The Top Three Reasons SMB Owners Need AI Assistant in Acrobat

It's a truism that time is money. But if you're a small or medium-sized business owner, you know this is especially true for us. I'm a small business owner twice over, both as the founder of marketing agency Blueberry Creative Studios, which specializes in brand storytelling, and as the co-founder of sister company Champl Creative, which focuses on UGC content creation and influencer marketing. For both companies, I am simultaneously either one-half or the entirety of the sales team, as well as program management, people management, payroll, HR, and… you get the point.

If you own or operate an SMB, you know how much administration it entails–and that this cumbersome work cuts into the hours you could be spending on actually generating revenue.

That's why Adobe's new AI Assistant in Acrobat is a game-changer for me. Even in beta, this generative AI-powered conversational engine has already facilitated more efficient communication between me, my team, and my clients, saved me time on low-level work, and even helped kickstart my brainstorming. Here are the top three ways I think you should use AI Assistant in Acrobat to supercharge your business, just like I have.

Keeping your team aligned

If your schedule is anything like mine, you're in back-to-back meetings all day long, continuously toggling between projects and clients. Compiling and sending out meeting notes is tedious at the best of times. Yet how much more so when you can't remember what deliverables your third client of the day decided upon during your brainstorm, so you're frantically trying to decipher your digital chicken scratch from seven hours ago when it's already nine at night. (Not that this has ever happened to me.)

AI Assistant distills meeting transcripts into an easy-to-read outline that can be shared so all stakeholders are instantly on the same page. Suddenly, a two- or three-hour meeting is not only digestible but simple to surface to teammates who weren't present. Instead of having to stop and call my business partner to catch each other up on simultaneous meetings, we can consult and share the summaries AI Assistant made for us. Just like that, we have valuable time back and we've eliminated the possibility of making costly mistakes by sharing incorrect information.

But that's not all. You can also ask AI Assistant questions, like "What are the top five takeaways from this meeting, formatted in an email?" and AI Assistant quickly distills and creates a draft that you can review, add your own commentary, and send. AI Assistant can also format information for other purposes such as slides. I cannot tell you the peace of mind I get from circulating a clear, accurate tl;dr of a meeting immediately after it wraps. I want that for you too. And with AI Assistant, it's all yours.

Getting instant insights

Right before I started using AI Assistant, I calculated how many hours a week I spent just trying to understand what's inside all of the long, complex documents piling up in my folders and emails. I'm not going to tell you what the final number was, because it was frankly horrifying, but I can tell you that numerous team members have told me how much more cheerful I am now that I have AI Assistant doing this work for me.

Instead of struggling to recall all the details of a 50-page brand guide or distill key takeaways from a dense research document, I now plug the document text into Acrobat and AI Assistant gives me the power to get to the information I need, fast. AI Assistant not only makes a summary for me but gives me clear answers to any specific questions I ask. These answers contain citations that link back to where this information came from in the original document so I can be certain I'm getting accurate and reliable information.

Turbocharging your creativity

The benefits I get from AI Assistant aren't just related to productivity. AI Assistant is already making my creative work higher quality by making it easier for me to process and share information, thereby helping me navigate tight deadlines with an ease I've never had before.

Recently, a client received a last-minute research report that suggested we should entirely overhaul every aspect of our branding from what they'd initially requested. "We'd love to keep the same timeline," they told us wistfully, "but we're sure that's crazy." By incorporating AI Assistant into my team's creative process, we were able to get up to speed on the new directives and pivot more quickly, drilling down on exactly what needed to change in our deliverables and focusing all our energy on creativity instead of admin. Ultimately, we delivered great work on the original deadline. My client is dazzled and has increased our scope of work tremendously as a result. So, I'm thrilled to say AI Assistant has already allowed me to not only serve my clients better but grow my business as well.

In the future, AI Assistant will be able to accelerate the creative process even more. Instead of starting from scratch every time, I'll be able to ask AI Assistant to generate first drafts, instantly change voice and tone, copy edit and even suggest design and layout options, allowing me to leverage my creativity at a higher level.

I can't promise that using AI Assistant for your SMB will mean your hair is never on fire. But I can promise that you'll be more informed about what the fire constitutes, empowered to put out the fire more quickly, prepared to take on more fires, and… this analogy is going off the rails, but… build better hoses?

AI Assistant for Acrobat is in beta now, and I can't wait to see how it continues to develop. And while it's still early, I can already say that it's going to add tremendous value for your SMB immediately. It's available now, just log into your Acrobat Individual or Teams account and start getting more productive today.