If you have a question about a document, who better to answer it than the document itself?
That’s the idea behind Acrobat AI Assistant, a new tool released by Adobe Monday. For an additional $4.99 monthly fee, most Adobe Acrobat customers will reportedly be able to ask the tool questions about complex documents and receive answers based on their content. The company said the types of documents the AI tool can request can range from training manuals to tax documents.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke about this. CNBC in February, the assistant will help make documents more understandable and accessible.
“Imagine you opened a 100-page document. You want to understand the resume, you want to talk to him, you want to ask questions,” Narayen said. “You want to cross-reference that with other documents that you may have, as well as all the information that you have in your facility.”
Adobe Acrobat is part of the company’s cloud services, which generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2023, according to its latest 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2023, the cloud computing business, together with the Creative Cloud segment, accounted for 73% of the company’s total revenue, or about $14.2 billion.
Adobe also on Monday launched a free mobile version of the AI assistant in beta, where customers can ask it questions using voice commands. It is also available through extensions in browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. The $4.99 monthly fee is an “early access” plan, the company says. saidwhich means it may grow in the future.
The popularity of AI assistants has skyrocketed since the launch of OpenAI ChatGPT in 2022. The programs use artificial intelligence to provide human-like answers to questions on both websites and apps. The launch of Adobe’s AI assistant follows similar moves by other tech companies to incorporate AI-powered chatbots into their technology. Microsoft Bing was one of the first companies to launch an AI chatbot for its browser, but companies like Meta and Amazon have since followed suit.
While some have reportedly increased productivity and even replaced some workers, other AI-powered chatbots have gone off the rails.
However, the trend of incorporating AI assistants into existing products is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, said Yusuf Khan, head of data science and artificial intelligence at Constellation, a SaaS company that works with artificial intelligence and data science technologies. For companies with a lot of proprietary data, it may be obvious to try to gain some value by making it available to customers through an artificial intelligence assistant, Khan said.
“We are gradually moving from a search-based approach to a chat-based approach,” he added.
However, Khan cautioned that companies need to consider their customers’ needs and how they would benefit from an AI assistant.
“Yes, you can fit it into every industry, but the question is whether you should fit it into every industry,” Khan said.