‘Bringing AI to the masses’: Adobe taps into 3 trillion PDFs worldwide with new product

The $378bn software titan says it is deploying an AI chatbot across trillions of PDF documents in a bid to further make the technology more mainstream.

Adobe's generative AI assistant in Acrobat.

Adobe is launching an artificial intelligence chatbot in Acrobat — the world’s most used PDF reader — as it ups the ante in the AI race against Microsoft, Google and Meta.

The $US247.1bn ($378bn) media and design software titan says its bot will be able to summarise lengthy documents in seconds, as well as format information and answer questions via simple written prompts.

It is part of a surge of new AI-powered products to hit the market, with OpenAI unveiling Sora at the weekend, which uses artificial intelligence to create photorealistic videos from text descriptions.

Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, has also accelerated its roll out of AI “Copilots”, which are now available across its suite of products, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Adobe senior vice president for Document Cloud, Abhigyan Modi, said the AI assistant in Acrobat would make the technology more accessible. He said the AI Assistant in Acrobat was “bringing generative AI to the masses, unlocking new value from … approximately 3 trillion PDFs in the world”.

“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable knowledge and professional-looking content,” Mr Modi said.

“PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”

The AI assistant can perform tasks such as recommending questions based on a document’s content, provide summaries with citations and consolidate information. It can be used across all document formats, including Word and PowerPoint, making it a competing bot to Microsoft’s Copilot.

Crucially, Mr Modi said no customer document content is stored or used for training AI Assistant without consent.

Adobe will launch AI Assistant in Acrobat as a beta to test and learn with its customers globally, including a “private beta” for enterprise users.

It will be available in Acrobat Standard and Pro Individual at no additional cost during the beta. Mr Modi said once AI Assistant is generally available, Acrobat customers will have access to the full range of capabilities through an add-on plan.

The assistant is not the first AI product from Adobe. Last year it unveiled Firefly — which is embedded across its suite of projects, such as Photoshop and Illustrator — which uses AI to produce photorealistic images among other tasks.

It comes amid heightened concern around deep fakes and the risk of spreading more misinformation ahead of next year’s US presidential election and other major polls in Europe and India.

Already, people have used AI to create deep fakes of debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Adobe plans to counter this by introducing watermarking in an image’s metadata field, to show what has been AI generated — what it likens to a “nutrition label”.

Originally published as ‘Bringing AI to the masses’: Adobe taps into 3 trillion PDFs worldwide with new product