Meet the New AI Features in Adobe.
How Did We Ever Live Without These?
Written by Lauren Wait
Lauren is an award-winning Arizona-based journalist and editor and has worked for over 20 years within the magazine and book publishing industry.
For most knowledge workers, PDF is the gold standard for creating and sharing important information. But what if you could interact with your PDF, and use it to cut time spent on almost all your day-to-day tasks?
Imagine opening a 50-page report, generating high-level questions and answers, and sharing those insights directly via email with your team — all within seconds.
A research assistant creates a summary email from an earnings call transcript with the click of a button.
A sales rep identifies a potential client’s challenges and creates a custom pitch deck for that company with just a few minutes of work.
We all hear the current chatter about AI; about how it can help us “be productive.” So why are so many people not using it?
It might be that the AI learning curve feels intimidating. Or it seems there is never enough time to learn a new productivity tool.
The key is to focus on how generative AI can be put to work in small ways that result in large time savers — allowing knowledge workers to be a driving force for problem-solving and innovation within organizations.
Thirty years after Adobe invented the PDF, Acrobat remains the industry standard for reading, editing and transforming them. Now their goal is to make the PDF work for you. How? Through AI.
Adobe now offers an intuitive, personal AI Assistant you can chat with using simple language. And it doesn’t require any complicated implementations — just open Reader or Acrobat and start working with the new capabilities.
No one wants to jump from system to system. Integration is key, particularly in today’s hybrid and asynchronous work environments. And Adobe’s latest developments in generative AI and security are revolutionizing the way we read, review, interact with and manage digital content. From Liquid Mode to Generative Summary, let’s check out Adobe’s AI innovations for modern workflows.
There’s nothing more frustrating than bouncing in the back of a taxi while having to pinch, nudge and swipe around your phone screen. Especially if the PDF you’re desperately trying to review doesn’t display correctly on mobile.
Adobe has a solution. It’s called Liquid Mode, and it’s a Time Magazine 2023 Best Invention. Liquid Mode automatically resizes your PDF to fit your phone and whatever other device you’re using. It creates a personalized experience by changing the font size, character or line spacing and more.
Another new personalization from Acrobat can help you save time on digital transactions. How many times have you filled out multiple forms with the same information? Name, address, email, over and over.
Adobe Acrobat includes a fillable form that remembers your profile and pre-populates your information. Click, done. And it can save multiple profiles (for you, your significant other and your dog Sparky). The best part? It works whether you’re on a desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.
But what if it’s a physical document you’re dealing with? So much of our work today is digital, yet scenarios still arise when you find yourself with a physical document that needs to be saved or shared. Adobe has a solution for that, too.
Adobe Scan is a mobile app that is a paper-to-PDF solution. It’s as simple as taking a photo. Adobe Scan uses AI technology to correct the perspective of the image, sharpen text and remove any glares or shadows — making the scanned document easier to read and work with. Plus, with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, you can convert the scanned document into an editable PDF file that you can search and edit. You can even extract text from the document or add new text in custom fonts that match the original file.
The ease and time-savings of Adobe Scan cannot be understated. “It’s almost like having a scanner in your pocket,” explains Adobe Principal Evangelist Lori DeFurio in a recent TechTalk. “We’re converting paper to pixels and then pixels to words.” And we might add: pain points to seamless workflows. It’s a handy tool to have when you need to digitize documents quickly and easily.
Generative AI is positioned to be everyone’s best personal assistant. And now, you can experience the benefits of a generative AI assistant natively within Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The Acrobat Pro AI Assistant leverages the same generative AI and machine learning models behind Liquid Mode, so you can do things like:
Get document insights: AI Assistant is a helpful tool that can recommend questions based on the content of a PDF document and provide answers in an intuitive conversational interface.
Speed read: If you need to quickly understand what a long document is about, AI Assistant can provide you with short overviews in easy-to-read formats.
Fact check: To help you verify the source of AI Assistant’s answers, Adobe’s custom attribution engine and proprietary AI generate intelligent citations.
Get to the point: AI Assistant also makes it easy to navigate long documents with clickable links that help you find what you need quickly, so you can focus your time on the most important information.
Repurpose and share key points: If you want to consolidate and format information into top takeaways, text for emails, presentations, reports and more, AI Assistant can do that, too. And with the “copy” button, you can easily pass along the information you need.
With Acrobat AI Assistant, you can engage with your document. Ask it questions — including voice prompts — and get quick answers linked to sources from your doc. Then use the responses to craft your emails and presentations.
The features of Acrobat Pro AI Assistant are vast, but they are all dedicated to consolidating typical tasks. This brings the important points to the forefront and maximizes productivity for knowledge workers.
One of the most time-saving features is a one-click Generative Summary, which automatically pulls out key points to help you navigate your docs and get important info fast.
“This summarizes the whole document. I can read the first summary and if it wasn’t what I thought it was, I didn’t spend a lot of time reading three, four, five paragraphs in,” says DeFurio. “Assistant will present you with a summary, as well as three questions that it thinks you might be interested in. But you can add your own questions and have a back-and-forth conversation — and it’s all coming from within that PDF.”
And you can use the information with confidence. Adobe’s custom attribution engine and proprietary AI generate citations for each of its answers — so you can easily click on and verify the source of AI Assistant’s answers.
AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat has guardrails in place so that all workers — from individuals to the largest enterprises — can use the features with confidence. Enterprise-grade security and information governance are available for large organizations.
“We’ve put customizable functionality in our Acrobat environment for IT so that they can have the peace of mind, and they can customize it the way they want and do mobile management and user authentication, asset encryption, sandboxing technology, all of that to help protect,” explains DeFurio. “We also have a 24/7 security operations center and threat response center at Adobe.”
AI Assistant is developed in alignment with Adobe’s AI Ethics processes. Adobe also prohibits third-party Large Language Models (LLMs) from training on Adobe customer data. Read more about how Adobe is leading secure, responsible generative AI in digital documents.
AI Assistant is set to change how everyone interacts with, understands and gets value from digital documents — while cutting the time they spend on common tasks from hours to minutes. And it will only get better. The value that the AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services will continue to increase.
The PDF is a core file type in business, regardless of industry. And now with its easier processes and intelligent interactivity, the PDF is more than a carrier of information — it’s a powerful asset to conquer your to-do list.
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