Contract AI's Major Features? Contract AI could change how you interact with contracts and legal documents, whether scanned from paper or digitally acquired. Adobe Acrobat is one of the most common tools for opening PDFs, so having a tool to summarize contracts right there is a boon. Spot the Difference If your job contract or property lease has been updated, it can be hard to spot any differences in language when there's so much to read. Some seemingly minor nuances in language can make large differences between what you previously signed for and what you now sign for in the updated contract. The new AI features can compare old and new contracts or documents side-by-side, pointing out new or updated language for you to quickly learn the differences. Small updates are easily missed by human eyes. Simplify Complex Language Legal documents and contracts often use complex language -- known as legalese -- which the average consumer often finds difficult to decipher. This complex language gives businesses and contract writers the upper hand since most people sign without truly understanding the terminologies. Adobe Acrobat can simplify and humanize this language so anyone can understand it. Beware that simplified language may sometimes change the exact meaning of the official terminology -- just like translating from one language to another. Summarize Long Documents Alongside Acrobat AI Assistant, Contract AI works to summarize long legal documents. Not only does the AI tool summarize any document into bite-sized chunks you can understand, but Acrobat AI Assistant also cites where in the document that information can be found. The citation aspect is important for your peace of mind. It lets you know that the information provided in its summary comes from your document and that they weren't AI hallucinations. The citation highlights the text, giving you the page and paragraph so you can easily reference it at any later point. Locate Individual Policy Sections Using the AI Assistant voice tool or the text prompt, you can ask Acrobat to locate, answer questions about, or summarize any particular policy section in your documents. This is helpful if you have any discrepancies with your contract or specific wording and especially helpful when you need to access a part of the contract under a time constraint. You can ask questions like "When did this contract begin?" or "Who is responsible for garbage disposal?" As long as the answer is written in your contract somewhere, Acrobat AI Assistant's intelligence will supply you with the answer, along with the citation for you to find the section within your document. Do your due diligence when signing contracts. Do not blindly trust AI summaries or overviews without fact-checking first; you should always read through a contract yourself. You are still responsible for what you sign. How Much Do Contract Intelligence Capabilities Cost? The intelligent contract reader is an Acrobat AI Assistant feature. This means it forms part of the optional extra purchased with Acrobat AI Assistant, and it isn't inherently a tool in standard versions of Adobe Acrobat. AI Assistant is available as an add-on subscription to any Acrobat user, regardless if you use the free Acrobat Reader, the paid subscription of Adobe Acrobat Pro or access to Acrobat from the browser. The add-on can be purchased by anyone using Acrobat from a desktop -- AI Assistant's mobile version is in beta mode, but it will be available publicly for mobile users in the future. The AI Assistant add-on subscription costs $4.99 per month. This includes built-in intelligent contract capabilities, allowing you to skim-read, summarize, and understand long documents and contracts, including simplifying confusing legalese language. Contract intelligence capabilities is a welcome addition to an already sought-after tool in Acrobat. Millions of everyday people, business owners, and SMB owners around the world use Acrobat daily for document management. A smart tool to help summarize, understand, and compare legal documents and contracts is a valuable addition to the toolbox.

