Adobe has added intelligent contract capabilities to the Acrobat AI Assistant, which can now help interpret agreements for businesses and consumers. Adobe’s smart contract reader can help people understand those lengthy click-to-agree terms of service treatises that precede vendor websites and service agreements. “Customers open billions of contracts in Adobe Acrobat each month and AI can be a game changer in helping simplify their experience,” Adobe Document Cloud SVP Abhigyan Modi said in an announcement. For business users, Acrobat AI Assistant can identify key dates, prepare or review new agreements, and highlight changes.

The expansion of AI features aims to help Adobe bolster its position as market leader in document management. Acrobat AI Assistant can “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,” VentureBeat writes.

In its announcement, Adobe shared research indicating that “nearly 70 percent of consumers have signed contracts or agreements without knowing all the terms and 64 percent of SMB (small and medium business) owners say they avoided signing a contract because they were not confident they understood the content.”

“Control F is dead,” VentureBeat quotes an Adobe product executive saying about the keystroke combination people typically use to search documents, going on to proclaim “the shift from keyword searching to conversational AI reflects Adobe’s broader vision for making complex documents more accessible.”

The new tool lets people “easily review contracts with stakeholders and request e-signatures all in one app,” according to Adobe.

SiliconANGLE calls it Contract AI, and says “it can ingest hundreds of contractual documents and analyze them in seconds.” In addition to automatically identifying PDFs that contain a contract, Contract AI will analyze the document, summarize key points and recommend questions for the user to ask.

“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,” points out SiliconANGLE, noting that “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.”

Customers can purchase Acrobat AI Assistant as an add-on for $4.99 per month says Adobe, noting that the feature is available worldwide for desktop, web and mobile.