Using AI Assist

Open AI Assist, ask about the contract in front of you, and review any edits or comments it proposes before you accept them. Assist is Pactly’s built-in chat: it answers in plain language, grounded in the contract you are looking at and its full history, and it can also act on your request by drafting tracked edits, review comments, clauses, and playbook reviews. It never changes your contract silently, so every edit and comment arrives as a proposal you accept or reject.

Assist is available to standard signed-in users. It floats in the corner of the app and stays with you as you move between pages. Hub accounts (approver and requester roles) don’t see the panel.

1. Click AI Assist in the bottom corner of any Pactly web page to open the panel.
2. The panel opens titled Assist with a BETA badge.
3. Type into the Type your message… box and press Enter, or pick one of the suggested prompts to start.

Where you open Assist sets its context:

• On a contract page, Assist already has that contract’s text and timeline loaded, so you can ask about it directly. The empty state reads “Ask a question about this contract to get started.”
• Anywhere else (the repository, a dashboard), Assist works as a general assistant and can search across all your contracts. The empty state reads “Ask me anything to get started.”

Assist also runs inside the Pactly Word plugin, where it can edit the open document. For that surface, see Using Assist in the Word plugin.

On a contract page, ask in natural language. Assist answers from the contract’s text and can pull its full history: emails, notes, rounds, approvals, and signer status.

• “What’s the termination notice period?”
• “Summarize where this deal stands and what changed in the last round.”
• “What did the counterparty ask for in their last email?”
• “Has anyone approved this yet, and who signed?”

The conversation is threaded, so you can build on an answer without repeating yourself. Ask “is that cap mutual?” straight after asking what the cap is.

For complex questions, Assist works in steps and shows its progress in the panel (for example “Searching contracts…” or “Loading playbook positions…”) before it answers.

Assist does not edit your contract on its own. When you ask it to change something, it returns a proposal and waits for you.

• Tracked edits. Ask “make the liability cap mutual” or “add a 30-day cure period” and Assist drafts the change as a proposed edit. You Apply it (inserted as a Word track change), tweak it first with Edit, Copy it without inserting, or Reject it. Edit proposals apply inside the Word plugin, where the document is open and editable.
• Comments. Ask it to “flag the IP assignment clause for review” and Assist prepares a Word comment for you to add.
• Clauses. Ask “insert our standard governing-law clause” and Assist searches your clause library and returns the language for you to insert.
• Playbook review. Ask it to “review this against our NDA playbook” and Assist matches a playbook and walks the document position by position.
• Support. If you ask for help it cannot give, Assist can draft a support message, which it never sends until you choose to.

Read every proposal before you accept it. Because edits land as tracked changes, nothing reaches the document, or the counterparty, until you apply it.

To give Assist context beyond the open contract (a prior version, a related email, a redline you received), use the attach action (the paperclip) next to the message box. Supported file types are PDF, Word, Text, and Email (.pdf, .docx, .txt, .eml, .msg), up to 10 MB per file.

Assist holds the whole conversation, the contract, and any attachments in context at once. That context is large (around 200,000 tokens) but not unlimited, and it fills up as a chat runs longer and you attach more.

When you move on to a different question, start a fresh conversation rather than continuing one indefinitely. A clean thread keeps answers sharp and avoids carrying stale context from an earlier topic.

• Be specific. “Make the liability cap mutual and change it from $1M to 12 months of fees” beats “fix this clause.”
• Point to a location. “Change the termination-for-convenience clause in section 12” is clearer than “change the termination clause.”
• Iterate. If a draft is close, refine it: “Good, but add an exception for willful misconduct.”
• Verify. Read every proposed edit, and confirm any factual answer against the contract itself before acting on it.

• AI Assist overview
• Using Assist in the Word plugin
• Running a playbook review (Word plugin)
• Contract Timeline
• For developers: AI integrations (MCP & API) overview