Long agreements are not hard because they are complicated. They are hard because the answer to "what happens if we deliver late" is spread across a definitions section on page 4, an obligation on page 42, and a schedule on page 211 that quietly changes the number.
The method
- Upload the agreement and its schedules as one folder. Scanned pages are handled by built-in OCR, though quality depends on the scan.
- Ask narrow questions rather than broad ones. "What is the penalty for late delivery?" works better than "summarise the contract".
- Follow the citation. Every answer names the document and page, so you open the page and read the clause yourself.
- Ask the negative question. "Does this agreement mention a force majeure carve-out for currency controls?" If it does not, the system should say so rather than invent one.
- Finish with a structured extraction — parties, dates, amounts, obligations — and export it for the file.
Before you trust any document AI, ask it something the document does not contain. A tool that produces a confident, plausible, invented answer is not usable for contract work.
What this replaces
| Task | Manual approach | With local document search |
|---|---|---|
| Find every mention of "indemnity" | Ctrl+F across five PDFs, misses synonyms | One search across the whole indexed library with page references |
| Check a defined term's real meaning | Flip back to the definitions section repeatedly | Ask, then jump straight to the cited page |
| Compare this year's contract to last year's | Two screens and a highlighter | Side-by-side comparison of the two indexed documents |
| Hand a summary to a partner | Retype notes | Export the summary with citations attached |
Why it stays offline
With a local model installed and configured, indexing, search, and answering can run without internet access. Optional external AI providers or integrations may send requests outside the appliance, so verify the configuration and network policy before using confidential material.
AI Box answers from the documents you upload and shows the source document and page. Answers should still be checked against the cited page before they are relied on for legal, medical, or financial decisions.
Privacy, professional-conduct, and health-data obligations depend on your jurisdiction, organization, contracts, and deployment. Consult qualified counsel or your privacy officer before using AI with regulated or confidential records. A local appliance is not, by itself, a compliance certification.