Registering a new contract is mostly typing: title, counterparty, start date, term, renewal type, notice period, owner, payment terms. All of that information is already in the PDF – someone just has to read it and put it in the right fields, in the right place. For a Benelux customer we built an AI PDF scan into their SharePoint contract management on Shareflex: drop a signed contract PDF in a library, and moments later the contract data is extracted, checked and ready for review.
This article explains what the AI PDF scan for contracts does, how it works for the user and why it is reliable enough to use on real contracts.
The problem: valuable data locked in PDFs
A contract register is only as good as the data in it. When registering a contract takes a quarter of an hour of copying from a PDF, fields get skipped, dates get mistyped and contracts end up in the wrong place – or are not registered at all. That undermines everything that depends on the register: notice-period alerts, reports and an overview of obligations.
How the AI PDF scan for contracts works
1. Upload the PDF
The user drops a signed contract in the AI Scan library and can carry on with other work. The scan runs on the server, not in the browser.
2. AI reads and understands the contract
First, Azure AI Document Intelligence turns the PDF – including scans, columns and tables – into clean text. Then Azure OpenAI extracts the contract data: parties, dates, term, renewal and notice conditions, owner and payment terms. What the AI looks for is driven by the fields of the contract register itself: add a field, and the AI extracts it from the next scan onwards.
3. Checked against your own data
The AI proposes; Shareflex checks. Choices must exist, dates must be real dates, and references – country, division, contract type, counterparty, owner – are only filled in when they match existing data exactly. If there is no exact match, the field stays empty for the user to choose. An empty field is better than a wrong one. For yes/no questions the AI must also quote the sentence in the contract its answer is based on.
4. Review and approve
The user reviews the result in one screen: the text the AI found next to the values it filled in, with the PDF alongside. Country, division and contract type can only be chosen in combinations that really exist. One click on Approve creates the contract in the right place and attaches the PDF.
An AI PDF scan you can trust
- A human decides: nothing is registered without approval.
- Transparent AI: the original text and quotes are shown next to every value, and each scan keeps a full log.
- No silent errors: every scan has a clear status – in progress, review needed, processed – and problems such as a duplicate contract are flagged and can be e-mailed to the responsible people.
- Your own environment: the AI runs in your own Azure tenant and the documents stay in your Microsoft 365.
- Configurable: models, instructions and fields are settings, not software changes.
What it delivers
- Minutes instead of a quarter of an hour per contract: users review instead of type.
- Better data: consistent, validated metadata – and therefore reliable alerts and reports.
- The right place: every contract lands in the correct country, division and contract type.
- Faster adoption: registering a contract is no longer a chore that gets postponed.
Frequently asked questions
What does an AI PDF scan for contracts do?
It reads a signed contract PDF, extracts the contract data – parties, dates, term, renewal and notice conditions, owner, payment terms – and prepares a new contract record in SharePoint for review and approval.
Does the AI register contracts on its own?
No. The AI proposes values and Shareflex checks them against your own data, but a user always reviews and approves before the contract is created.
Does it work with scanned contracts?
Yes. Azure AI Document Intelligence also reads scanned PDFs, columns and tables before the contract data is extracted.
Where does our contract data go?
The AI services run in your own Azure environment and the documents stay in your own Microsoft 365 tenant.
Want AI in your contract process?
The AI PDF scan is part of the contract management we build on Shareflex Contract. Also see our Shareflex Contract AI services, read how contracts are signed from SharePoint with Oodrive and DocuSign, or how we built a safe Copy Contract feature in the same module. Get in touch for a demo.
