Adobe AI Assistant for PDFs Can Now Translate Contract Jargon

Adobe has added features to its Acrobat AI Assistant, including tools to help summarize complicated language, such as legalese.

The company has already made AI upgrades to its video-editing platform, Premiere Pro, and there were also rumors that a future upgrade would incorporate OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video model.

These latest launches are aimed squarely at Acrobat users, promising to make working with contracts much easier and more efficient.

What Are the New Tools?

Adobe says it is aiming to “simplify working with contracts” with its new intelligent contract capabilities.

These generative AI features “will help customers grasp complex terms and spot differences between multiple agreements,” the company explains.

There are four upgrades and these are available from the Acrobat AI Assistant, which can be bought as an add-on for $4.99 per month.

• The first is called Contract intelligence, which will recognize when a document is a contract, generate an overview, surface key terms and, says Adobe, “recommend questions specific” to that document.
• The AI Assistant can now also generate straightforward explanations of content in a document. This includes clickable citations for verifying responses.
• If users have different versions of their document, Adobe has added a compare and contract tool, which can be used across 10 contracts, including scanned documents.
• The final addition is a secure sharing and signing option so that contracts can be reviewed between different stakeholders and e-signed but from within the app.

Fewer Mistakes

Adobe says that the tools are designed specifically to help demystify contracts. The company actually carried out a survey and found that nearly 70% of consumers have signed contracts or agreements without knowing all the terms.

The survey also revealed that more than 60% of SMB owners have avoided signing a contract because they were not confident they understood the content.

Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud explained that the new tools make 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.”

AI Training Promise

Adobe also has used the launch to emphasize that it doesn’t train its AI models on customer data. The company published this promise in June last year when a mandatory terms of service update suggested that Adobe would be able to automatically access user content.

The response from users was fast and furious, which prompted the publishing of a blog post. In this, the company wrote: “We’ve never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update.”

In this announcement for its new tools, Adobe has repeated this, adding that it also prohibits third-party LLMs from training on Adobe customer data.

Training data remains a contentious issue in AI development with OpenAI and Microsoft among the big names in the frame for data scrapping. While companies are keen to come out and shout that they are not harvesting their users’ data, LLMs do need data to train on, raising the question of where this data is coming from.