How to ensure your employees understand the documents they sign

65% of business leaders admit to signing contracts without fully understanding the details...

Think about the last contract you signed at work or in your personal life.

Did you read each page, cover to cover? Were you able to digest and understand each clause of legalese or jargon? Was the process manageable… or was it migraine-inducing?

The uncomfortable truth is that most of your employees are signing contracts each day, week, month, and year without really knowing what’s in them. An Adobe Acrobat survey published in February 2025 found that the majority of UK knowledge workers (64%) and business leaders (65%) admit to signing contracts without fully understanding the details.

If you work in HR, risk, or compliance, it’s one of those workplace issues that keeps you up at night, while many others are happy to sweep it under the carpet. Why? Because contracts are invariably complex, tricky to process, and slow down day-to-day business—the survey found that 61% of technology leaders experienced business delays due to difficulty interpreting contracts.

With increasing pressures for speed, efficiency, and productivity at work, a shockingly high proportion of employees at all levels (including within HR) are happy to accept the dangers of signing contracts without understanding their contents, as indicated by the research shared above. These include personal risks of disciplinary action and job termination, alongside threats to your company.

So, as an HR or business leader, what can you do about this monumental, largely unaddressed area of risk?

How Adobe AI tool relieves HR headaches – including ‘hoodwinking’

Adobe Acrobat’s research shows how badly employees and businesses need support to effectively process, analyse, and understand complex documentation at speed—a task ready-made for artificial intelligence.

Accordingly, Adobe has launched contract intelligence in Acrobat AI Assistant, a generative AI-enabled tool available in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, that helps users navigate and understand complex terms and contracts, from vendor agreements and employment documents to loyalty programs and beyond.

New capabilities give employees the assistance they need before signing on the dotted line, generating a contract overview, surfacing key terms and possible questions, and even checking for consistency and discrepancies across other contracts and documents.

AI Assistant automatically recognizes when a document is a contract - including scanned docs and tailors the experience for the user, offering summaries and responses include clickable citations, making it fast and easy for your employees to navigate the source and verify responses.

In short, while it’s not a replacement for legal advice, it’s perfect for navigating those agreements with confidence, and allows employees to understand what is included in the contracts they are signing.

There are wider business applications to consider, but the development has an obvious use case within HR and employment processes. Earlier in 2025, a Cornell University study looking at employment relations found that even when workers sign a contract to indicate their consent, they may not feel they are fully informed about what they have agreed to - leading to an erosion of trust.

“You want to attend to employees' subjective feeling of how much they understand, because that will determine, down the line, whether they feel like they were hoodwinked," explained Vanessa Bohns, author and professor at Cornell’s Industrial Labor Relations School. “You can't just focus on getting someone to legally consent to something to protect yourself from liability. You have to make sure that they understand it.”

Introducing contract intelligence in Acrobat AI Assistant can help you build confidence in your employees’ ability to understand the documents they sign, from employee contracts and handbooks to policy acknowledgments. Even when reviewing a job offer, AI can break down complex terms, such as salary, benefits, and non-compete clauses, helping provide candidates with more confidence in their business.

In turn, HR teams not only increase trust but also drive greater buy-in into company culture, benefits policies, and beyond.

Intelligent contract applications in the wider workplace: HR’s role

Beyond the walls of HR, there are countless applications of AI-enabled contract intelligence across business functions, with contracts and documentation in the lifeblood of every business department.

As an HR professional, you must also consider your role in the exploration, adoption, and facilitation the adoption of such technology across your wider workforce. This may range from assisting with the provision of training programs on the AI tool, to driving a cultural shift within your organization where employees and business leaders follow best practices around safe and secure contract management without sacrificing valuable time.

There are huge productivity gains on offer, with time freed up from a heavily manual process able to be spent on critical work, but it also significantly reduces the risk of workers signing contracts without fully understanding their details. HR and compliance teams, this is your cue to breathe a sigh of relief.

For example, Austin Bailey, a consultant overseeing compliance and operations at JR Real Estate Group who uses Acrobat AI Assistant said: “I used to allow 30 to 45 minutes per contract for an initial review. Now I can do it in 8 to 10 minutes, simply by clicking in on the key summary bullet points that AI Assistant brings to my attention.”

“The compounding time savings is huge,” he added. “It will pave the way for our company’s growth.”

The tool empowers staff to become more skilled at navigating contracts ranging from vendor agreements – another vital application for HR departments, with 83% of HR tech buyers experiencing some type of regret after purchase – to intellectual property documentation and beyond.

Indeed, 78% of knowledge workers surveyed by Adobe Acrobat said that having AI help with summarizing and comparing contracts may give them more confidence in their ability to understand the variety of agreements they regularly encounter.

To ensure the tool is safely and regularly used by employees, however, HR and people teams must follow best practices for AI adoption and upskilling, giving staff training to ensure they are capable and comfortable with the fundamentals. This must also be augmented with access to secure testing environments to experiment with the technology.

The future of work demands safe, intelligent solutions

With billions of contracts opened in Adobe Acrobat each month, there is no escaping the scale of risk at play when employees across the business blindly sign documents without fully understanding their contents.

Abhigyan Modi, Senior Vice President of Adobe Document Cloud said it is vital to give businesses “new capabilities to deliver contract intelligence in Adobe AI Assistant, making 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.”

As our workplaces are transformed by AI technology, the emphasis must be on embracing technology that not only offers huge productivity gains but also guarantees a safer and more secure future of work.

Alongside mitigating the risk of mishandled contracts and documentation, Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant itself is governed by data security protocols and developed in alignment with Adobe’s AI Ethics processes.

Adobe Acrobat is a core productivity tool for more than 650 million monthly active users who open 400+ billion PDFs in the app each month. Launched in February 2024, Acrobat AI Assistant transforms how people and businesses work with their documents. With new features and growing adoption, Acrobat AI Assistant saw customer conversations in the app double quarter over quarter in the final quarter of 2024.

Adobe never trains the company’s generative AI models on customer data and prohibits third-party LLMs from training on Adobe customer data.

Survey methodology

Adobe partnered with Advanis, a research firm that provides market, social, and consumer research services. We surveyed 1009 UK consumers, 256 small business owners, 372 knowledge workers. The data was collected between January 6 and January 12, 2025. The survey sample is representative of UK demographics.