If you have a question about a document, who better to answer it than the document itself?
That’s the thinking behind Acrobat AI Assistant, a new tool released by Adobe Monday. For an additional monthly fee of $4.99, most Adobe Acrobat customers will be able to ask the tool questions about complicated documents and get answers based on their contents. The company said the type of documents that can be queried by the AI tool can range from study guides to tax documents.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told CNBC in February that the assistant will help make documents more understandable and accessible.
“Imagine you opened a 100-page document. You want to understand the summary, you want to have a conversation with it, you want to ask questions,” Narayen said. “You want to correlate it with other documents that you may have and with any information that you have in your company.”
Adobe Acrobat is part of the company’s document cloud services, which brought in $2.6 billion in 2023, according to its most recent 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document cloud business, along with the Creative Cloud segment, accounted for 73% of the company’s total revenue, or about $14.2 billion, in 2023.
Adobe on Monday also launched a free mobile version of its AI assistant in beta that customers can ask questions via voice commands. It is also available via extensions on browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. The $4.99 monthly fee is an “early access” fee, the company said, meaning it may increase in the future.
The popularity of AI assistants has exploded following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022. The software 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’s Bing was one of the first to launch an AI chatbot for its browser, but companies like Meta and Amazon have since followed suit.
While some have improved productivity and even replaced some workers, other AI-powered chatbots have gone astray.
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 computer technology. data. For companies with a lot of first-party data, it might be obvious to try to extract some value by making it accessible to customers via an AI assistant, Khan said.
“We are slowly 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 the benefits they would gain from an AI assistant.
“Yes, you can adapt it to every industry, but the question is, should you adapt it to every industry,” Khan said.