Contract review workflows move at the speed of their slowest step. In many organizations, it’s when a contract arrives in a shared folder and becomes the responsibility of a contract reviewer. The contract sits there until a reviewer can find enough time to open it, skim its contents, and decide how urgently it needs attention from the team.

Supplementing that step with a simple automated workflow can speed up the process dramatically. Using the Cloudmersive Document AI and PDF connectors in Power Automate, we can build a flow that automatically generates an AI summary of an incoming contract and stamps it with an “UNDER REVIEW” watermark the moment it arrives. This way, reviewers have the context they need automatically before they open the document, and the document is clearly marked as in-progress before it has a chance to circulate prematurely.

Setting up the Document AI and PDF connectors in Power Automate

Before we start building our flow, we’ll need both the Cloudmersive Document AI and PDF connectors available in our Power Automate environment. Both are available as premium connectors and can be connected using a Cloudmersive API key.

If you don’t have an API key currently, you can get a low-volume API key for testing (800 API calls/month) by creating a free account on the Cloudmersive website. This will be enough to create a quick test/POC showing both connectors’ capabilities with short example files.

Building the contract review flow

We’ll build an Automated Cloud Flow that triggers when a new file arrives in a designated “Contract Intake” folder in SharePoint.

Once our trigger is configured, we’ll add a SharePoint: Get file content action to retrieve the file bytes from the newly arrived document. We’ll use the file identifier from the trigger output to specify which file to retrieve.

Extracting an AI-generated contract summary

With our file content in hand, we’ll add a new action and navigate to the Cloudmersive Document AI connector. From the actions list, we’ll select Extract Summary from a Document using AI.

We’ll configure this action by passing in the file content bytes from our Get file content step. We’ll leave the recognitionMode parameter on its default Advanced setting for the most accurate results.

When this action runs, it returns a DocumentSummaryText field containing a natural-language paragraph summarizing the contract’s contents. That includes the parties involved, the subject matter, the key terms, and any other salient details the AI identifies from the document.

Adding a watermark to mark the contract as under review

Next, we’ll add a new action from the Cloudmersive PDF connector. From the actions list, we’ll select Add a text watermark to a PDF.

We’ll configure this action with the following parameters: for InputFile, we’ll pass in the file content bytes from our Get file content step. For watermarkText, we’ll type out UNDER REVIEW. We’ll leave the font and sizing parameters on their defaults, though these can be customized to match your organization’s document standards. Note that the default font color is red, and the default font style is Times New Roman.

The output of this action is a watermarked PDF file. It’s just the original contract with the “UNDER REVIEW” text stamp applied across each page.

Storing the watermarked contract and notifying the reviewer

We’ll now add our SharePoint: Create file action to store the watermarked PDF back in our document library. We’ll save it to a separate “Contracts In Review” folder to keep it separated from the original intake location.

Finally, we’ll add an Outlook: Send an email action to notify the assigned reviewer. We’ll populate the email body with the DocumentSummaryText output from our Document AI step; the reviewer will receive the contract summary directly in their inbox alongside the notification.

Saving and testing the flow

At this point, we’ll save our flow and run a test using an example contract. For our test, we’ll upload a standard vendor services agreement to our intake folder.

When our flow finishes running, we’ll first look at the flow run history to make sure each step completed successfully.

After that, we’ll check our output folder to confirm the watermarked PDF was created correctly, and we’ll review the email notification to confirm the summary arrived in the “reviewer’s” inbox.

If we take a look at the DocumentSummaryText alongside our original contract document, we’ll be able to confirm that the summary accurately captures the key details in a single paragraph: parties, subject matter, term length, and governing jurisdiction.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to build a Power Automate flow that automatically summarizes and watermarks contracts using the Cloudmersive Document AI and PDF connectors.

The result is a flow that closes the gap between document arrival and reviewer action. Every contract that lands in the intake folder immediately gets a plain-language summary and a clear in-progress marker, so reviewers have the context they need the moment they’re notified. With this flow running in the background, documents won’t sit in limbo waiting for someone to triage them.

For expert advice on using Cloudmersive connectors for enterprise-scale workflows in Power Automate, please reach out to a Cloudmersive representative.