Adobe introduces AI assistant to help enterprises exploit data held in PDFs

Adobe has unveiled a new artificial intelligence assistant that integrates with its widely used Acrobat PDF software, promising to help enterprise workers save hours each week by making it easier to extract insights and information from digital documents.

Acrobat AI Assistant for enterprise is an add-on to Adobe’s Acrobat product that will enable employees to quickly generate summaries of lengthy, complex documents, get answers to specific questions, create initial drafts of written content, and navigate to relevant sections of a report through clickable citations.

Adobe employees in sales and in research and development are already using it internally, according to Toni Vanwinkle, Adobe’s Vice President of Digital Employee Experience. “AI assistant really helps our employees work smarter,” she said. “Unlocking information in the enterprise is really one of those key things to foster productivity for knowledge workers.”

Vanwinkle provided several examples of how Adobe staff are using the AI assistant to work more efficiently. The company’s research and development teams, she said, have cut down the time spent analyzing industry trends from hours to minutes by using the tool to automatically summarize technical documents. Adobe’s sales teams have also reduced by half the time needed to research responses to requests for proposals (RFPs) by using the assistant to pinpoint relevant information.

Acrobat already includes some AI features that any user can access, but the new enterprise assistant focuses specifically on common business use cases such as report querying, document navigation, content summarization and data extraction.

A conversational interface enables workers to extract information from PDFs and documents in other formats, including Word and PowerPoint, or generate summaries so they don’t have to read the whole thing.

Under the hood, the AI models powering the assistant are currently from Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which provides enterprise access to OpenAI’s powerful language models like GPT-3. However, Vanwinkle said Adobe plans to take an “LLM-agnostic” approach in the future that will enable enterprise customers to plug in other large language models based on their specific needs. But any partner models would need to meet Adobe’s standards for ethics, security, and privacy, she noted.

Allowing an external LLM to process enterprise data held in potentially confidential documents could be seen as a security risk, but Adobe said that the AI assistant is governed by data security protocols.

To help enterprises successfully deploy the AI assistant, Adobe is providing best practices guides and customer success managers to advise companies on implementation, integration, and driving organizational change. The company is also assisting customers in setting up “communities of practice” that bring together AI champions from different functions to share knowledge and identify high-value use cases.

Shared responsibility

But even with the most advanced AI, Vanwinkle emphasized that human judgment remains essential and that the assistant is not meant to replace human workers but rather augment their capabilities. Users still need to carefully review and validate the AI’s outputs, especially for any externally facing content.

“We want to make sure that there’s always a human in the loop,” she said. “Understanding really strong prompting, understanding the documents, doing that verification process all help us with the hallucination issue” that sometimes causes AI systems to generate inaccurate or nonsensical information.

Adobe insists that when enterprises make use of Acrobat AI Assistant, they agree to use the features responsibly.

The company has been investing heavily in AI across its product lines in recent years, but the Acrobat AI Assistant for enterprise represents one of its most ambitious efforts yet to bring advanced AI capabilities to knowledge workers in large organizations. It comes as competition heats up in the suddenly crowded market for generative AI tools aimed at business users, with rivals like Microsoft and Google racing to integrate their own AI models into productivity software.

Looking further ahead, Vanwinkle said Adobe’s long-term vision is for AI to become a “superpower” that helps unlock employees’ full potential rather than a threat to their jobs. “The vision for me is to give employees assistance that can unlock and become superpowers for them to bring more valuable work to the enterprise and hopefully more quality to their own lives and more well-being,” she said.

The new Adobe Acrobat AI assistant for enterprises is generally available, the company said. Pricing details were not disclosed, but the tool will be sold as an add-on to Adobe’s existing enterprise Acrobat licenses on a per-user basis.

For now, the Acrobat AI Assistant only functions in English, but additional languages are “coming soon,” the company said.