Adobe Launches Acrobat Studio, Bringing AI to the PDF

Adobe wants to bring the PDF into the AI era. For more than 30 years, this business file format has been the workhorse of office communication. Now, Adobe is giving it a significant upgrade with Acrobat Studio, a new tool helping companies mine insights, inform decisions, and reformat these documents into polished, on-brand content—no design team required.

“This is one of our biggest milestones since we launched Acrobat just over 32 years ago,” says Michi Alexander, Adobe’s vice president of product marketing, during a briefing last week. She noted that more than three trillion PDFs exist today, calling it the world’s “number one business file format.” Alexander adds that many of the most critical business documents are PDFs, such as final contracts, proposals, and reports.

What’s Included in Acrobat Studio?

“Acrobat Studio is the place where your best work comes together, uniting the productivity of Acrobat, the creative power of Adobe Express and the value of AI to empower you to work smarter and faster,” Abhigyan Modi, Adobe’s senior vice president of its Document Product Group, remarks in a statement. “We’re reinventing PDF for modern work, so whatever you need to get done, you can do that with Acrobat.”

Here’s a look at the key features of Adobe’s newest software:

PDF Spaces

A centralized knowledge hub that lets you chat with AI about imported files, links, and notes to uncover insights instantly. Interestingly, this name is a bit misleading because it’s not just for PDFs, but also Microsoft 365 files and websites. Nevertheless, it’s a repository for a variety of content you want to derive insights about.

To make these responses more relevant, there are multiple pre-built, specialized assistants to choose from. Whether it’s “analyst,” “instructor,” or “entertainer,” the selection you make dictates the information, recommendations, and ideas that are produced. And to provide peace of mind that the AI isn’t hallucinating, these assistants have been trained to include citations.

This assurance is significant and one Alexander describes as “one of our big differentiators.” The citations will direct you to the specific part in the document where the answer is and in context. “If you want to get more information, the context is right there,” she explains. “You can easily validate the answers from AI, which is so critical given the high-stakes nature of businesses.”

Beyond the pre-built assistants, you’ll be able to personalize them to serve a role suited to the specific needs of your project.

Of note, these aren’t the first AI assistants on Acrobat. In 2024, Adobe launched Acrobat AI Assistant, a bot providing one-click summaries and rapid insights on your PDFs, with a price tag of $4.99 per month. According to Forrester, it has helped companies reduce so-called document tasks by up to 45 percent.

PDF Spaces are also designed for collaboration, giving teams, classmates, and customers access to a shared knowledge hub where everyone can draw from the same insights. The idea extends Adobe’s broader ecosystem of collaborative tools—from Creative Cloud, which lets designers co-edit assets, to Firefly Boards, which supports multi-creator workflows.

At a high level, there appear to be some similarities between PDF Spaces and Google’s NotebookLM. Both utilize AI to simplify document management and extract insights from them. However, one could argue that the former is tailored towards working professionals while the latter is primarily targeting individuals.

Adobe does note one key limitation: PDF Spaces are limited to up to 100 documents.

Get More out of PDFs With Adobe Express

Now that you’ve extracted all the insights you can from those PDFs, what’s next? Although Adobe calls these file formats the final version, the truth is that there is still life left in these documents. Acrobat Studio includes an integration with Adobe Express, allowing you to use its premium features along with Firefly’s Text-to-Video and Text-to-Image capabilities to turn PDFs into creative infographics, presentations, flyers, and even social media posts.

Starting with only a PDF may no longer be a roadblock for creative or marketing teams. By importing a file into Acrobat Studio, you gain access to both design features and Acrobat’s editing tools, making it easier to repurpose content. Imagine extracting copy from the PDF and dropping it into a webpage, financial reports, product sheets, meeting transcripts, or discovery notes. It transforms a static document into usable building blocks for campaigns.

Contract Assistance

Because legal documents like contracts are typically in PDF form, they’re well-suited for Acrobat Studio. To address this use case, Adobe is including a contract-focused AI assistant designed to simplify the complexity of these agreements. By importing files such as mortgage contracts, auto leases, regulatory updates, corporate policies, or employee agreements, you can quickly surface key clauses, compare terms, and gain clearer insights into what the documents actually mean.

Enterprise Grade Security

The final component of Acrobat Studio is security. Along with the aforementioned citation feature, Adobe states its software also only analyzes documents that it has been permitted to use. The app includes encryption, watermarking, audit trails, sandboxed environments, and administrative oversight for compliance, data protection, and governance.

In addition, Adobe promises not to train its AI models on customer data and prohibits third-party partners from doing the same.

The PDF Evolution

Launching an AI-powered Acrobat solution shouldn’t be surprising. After all, Adobe has been inserting more and more generative AI capabilities into its suite of products, such as with Firefly, Photoshop, and its Experience Platform. So why is the company launching Acrobat Studio now?

Alexander points out that this launch is intended to reimagine how we think of PDFs. She says traditionally, it’s been considered simply a stagnant, final format for a document. However, Adobe now wants us to consider PDFs as being more open. “This is where we believe the evolution of PDFs will go,” she acknowledges. “PDFs won’t just be a static document. It may not just be one single file. It’ll be something that has all of these different capabilities in it. It has an AI assistant built into it. What a PDF is is going to be fundamentally changing, and we believe that we are at the forefront of it.”

Adobe contends that the timing of Acrobat Studio’s debut is based on the user landscape and the tasks being done by business professionals. “What’s most important is really about building for our consumers and the needs that they’re having to solve for. This was really tailored to what our audience needs, which is they need to get through the content fast, they need to understand what matters, and they need guidance on all of this information overload. And they really need to be able to share and collaborate with their teams, and then turn that into content.”

“We believe that this is what business professionals need to be successful and thrive in this current work landscape,” she concludes.

Acrobat Studio is launching today globally in English with early access pricing of $24.99 per month for individuals and $29.99 per month for teams. There’s also a free 14-day trial, providing unlimited access to PDF Spaces, AI assistants, and Adobe Express Premium.