At some point over the last two decades, productivity applications enabled humans (and machines!) to create information at the speed of digital—faster than any person could possibly consume or understand it. Modern inboxes and document folders are filled with information: digital haystacks with needles of insight that too often remain undiscovered.
Generative AI is an incredibly exciting technology that’s already delivering tremendous value to our customers across creative and experience-building applications. Now Adobe is embarking on our next chapter of innovation by introducing our first generative AI capabilities for digital documents and bringing the new technology to the masses.
AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat, now in beta, is a new generative AI–powered conversational engine deeply integrated into Acrobat workflows, empowering everyone with the information inside their most important documents.
Accelerating productivity across popular document formats
As the creator of PDF, the world’s most trusted digital document format, Adobe understands document challenges and opportunities well. Our continually evolving Acrobat PDF application, the gold standard for working with PDFs, is already used by more than half a billion customers to open around 400 billion documents each year. Starting immediately, customers will be able to use AI Assistant to work even more productively. All they need to do is open Acrobat on their desktop or the web and start working.
With AI Assistant in Acrobat, project managers can scan, summarize, and distribute meeting highlights in seconds, and sales teams can quickly personalize pitch decks and respond to client requests. Students can shorten the time they spend hunting through research and spend more time on analysis and understanding, while social media and marketing teams can quickly surface top trends and issues into daily updates for stakeholders. AI Assistant can also streamline the time it takes to compose an email or scan a contract of any kind, enhancing productivity for knowledge workers and consumers globally.
Innovating with AI—responsibly
Adobe has continued to evolve the digital document category for over 30 years. We invented the PDF format and open-sourced it to the world. And we brought Adobe’s decade-long legacy of AI innovation to digital documents, including the award-winning Liquid Mode, which allows Acrobat to dynamically reflow document content and make it readable on smaller screens. The experience we’ve gained by building Liquid Mode and then learning how customers get value from it is foundational to what we’ve delivered in AI Assistant.
Today, PDF is the number-one business file format stored in the cloud, and PDFs are where individuals and organizations keep, share, and collaborate on their most important information. Adobe remains committed to secure and responsible AI innovation for digital documents, and AI Assistant in Acrobat has guardrails in place so that all customers—from individuals to the largest enterprises—can use the new features with confidence.
Like other Adobe AI features, AI Assistant in Acrobat has been developed and deployed in alignment with Adobe’s AI principles and is governed by secure data protocols. Adobe has taken a model-agnostic approach to developing AI Assistant, curating best-in-class technologies to provide customers with the value they need. When working with third-party large language models (LLMs), Adobe contractually obligates them to employ confidentiality and security protocols that match our own high standards, and we specifically prohibit third-party LLMs from manually reviewing or training their models on Adobe customer data.
The future of intelligent document experiences
Today’s beta features are part of a larger Adobe vision to transform digital document experiences with generative AI. Our vision for what’s next includes the following:
Insights across multiple documents and document types: AI Assistant will work across multiple documents, document types, and sources, instantly surfacing the most important information from everywhere.
AI-powered authoring, editing, and formatting: Last year, customers edited tens of billions of documents in Acrobat. AI Assistant will make it simple to quickly generate first drafts, as well as helping with copy editing, including instantly changing voice and tone, compressing copy length, and suggesting content design and layout options.
Intelligent creation: Key features from Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative models, and Adobe Express will make it simple for anyone to make their documents more creative, professional, and personal.
Elevating document collaboration with AI-supported reviews: Digital collaboration is how work gets from draft to done. And with a 75% year-over-year increase in the number of documents shared, more collaboration is happening in Acrobat than ever. Generative AI will make the process simple, analyzing feedback and comments, suggesting changes, and even highlighting and helping resolve conflicting feedback.
As we have with other Adobe generative AI features, we look forward to bringing our decades of experience, expertise, and customers along for the ride with AI Assistant.
This article contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those related to Adobe’s expectations and plans for AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat, Adobe’s vision and roadmap for future generative AI capabilities and offerings and the expected benefits to Adobe. All such forward-looking statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this press release and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Factors that might cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to: failure to innovate effectively and meet customer needs; issues relating to the development and use of AI; failure to realize the anticipated benefits of investments or acquisitions; failure to compete effectively; damage to our reputation or brands; service interruptions or failures in information technology systems by us or third parties; security incidents; failure to effectively develop, manage and maintain critical third-party business relationships; risks associated with being a multinational corporation and adverse macroeconomic conditions; failure to recruit and retain key personnel; complex sales cycles; changes in, and compliance with, global laws and regulations, including those related to information security and privacy; failure to protect our intellectual property; litigation, regulatory inquiries and intellectual property infringement claims; changes in tax regulations; complex government procurement processes; risks related to fluctuations in or the timing of revenue recognition from our subscription offerings; fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; impairment charges; our existing and future debt obligations; catastrophic events; and fluctuations in our stock price. For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties, please refer to Adobe’s most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. Adobe undertakes no obligation, and does not intend, to update the forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
This content was produced by Adobe. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.