Adobe releases generative AI contract management tool

Adobe on Tuesday added "contract intelligence" to its Acrobat AI Assistant, generative AI technology that gives users the ability to summarize complex contract language in PDFs and detect changes in review cycles.

It may appear to be a minor feature added to Adobe's Document Cloud, but it amounts to a shot across the bow for current contract lifecycle management (CLM) software vendors, as well as Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft. The three companies support those workflows in their products with additional licenses or development tools, explained Deep Analysis founder Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

Acrobat AI Assistant requires a $4.99 per month add-on subscription to Acrobat or the free Reader, but the contract intelligence comes with the AI Assistant at no extra charge.

"It's free, essentially," Pelz-Sharpe said. "[Adobe has] stuff there that they just bundle and say, 'Oh, you can have this, versus going to [a third-party CLM vendor] and signing a million-dollar deal.'"

Contract intelligence in Acrobat AI Assistant detects that a document is a contract -- including scanned images or photos of documents that haven't yet been OCR'ed. Then, the user can query the document in chatbot format. The AI assistant can find and summarize, in plain language, the high points of a contract such as fees, commissions, deadlines, penalties and due dates, verified with clickable citations.

It also supports comparisons of up to 10 different contract versions, including scans, showing the differences in table format.

Pelz-Sharpe said the contract intelligence feature baked into Acrobat AI Assistant looks like a full-blown app -- not just a few lines of code. Adobe would be served well to come out with other specialized apps or services for Acrobat AI Assistant that could tackle thorny document workflows, such as government applications and insurance claims.

There are more than 650 million Acrobat users, according to Adobe. Of the more than 400 billion documents opened every month in Acrobat, about a billion of them are contracts, said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud. Acrobat already supports digital signatures.

Like a lot of technologies, the CLM sector is about to undergo disruption from generative AI automation, Pelz-Sharpe said. GenAI, in conjunction with rules-based workflows, will enable contract reviews and approve them when both parties involved in a contract come to an agreement within preset boundaries.

"We're moving fast into a world where, in many cases, the human will never view the document -- they'll only review exceptions," Pelz-Sharpe said. "The rest will be straight-through, machine-to-machine processing."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.