Adobe Acrobat's AI Assistant Can Simplify Your Complicated Contracts

Adobe said 70 percent of consumers admitted to not reading the contract Adobe Acrobat's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant is getting a new capability that will make it easier for users to get a quick breakdown of complex contracts. Announced on Tuesday, the new feature is called Contract Intelligence, and it adds a new workflow for the AI chatbot whenever a user opens a contract via Acrobat. The company says the feature can surface key details of the contract, which can otherwise get buried in lengthy text. Notably, in November 2024, Adobe released a paper about the SlimLM AI model that can function entirely within a smartphone and process documents. In a blog post, the San Jose-based tech giant detailed the new feature for Acrobat's AI assistant. The company said it developed the new tool on the basis of the feedback from the Adobe Acrobat Contract AI survey. The survey was conducted in January in partnership with research firm Advanis and included 1020 US-based consumers, 274 small business owners, 286 knowledge workers, and 202 technology leaders. The tech giant found that as many as 70 percent of consumers in the US admitted to not reading a contract before signing it. Similar sentiments were shared by 62 percent of the small business owners, 61 percent of the surveyed knowledge workers and 63 percent of the technology leaders. Adobe stated that the new Contract Intelligence feature within the Acrobat AI assistant solves this problem by improving the process of navigating through the information in contracts. With this, whenever a user opens a contract in Acrobat, the AI chatbot will automatically identify it as such. This will also work for scanned documents. Once recognised, the AI assistant will generate a contract overview and surface key terms and clauses in a single click. The AI will also summarise and simplify the contract language for ease of understanding and readability. Additionally, the feature will also recommend questions specific to the document to help the user gain additional information. Contract Intelligence also adds clickable citations next to the generated summaries and responses. Users can click on the citations to find the source of the information to verify the AI-generated outputs. Additionally, the feature also allows users to compare and look for differences between versions of up to 10 contracts. This also supports scanned documents. This feature is now available with the Acrobat AI Assistant add-on for both paid and free users. The feature is being added to the desktop app, web client, as well as mobile apps. It only supports the English language currently. Notably, the Acrobat AI Assistant add-on is priced at Rs. 398 a month.

Most people don't read contracts -- Adobe's AI fixes that

Adobe has launched new AI features for its Acrobat AI Assistant, which now includes automatic contract detection, key term summarization, and multi-version comparison. This aims to alleviate the challenges faced by consumers and businesses when dealing with complex legal documents. Recent research from Adobe highlights that approximately 70% of consumers have signed contracts without comprehending all the terms. In the business sector, 64% of small business owners have chosen not to sign contracts due to a lack of understanding of the content involved. "Control F is dead," commented Lori DeFurio, a product executive at Adobe, regarding the traditional document searching method. This shift towards conversational AI represents Adobe's goal to enhance the accessibility of intricate documents. Contracts and agreements are commonly encountered in various life scenarios, such as gym memberships, employment, and business transactions. A survey stated that 73% of consumers, 68% of knowledge workers, and 91% of small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners handle contracts at least monthly. The survey commissioned by Adobe Acrobat revealed significant insights regarding engagement with contracts. Key findings include: Specific audience reactions found that dealing with contracts elicits negative emotions among consumers. Nearly 70% expressed feelings of discomfort or anxiety when reading contracts, with 63% feeling "uncomfortable" or "terrified" upon signing agreements without full understanding. 69% admitted to signing contracts without knowing all details, resulting in two-thirds discovering unexpected terms afterward, with 15% labeling these findings as "horrifying." Furthermore, 72% of consumers indicated that AI assistance in summarizing and comparing contracts could bolster their confidence in understanding contractual agreements. Remember when Google said no to military AI: Not anymore For small business owners, contracts are even more prevalent, with 91% engaging with them at least monthly, and 45% weekly. Among these owners, 62% have signed contracts without fully grasping the details, with 69% reporting a mix of discomfort and fear. Additionally, 60% encountered surprising terms post-signature, while 64% refrained from signing contracts due to uncertainty about the terms. Despite some hesitation towards adopting new technologies, 71% believe AI tools could assist in understanding contract details effectively. Knowledge workers also face hurdles with contracts, as 61% of these employees admitted to signing documents without comprehending the specifics. Up to 32% of workers faced adverse workplace outcomes as a result, such as disciplinary actions or loss of trust. Technology leaders echoed these sentiments, with 96% believing AI would enhance employee contract comprehension. The new contract intelligence features of Acrobat AI Assistant include functions such as automatic contract recognition, generation of concise overviews, straightforward explanations, and the ability to compare differences across multiple contracts, including scanned documents. Adobe Acrobat allows for secure sharing and signing, enabling users to easily review contracts with stakeholders. Adobe collaborated with Advanis to survey 1020 U.S. consumers, 274 small business owners, 286 knowledge workers, and 202 technology leaders between January 6 and January 12, 2025, ensuring a representative demographic sample.

