Adobe taps AI to teach Acrobat new tricks
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Adobe is adding generative AI to Acrobat, its venerable tool for creating and managing PDF files.
Why it matters: Adobe and its rivals are racing to incorporate AI into their products before chatbots can render traditional software obsolete.
Driving the news: Adobe on Tuesday launched Acrobat Studio, a subscription service that allows individuals or groups to query a series of documents, generating answers complete with citations.
How it works: Customers can combine up to 100 documents into what Adobe calls "PDF Spaces."
- Acrobat Studio automatically organizes and summarizes the data, and users can ask questions or use the results to create presentations and other documents.
- The service focuses on the types of data found in PDFs, but Acrobat Studio also works with Word documents, PowerPoint, Excel and web pages.
- Available on desktop, web and mobile, Adobe Studio is priced at $29.95 per month for businesses and $25 per month for individuals.
- The subscription also includes the premium version of Adobe Express.
The big picture: Adobe isn't the only software giant infusing AI throughout its product line.
- Salesforce kicked off a big agent push this year and Microsoft has added AI Copilot to nearly all of its key products.
Zoom in: Adobe pitches itself as a creator-friendly alternative to other AI offerings.
- Its Firefly features are safe for commercial use because they're trained only on data that's either licensed by Adobe or in the public domain.
- Adobe also said it won't train its models on customer data.
Our thought bubble: Adobe sent several documents related to the Acrobat Studio launch in a PDF Space. It's pretty nice to just ask questions of a press kit.
- I asked "How much does this cost?" and "Which document types are supported" and got the information almost immediately, rather than the usual process of hunting through various press releases, blog posts and spec sheets.
- It's something I probably could have done myself by importing the documents into ChatGPT or another app, but this was more convenient, and the included citations allowed me to easily double-check that there weren't any hallucinations.
Yes, but: Some say Adobe still isn't moving fast enough.
- "Adobe is off to a slower AI start than we had anticipated," financial analyst Dan Ives said in a research note, removing the company from Wedbush's AI 30 list.
- Ives and colleagues say they have increased concerns that Adobe will see its products disrupted by AI, rather than benefiting from it.
- AI is getting rapidly better at creating software on demand that could eventually be far cheaper than off-the-shelf tools, while also being more personalized to an individual person or business.
Between the lines: Although Adobe created the PDF format, it's now an openly available standard, and plenty of other services on the market allow people to query PDF and other document types.
- Adobe pitched Acrobat Studio as a more capable and secure option, especially for handling long documents and documents with charts, as well as those created by scanning a physical paper document, still a popular use of PDFs.
- "Even though other tools can do some of the capabilities, it's high risk," Adobe VP of product marketing Michi Alexander told Axios.
- In contracts, for example, "you can use another tool for that, but it's not going to help guide you in the same way we would," she said.
