Over more than a decade, Adobe has delivered hundreds of intelligent capabilities across their creative, experience and document applications, providing tremendous value to billions of Adobe Acrobat subscribers worldwide.
Generative AI brings even more exciting possibilities — and some new challenges. Starting with Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative creative models, they’ve made a commitment to thoughtful AI innovation and leadership. Adobe continues to demonstrate this commitment in how they develop and deploy their technologies, in the practices they develop and through collaborations with industry and government partners to help create a world where game-changing discoveries can flourish alongside responsibility.
Today Adobe is embarking on their next chapter of generative AI innovation by introducing their first capabilities for digital documents. AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat, now in beta, is a new AI-powered conversational engine deeply integrated into PDF workflows.
Adobe is taking the following steps to put the right capabilities and guardrails in place so their customers — from individuals to the largest enterprises — can use AI Assistant with confidence.
Building trust
Generative AI is an incredibly exciting technology that’s already delivering tremendous value to Adobe’s customers. Generative AI is also still in its early stages and improving the technology is an ongoing journey. To help build trust with customers, Adobe is taking a multi-layered approach:
- AI ethics testing and reviews: All AI Assistant features in Reader and Acrobat, including third-party LLM integrations, go through Adobe’s responsible AI Ethics governance process and are developed and deployed in alignment with the company’s AI Ethics principles of accountability, responsibility, and transparency.
- Guardrails for LLMs: When working with third-party LLMs, Adobe contractually obligates them to employ confidentiality and security protocols that match their own standards. Adobe specifically prohibits third parties from manually reviewing or training their LLMs on Adobe customer data. They also include robust testing and evaluation methodologies in pre- and post-processing and engineering processes.
- Data security protocols: AI Assistant features in Reader and Acrobat are governed by data security protocols, including testing and evaluation methodologies in pre- and post-processing, and evaluation, testing and evaluation built into Adobe’s engineering processes.
- Keeping humans in the loop: AI Assistant includes attributions in generated responses, making it simple for customers to confirm where the information came from; an in-app message reminds customers to double-check the source of the answers AI Assistant provides.
- Built for business: AI Assistant includes enterprise-grade data security and information governance.
- Ongoing customer feedback: Generative AI is still emerging and improving the technology is an ongoing journey. Adobe provides customers with multiple channels — from in-app feedback and advisory boards to community groups and social listening programmes — and encourages active conversations to help the company identify and address issues quickly.
Leveraging large language models (LLMs)
As a leader and visionary in artificial intelligence, Adobe builds foundation models in the categories where they have deep domain expertise and partners with best-in-class large language models (LLMs) for text-based experiences.
Adobe takes an agnostic approach to LLM-integrations, curating the best technologies, partners and models to deliver the right output for their customers’ needs. For AI Assistant features in Reader and Acrobat, they are currently leveraging the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Adobe will continue to explore and test a variety of technologies to provide customers with quality, responsible experiences.
When working with third-party LLMs, Adobe contractually obligates them to employ confidentiality and security protocols that match their own standards. They also evaluate all LLM integrations in accordance with Adobe’s AI Ethics process and principles. They specifically prohibit third parties from manually reviewing or training their LLMs on Adobe customer data. They also include robust testing and monitoring methodologies in pre- and post-processing and engineering processes.
Liquid Mode: A building block for document intelligence
Liquid Mode — Adobe’s breakthrough reading experience that delivers an easier way to read documents on mobile — is powered by proprietary AI models that offer a deep understanding of PDF structure and content. Liquid Mode turns static information into dynamic data, automatically reflowing PDF documents to make them more readable and accessible on any sized screen. On the 30th anniversary of Adobe Acrobat and PDF, Liquid Mode achieved a major milestone, with customers using the feature to read more than 1 billion files on mobile devices. The technology has revolutionised reading experiences for individuals of all abilities and was recognised as one of Time Magazine’s 2023’s Best Inventions.
At the heart of Liquid Mode is the proprietary AI and ML-powered models that identify the elements of a PDF — like headings, paragraphs, images, lists, tables and more — and understand the hierarchy and ordering, making it possible to reformat a static PDF into a more dynamic, customisable experience.
Using Liquid Mode, customers can create intelligent outlines, collapse and expand sections and search text for faster navigation. They can also adjust things like font size and spacing between words, characters and lines to suit their reading preferences and abilities. Words also become resizable and reflowable, images tappable and expandable and tables fully responsive.
The experience Adobe’s engineering and design teams gained by building Liquid Mode and then learning how customers get value from it is foundational to what they’ve delivered in AI Assistant. The ability to deeply understand PDFs enables AI Assistant to analyse and surface insights from digital documents with greater precision now and will allow them to continue to refine the outputs even further into the future.
Into the future
Adobe is proud of their role in transforming the definition of PDF and the value they’ve delivered over the past 30 years. They believe the next 30 years will be defined by responsible innovation and look forward to working with their customers, their industry and the broader community to imagine and invent new ways to learn, create and collaborate with digital documents across our personal and professional lives.
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