When a long contract, tender or report lands on your desk, the real question is: "What does it say, and what should I watch for?" An AI summary answers exactly that in seconds instead of minutes.
How is it different from a plain summary?
A good summary doesn't just shorten the document; it detects its type and surfaces the most relevant information. PDF Platform's AI Summarize tool distinguishes tenders, contracts, academic papers and financial reports, and highlights parties, key dates, amounts and obligations.
Summarize step by step
- Upload the PDF: Text is read on your device; OCR kicks in for scanned documents. Your file isn't uploaded — only the text goes to the AI.
- Click "Generate Summary": The AI produces a structured summary with title, parties, key points, critical dates/amounts and takeaways.
- Download or share: Download the summary as a clean PDF or share it.
AI Summarize — Turn a long document into a professional summary in seconds.
After the summary, if you have a specific question about the document, use the AI Chat tool to ask it directly.
Preparing the document before summarizing
Summary quality tracks the quality of the text the model sees. Giving the relevant section of a two-hundred-page file rather than all of it produces a more accurate and shorter summary. In practice a few preparation steps make the difference: separating annexes from the main text, removing unrelated periods or repeated boilerplate, and turning scans into clean pages first.
How to verify a summary
A summary does not replace reading the document; it shows you where to read. If you are making a decision, confirm every critical fact against the document itself. What needs verifying is usually short and predictable:
- Amounts and currency.
- Dates, durations and notice periods.
- Party names and signing authority.
- Penalty, security and termination conditions.
- Negative provisions — «excluded», «not included», «limited to» — which fade easily in a summary.
What to expect by document type
Different documents answer different questions. In a tender document what should stand out is the submission deadline and the security amount; in a financial report it is period comparisons and movement in line items. A contract turns on parties and obligations, a technical report on method and findings. Keeping the question «what actually matters in this kind of document?» in mind while reading makes gaps obvious immediately.
When a summary is not enough
For some documents a summary is a starting point rather than a conclusion. Contracts you will sign, notices with legal effect, medical reports and correspondence with public bodies belong in this group. There, the summary tells you which clause to discuss and with whom; the right use is to route it to the relevant expert rather than to decide on the summary alone.
The next step: asking questions
A summary gives the overall picture, but usually one concrete question remains: what is the cancellation fee, or whether a clause binds you. Asking the document directly is more efficient at that point, because the answer rests on the document's own text and points at the relevant section. On long documents this removes the minutes otherwise spent searching.