Tired of reading contracts? Adobe Acrobat's AI will do it for you

Adobe says its newest AI tool can summarize never-ending contracts. But how long before lawyers game it? I got my first mortgage three years ago -- and when I did, I read every word of the contract. It was a horrible experience, not just for me but also for the bank manager whom I pestered into explaining every clause or term I didn't understand. According to Adobe, you no longer need to go through that... at least if you trust its AI system to summarize your contracts for you. "Contract Intelligence" is what Adobe is calling the new Acrobat AI Assistance feature. It can recognize contracts in PDFs or scanned documents, then generate overviews that are more digestible. "Acrobat AI Assistant generates summaries and responses with clear language and clickable citations, making it fast and easy to navigate to the source and verify responses," says the blog post (spotted by The Verge). On the face of it, that seems like a good thing. Contracts are long and confusing -- often intentionally so, but sometimes just out of necessity for a complex process. And I'm sure I'm not alone in needing some help truly understanding even the basic stuff, like a lease or insurance policy. But considering the extremely public and widespread issues we've encountered with generative AI summaries, I would hesitate to rely on any tool applying that tech to something as important as a legally binding contract. And that's just a lack of faith in "AI" on my part. Imagine how someone could use this to their advantage, though. Lawyers and other legal writers who do this for a living would be able to spot the patterns in AI-generated summaries almost immediately. With that knowledge in their back pocket, it would be easy to write entirely legal contracts in a way that's intended to steer AI-generated summaries into showing you false or misleading text. I can see the hypothetical press release now: "It's not my client's fault if the plaintiff did not read the contract themselves, and reached the wrong conclusion by using software to read it for them." Sorry, bank manager, but I'm still going to pester you before I initial here, here, and here, and sign here, at least for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, if you're looking for the best PDF tools (AI or otherwise), be sure to check out PCWorld's roundup.

Adobe's Acrobat AI Assistant can now assess contracts for you

Adobe has updated the Acrobat AI Assistant, giving it the ability to understand contracts and to compare them for you. The company says it can help you make sense of complex terms and spot differences between agreements, such as between old and new ones, so you can understand what you're signing. With the AI Assistant enabled, the Acrobat app will be able to recognize if a document is a contract, even if it's a scanned page. It can identify and list key terms from there, summarize the document's contents and recommend questions you can ask based on what's in it. The feature can also compare up to 10 contracts with one another and be able to check for differences and catch discrepancies. When it's done checking, and if you're satisfied that everything's in order, you can sign the document directly or request e-signatures from your colleagues or clients. Adobe listed a few potential uses for the feature and said you can use it to check apartment leases, to verify out-of-country charges for mobile plans and to compare perks or amenities of competing services. It could be even more useful if you regularly have to take a look at multiple contracts for your work or business. Of course, you'd have to trust the AI assistant to actually be able to spot important information and catch both small and significant changes between different contracts. If it works properly, then it could be one of Acrobat AI's most useful features, seeing as users (according to Adobe itself) open billions of contracts each month on the Acrobat app. The Acrobat AI Assistant isn't free, however. It's an add-on that will cost you $5 a month whether or not you're already paying for Adobe's other services and products.

For $5, Adobe's Acrobat AI assistant will check your contracts

Adobe's Acrobat AI assistant has long had the ability to summarize documents for you, but it now claims to be able to help you make sense of contracts - and catch discrepancies between them ... The AI assistant is a $5/month add-on to Adobe Acrobat that offers summary features similar to Apple Intelligence. One-click generative summary automatically pulls key points from your doc to help you find important info fast. Available on desktop and web. Chat with multiple documents and transcripts all at once so you can find key themes and takeaways -- without switching tabs. When you use AI Assistant, your documents are protected -- and your content is not used to train generative AI models. Engadget reports that the feature can now understand and compare contracts. Adobe has updated the Acrobat AI Assistant, giving it the ability to understand contracts and to compare them for you. The company says it can help you make sense of complex terms and spot differences between agreements, such as between old and new ones, so you can understand what you're signing. With the AI Assistant enabled, the Acrobat app will be able to recognize if a document is a contract, even if it's a scanned page. It can identify and list key terms from there, summarize the document's contents and recommend questions you can ask based on what's in it. The feature can also compare up to 10 contracts with one another and be able to check for differences and catch discrepancies. It would take a braver person than I to trust an AI system to summarize a contract, but if you're feeling lucky and don't mind laying out five bucks a month for the privilege, please report back ...

