Adobe Acrobat’s AI chatbot can now decipher contract jargon

Adobe is adding features to Acrobat’s AI Assistant that should help users to better understand contracts. The new “contract intelligence capabilities” allow the PDF management software’s chatbot to automatically recognize when files and scanned documents are contracts and summarize complicated language to make it easier for users to understand.

The Acrobat AI Assistant is available as a $4.99 per month add-on for Acrobat users with free or paid individual accounts. The contract intelligence update is available worldwide starting today on desktop, web, and mobile. Only English is supported for now, with more languages to follow, according to Adobe.

Adobe says the feature can surface key terms, generate citations and recommended questions for specific documents, and compare changes across up to ten different versions of a contract to check consistency and discrepancies. That should make it easier to spot things in lengthy contracts, such as important dates, specific policies, and charges that may otherwise get buried in walls of text.

Adobe says the aim is to save users time that they would otherwise spend on trying to understand the often long and complex documents, citing a recent survey that found 70 percent of consumers have signed agreements without knowing all of the terms within them. “Customers open billions of contracts in Adobe Acrobat each month and AI can be a game changer in helping simplify their experience,” said Adobe Document Cloud lead Abhigyan Modi.