3 Ways to Supercharge Your Productivity with Generative AI and Digital Documents Learn how generative AI can help you work smarter and do more with your important documents.

Information overload continues to be a big challenge for everyone—from individual consumers to large organizations. According to a 2022 OpenText survey, the vast majority of global workers (80%) experience information overload. While the amount of data that we create and have access to has grown tremendously, our ability to use it hasn't kept up.

Our Future of Digital Work global research last year reported that knowledge workers spend an average of 8.2 hours a week – about a whole workday – looking for information. It's gotten so bad that many of us have given up and we're left with folders of files gathering digital dust. We're surrounded by incredibly valuable information, that's unfortunately TL;DR – too long, didn't read.

Transforming information overload into useful knowledge.

With approximately 3 trillion PDFs worldwide, PDFs are the place where the most valuable information individuals and businesses need is kept. Unlocking all the value and intelligence from PDFs – and other documents like Word, PowerPoint and meeting transcripts – requires a deep understanding of document structure and content.

The proprietary models we developed for Liquid Mode to understand document content and structure are the foundation for the new Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant. This conversational interface is deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat's PDF workflows, bringing PDF AI to the masses. Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences that can supercharge your productivity, transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable knowledge and professional-looking content.

Working smarter and doing more with every document.

From cryptic instructions and complicated contracts to long presentations, here are three ways that generative AI can help you work smarter and do more with your important documents.

1. Get the right information – faster. Time is precious, and rather than spending all day finding what we need in long documents, we'd rather focus our time exploring and actioning on the information that matters. With generative AI, you can chat with a PDF about what's in the document and even recommend questions that maybe you hadn't thought of based on the content in the PDF—all through a conversational, intuitive interface.

With this year's tax season coming to a close, many individuals and businesses may reflect about how they can streamline their tax preparation in the future – or perhaps in the near term if they're one of the 10-15 percent of Americans who file extensions. AI Assistant can empower taxpayers to get quick answers, find and validate key facts faster, as well as easily consolidate and share important information, speeding up the process and feeling more informed and prepared. This may include needing a PDF summarizer to understanding new government tax guidance for small businesses, understanding complex instructions related to specific tax situations or even finding key insights related to reporting expenses (dependent care, travel/gift/car) that may lead to increased refunds.

Acting teacher Victoria Myssik creates and teaches online acting classes for students worldwide. Creating a comprehensive, compelling and unique curriculum requires a lot of research, which can be arduous and time consuming. She's currently using AI for a more productive, efficient and even fun way to research and write a new lesson plan for her course, "The Business of Acting."

"It's mind-blowing how much time I save with Acrobat AI Assistant," says Myssik. "It cuts down hours of reading into a few minutes of work. I can run my business better, and more importantly, it adds to my overall success in life. I have more time to take care of myself, audition, connect with friends, and do other things."

Entrepreneur and owner of Let's Cook Video Editing Services Chris Grubisa balances both growing his business and his responsibilities as a husband and father. AI has helped him simplify his work managing creative agreements, onboarding new team members and facilitating strategic partnerships. AI has been important for managing the family dynamic as well.

"Time is the most expensive commodity. From managing family schedules, condensing lengthy PDFs into key takeaways to handling essential paperwork for our newest, littlest family member, documents are essential in both my personal and professional life," Grubisa says. "AI has helped me streamline document navigation by helping me quickly condense, summarize and locate critical information."

2. Gain a deeper understanding and trust. Document AI can also help us dig deeper into our documents, not only quickly providing us with the information we were initially searching for, but also the important insights that we weren't expecting. With those AI-generated insights, however, come questions about accurate results and hallucinations. Acrobat AI Assistant features Adobe's custom attribution engine and proprietary AI to generate citations so customers can verify the source of those insights.

Product designer and content creator Ruben Cespedes manages lengthy, complex documents like brand deals, partnerships, design contracts and research papers daily. AI has been a game changer for him, creating digestible summaries and highlighting the most important insights. That way, he's able to stay focused on innovation instead of getting bogged down in the details.

"Acrobat AI Assistant acts like my own personal document-psychic, turning what used to be hours of document reviews into mere minutes. This means more time for coffee and channeling my creativity," Cespedes says.

It's important for Bryan Bonilla, co-founder and owner of Pirate World, and his team to keep up with the latest trends, namely Gen Z. Using AI Assistant in Acrobat, they're able to grab concise takeaways from a comprehensive social listening report about this important demographic. They can also ask questions, like "What type of sustainable things are Gen Z looking for?"

"Using Acrobat AI Assistant is like having a conversation with a real assistant. I can ask questions to dive deeper and learn more in minutes rather than spending an hour or more reading a report," Bonilla says. "I save dozens of hours a week and refocus that energy on coming up with inspired, beautiful products."

3. Create impactful content. These days, it's all about TL; DR. Everyone you work with wants the key information, action items and short notes. Pulling those from transcripts and plugging them into emails, presentations and reports shouldn't take a long time. Now it's easy to chat with PDF to distill and format lots of information into short takeaways, text for emails, presentations, reports and more. Inspired by our heritage in creativity, Acrobat AI Assistant can help empower customers to make their documents more creative and professional.

Real estate broker and host of Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing New York" and the spinoff series "Sell It Like Serhant" Ryan Serhant uses generative AI as a starting point when drafting e-mails and presentations.

"So many of the administrative tasks that I had to do, I now no longer have to do," Serhant says. "Whether it's preparing listing presentations, creating marketing plans, or writing email drafts. Now, AI can do that for me."

A vision for Document AI and productivity.

These gains in productivity and quality are only the beginning for generative AI. While it's still early days, it's clear that AI already provides tremendous value to how people work—from sales teams using it to personalize pitch decks to students creating easy-to-digest study guides from pages upon pages of material. There's also more value coming. Imagine using generative AI in your digital documents to supercharge your creativity—copy editing, creating first drafts and even suggesting different designs to choose from. We can't wait to see where the journey goes next!