Adobe wants to use AI to help you understand contracts

Google wants you to enable personalized ads in exchange for more Opinion Rewards surveys Adobe introduced a suite of AI features to Acrobat in April. Acrobat AI Assistant can do things like summarize text and find information across different documents -- pretty standard AI stuff. Now, though, Adobe's added new contract intelligence features to its AI that let it recognize contracts, create overviews, and explain given terms and passages on demand. Adobe positions these new capabilities are aimed at knowledge workers who, according to a survey Adobe conducted, tend to sign contracts in the course of their work without fully understanding what it is they're agreeing to. According to Adobe's survey (of just over 1,000 participants, a sample Adobe says was "representative of US demographics"), more than 60 percent of white-collar workers admit to signing contracts on the job without having a firm grasp on what the documents actually say. Almost a third of workers said they've also faced workplace consequences for signing contracts they didn't understand. Adobe's new contract intelligence features can purportedly help with all this by generating overviews, identifying and defining key terms, and finding answers to questions about legal documents. This doesn't exactly solve the problem of workers without a legal background or adequate support being put in the position of entering into binding agreements on behalf of their employers, but assuming Adobe's AI does what the company says and does it well, it might take a little stress out of those situations. Here's hoping Acrobat AI Assistant is able to keep the hallucinations to a minimum. Contract intelligence is available now A lot of Adobe's announcement was focused on how Acrobat AI Assistant with contract intelligence can help workers who regularly deal with contracts, but it's actually available to anyone. You can add Acrobat AI Assistant to your Adobe account for $4.99 a month. If you deal with a lot of contracts, it might be worth checking out.

Adobe Says Acrobat Can Simplify Complex Legal Contracts for You

Adobe, which loves to shove long-term subscriptions onto its customers, has a new add-on for Acrobat that it says will make it easier to read and understand legal contracts. Acrobat AI Assistant, as it is called, is supposed to look at a PDF contract and extract the most important details, as well as simplify them in a way that regular people can understand. The new feature is built into Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader, and serves as a $4.99 per month add-on for both free and paid tiers of the app. You can probably expect that Adobe is going to push the feature hard on users as it has reoriented its whole business around recurring subscriptions. Adobe says that recent surveys found 70 percent of consumers admit to signing contracts without knowing all of the terms within them. That suggests 30 percent of people actually read through contracts in their entirety, which seems generous. Either way, Adobe says that Acrobat AI Assistant can save users time by surfacing key terms with citations, and recommend questions a user might ask the assistant in order to fully understand what they are signing. Of course, AI language models are not perfectâ€"they are next-word predictors that try and produce text that looks like a factual synthesis of the information they are provided; they do not inherently try and produce a factual synthesis. That could be good enough some of the time, but in the case of legal contracts it opens up users to risk if they sign a contract claiming they understood it when in fact they had not actually read it in its entirety. Generally, pleading ignorance because you did not read it does not make a contract invalid. That being said, because most people do not read contracts anyway, it seems like somewhat of a moot point. Major companies like to fill their user agreements with complex language that will protect them from liability. Last year, Disney faced a PR crisis when a man whose wife died after eating at a restaurant in Disney World was told he could not sue the company because he had signed a user agreement for Disney+ that required disputes with the company go to private arbitration. Perhaps a tool like Acrobat AI Assistant could at least surface details like that and explain them so individuals understand what they are signing up for. Adobe has lost a lot of fans over the years due to its move to a subscription model for apps like Photoshop, as well as its use of dark patterns to keep customers locked in by charging them penalties if they try and cancel annual subscriptions early. Tech companies prefer subscription models over one-time purchases because they create recurring, predictable revenue streams. Photoshop being the industry standard in the design world, it has been hard to unseat Adobe from its position of dominance.

Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant Introduces New Generative AI Features to Make Understanding Contracts Easier for Everyone

Special contract experience and one-click citations can demystify complex language, summarize key terms and identify differences across multiple contracts, helping customers understand and verify the information in these important documents in less timeAdobe Acrobat works on digital and scanned documents and supports contract workflows from start to signature - including reviews, commenting and e-signaturesNew contract intelligence, powered by Adobe's responsible approach to AI and deep PDF expertise, now available in Acrobat AI Assistant Today Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced new intelligent contract capabilities in Acrobat AI Assistant to simplify working with contracts. The new generative AI features can help customers grasp complex terms and spot differences between multiple agreements so they can better understand and verify the information in these important documents -- faster and easier. From credit card and vendor agreements to loyalty programs and purchase orders, contracts are a fact of life for consumers and businesses. Most contracts are long and complicated, making it difficult and time-consuming to understand their contents. In fact, a new survey by Adobe Acrobat found that nearly 70% of consumers have signed contracts or agreements without knowing all the terms and 64% of SMB owners say they avoided signing a contract because they were not confident they understood the content. "Customers open billions of contracts in Adobe Acrobat each month and AI can be a game changer in helping simplify their experience," said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud. "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." Grow Your Confidence with Contracts Leveraging contract intelligence capabilities in Acrobat AI Assistant, business owners can quickly identify key dates in vendor contracts or prepare to review a new partnership agreement with their attorney. Finance teams can accelerate reviews of sales contracts and more. Marketers can pinpoint changes in updated scopes of work and quickly find deliverables in brand and advertising partnerships. Consumers can quickly locate occupancy policies in apartment leases, find out-of-country charges in their mobile plans or compare amenities between top venue choices for a special event. Adobe Acrobat offers a comprehensive set of features and capabilities to help customers understand, review and sign contracts all in one app, including: Contract intelligence: Acrobat AI Assistant automatically recognizes when a document is a contract -- including scanned documents -- and tailors the experience, generating a contract overview, surfacing key terms in a single click, quickly summarizing information and recommending questions specific to customers' documents.Straightforward explanations -- verified: Acrobat AI Assistant generates summaries and responses with clear language and clickable citations, making it fast and easy to navigate to the source and verify responses.Compare and contrast: Quickly see differences between versions, check for consistency and catch discrepancies across up to 10 contracts -- including scanned documents.Secure sharing and signing: Easily review contracts with stakeholders and request e-signatures all in one app. Get More Reliable Responses Acrobat AI Assistant features are governed by data security protocols and developed in alignment with Adobe's AI Ethics processes. Adobe never trains the company's generative AI models on customer data and prohibits third-party LLMs from training on Adobe customer data. Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant supplements LLM technologies with the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind Liquid Mode to provide a highly accurate understanding of document structure and content, which enhances the quality and reliability of AI Assistant's outputs. The new contract intelligence capabilities in Acrobat AI Assistant are powered by extensive prompt engineering and an intelligent framework, which help deliver more accurate and relevant responses for contracts. Adobe Acrobat is a core productivity tool for more than 650 million monthly active users who open 400+ billion PDFs in the app each month. Launched in February 2024, Acrobat AI Assistant transforms how people and businesses work with their documents. With new features and growing adoption, Acrobat AI Assistant saw customer conversations in the app double quarter over quarter in the final quarter of 2024. Pricing and Availability Customers can access the new contracts capabilities in Acrobat AI Assistant. Both free Reader and paid Acrobat for individual customers can purchase Acrobat AI Assistant as an add-on for US$4.99 per month. The capabilities are available on desktop, web and mobile in worldwide English; other languages will follow. About Adobe Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.