Acrobat AI Assistant · Practical walkthrough

Check an answer from a long PDF with Acrobat AI Assistant

Ninety pages of supplier agreement landed in your inbox and somebody needs to know, by three o'clock, how much notice either side has to give. Search for "notice" and you get forty hits, most of them about notice boards.

Task by Task13 min read + practice

What you'll make

one checked answer to one question about a long PDF, with each cited page opened, each claim marked confirmed or not, and a note of what the document doesn’t settle.

What you'll need

Acrobat with AI Assistant (it comes with Acrobat Studio, or the AI Assistant add-on for an Acrobat plan), a PDF your organisation lets you use with it, and about 15 minutes. Adobe’s limits: files under 100 MB, up to 600 pages, questions under 500 characters; password-protected or restricted PDFs and PDF Portfolios won’t work. Adobe lists English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese as supported file languages. A confidently worded answer about a Polish-language contract is not a feature.

Example result.

Can either party end the agreement before the initial term ends?
- For convenience: no. Clause 14.1 (p.38) requires 90 days' notice that
  cannot expire before the end of the Initial Term. Confirmed.
- For unremedied material breach: yes, after 30 days. Clause 14.2 (p.38). Confirmed;
  "material breach" defined in clause 1.1.
- Effect on live Statements of Work: clause 14.5 and Schedule 3. Not established.

1. Ask one question, not a topic

“Summarise this contract” produces a summary, and the clause you needed becomes a bullet point with its qualifiers removed. Ask for the specific thing, its conditions, and permission to be incomplete.

Under what circumstances can either party end this agreement before the end of the initial term, and how much notice is needed in each case? Quote the wording and give the clause and page for each. If the document doesn't address a case, say so rather than inferring.

Change the subject to suit your document: an expenses policy (“which expenses need approval, and what exceptions apply?”) or a report (“how is this metric defined, and for which period?”).

Why this works: “either party” stops you getting only one side’s rights; “in each case” signals there may be several answers; quoted wording gives you something to check; the last sentence gives a gap somewhere to go.

What you should see: a question of two or three sentences, under the 500-character limit.

2. Run it and read the answer as a set of pointers

Open the PDF in Acrobat and select AI Assistant. Type your question in the message field and select Submit. The answer comes back with numbered source links; select a number to jump to that place in the document.

Read the answer once, to find out where to look. Then stop reading the answer and go and look.

Why this works: the numbered links are what separate this from guessing. They tell you where the answer came from, not whether it’s right.

What you should see: a short answer with numbers in it, such as [1], [2], [3].

3. Open every citation and ask four questions

For each numbered link, read the whole clause and the one after it:

Does the passage say what the answer says? Not “is it about the same subject”: does it support this exact claim?
Is that the whole sentence? Contract clauses are built out of qualifiers. Read to the end.
Is there a cross-reference? “Subject to Schedule 3” or “as defined in clause 1.1” means go there.
What is not cited? If the answer makes four claims and has three citations, find the claim with none.

If the answer still doesn’t hold up, ask for the material instead of a rule:

Show me every clause that mentions termination, ending, expiry or non-renewal, in document order, with the clause number and page for each and a one-line description. Do not interpret them.

Why this works: a list in document order is slower to read and much harder to get wrong. Check it against the contents page too; not finding a term doesn’t prove it isn’t there.

What you should see: each claim in the answer matched to a passage you’ve read, or marked as uncited.

4. Decide what you can say

Name which of three outcomes you have, claim by claim:

Confirmed. The wording supports it and you followed the cross-references. Say it, citing the clause: “Clause 14.1, page 38” travels. “Acrobat said so” does not.
Confirmed with a caveat. The main rule is clear; a condition or schedule is still unread. Say both.
Not established. The citations don’t support it, or the document doesn’t address it. That’s a real result, and worth saying out loud.

Don’t forward the generated answer as if it were the document; pasted into an email, it loses its links and your checking. If the question has legal or financial consequences, this is how you find the clause, not how you decide what it means. Take the clause numbers to whoever is qualified to interpret them.

Why this works: three named outcomes stop “mostly checked” turning into “checked”.

What you should see: a short note like the example result.

Check the result

Every claim you’ll repeat has a citation you’ve opened and read to the end.
You’ve found and dealt with any sentence that has no citation.
Cross-references in the cited clauses are followed or listed as unread.
PDF page and printed page or clause number are both clear if they differ.

The usual failure: a dropped qualifier. The answer gets the headline right (“90 days’ notice”) and leaves off the half of the clause that changes it. Spot it by reading every cited clause past the point the answer stopped quoting.

Your answer left out this condition: "[exact wording]". Re-read clause [number]. Revise the answer to keep that condition, say which party it affects and link the passage. Mark any cross-reference you haven't resolved.

[exact wording] is the missing phrase; [number] is its clause.

Worked example: a ninety-page supplier agreement

Fictional example. The question from step 1 produced this answer:

Either party may terminate for convenience on 90 days' written notice [1].
Either party may terminate for material breach not remedied within 30 days
of written notice [2]. The Customer may terminate immediately on the
Supplier's insolvency [3]. Termination for convenience does not affect
Statements of Work already in progress.

Citation [1] drops the qualifier. It opens at clause 14.1, page 38: “…by giving not less than ninety days’ written notice, such notice not to expire before the end of the Initial Term.” The answer has the ninety days and has lost the second half, which is exactly what was asked: you can’t use this clause to leave early. The repair prompt, with that phrase and clause 14.1, put it back.
Citations [2] and [3] hold up. Clause 14.2 (p.38) supports the breach route and points to the definition of material breach in clause 1.1. Clause 14.4 (p.39) supports the insolvency right.
The fourth sentence has no citation. The document-order list from step 3 found clause 14.5 (p.39): “The effect of termination on any live Statement of Work is subject to Schedule 3.” Nobody has read Schedule 3 yet, so that line became “Not established”.

Ten minutes, not two hours. The assistant found the clauses; the reading found the answer. The example result is the note that went to the contract owner.

Task kit for this job: Download (ZIP) · Reusable instructions

Go deeper

Deal with scans, images and tables

Check you can select and search the text. If you can’t, the PDF is probably a scan and AI Assistant has little to read: get an accessible copy or run text recognition first, then compare the recognised text with the page image. Adobe lists images and complex vector graphics as unsupported, so don’t assume a diagram, handwritten note or visually laid-out table has been understood. Read those pages yourself.

Ask across related documents without losing version order

The real question often spans files: the agreement, two variation letters and a schedule that arrived separately. PDF Spaces lets you ask across a collection, but “which document is this in?” becomes part of every answer. A variation letter that changes clause 14.1 and the original clause are both “in the documents”; only one is current.

For each finding about [topic], name the source file, its date if stated, the section and the page. Keep conflicting wording separate. Point out any explicit amendment or superseding language, but don't decide which document governs if the documents don't say.

Compare two versions of a contract covers the version question in depth.