Adobe launches Acrobat Studio: AI lets you talk to PDFs and whip up visuals

Adobe released Acrobat Studio on Monday, a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered PDF platform that lets users chat with their documents and create content in one workspace.

The service directly challenges Google’s NotebookLM, which became popular with students and researchers for similar features. Acrobat Studio combines Adobe’s PDF tools with AI assistants and creative software.

Users can upload up to 100 files into “PDF Spaces” – including PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel sheets, and web pages. AI assistants then read through everything and answer questions about the content.

“We’re reinventing PDF for modern work, so whatever you need to get done, you can do that with Acrobat,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe’s Document Product Group.

The AI provides answers with clickable links back to source documents. This prevents errors and lets users check the source of the information. Adobe offers three pre-built assistant types: analyst, instructor, and entertainer, but users can also create their own custom assistants.

Adobe thinks its advantage comes from built-in creative tools. The platform includes Adobe Express Premium, letting users turn document insights into presentations, infographics, and social media posts without switching apps.

Adobe competes with other tech companies rushing in to add AI features to their ecosystem of software products. Microsoft, for instance, has already integrated AI helpers into Office programs. Salesforce has also launched its own AI platform.

Adobe says it’s safer for businesses than free alternatives. The company promises it won’t use customer documents to train its AI models and offers enterprise-grade encryption.

The service is currently limited to English documents, and it can’t read videos, handwritten notes, or locked files. Pricing starts at $24.99 monthly for individuals and $29.99 for teams. Adobe offers a 14-day free trial to compete with Google’s free service.

The launch represents a significant evolution for PDF technology, which Adobe invented in 1993. With more than 3 trillion PDFs currently in circulation worldwide, Adobe is set to modernize how people interact with documents in an AI-driven workplace.

Success will depend on whether Adobe can add more language support quickly and if businesses value the creative features enough to pay for them.