Adobe Acrobat Studio brings genAI power to PDFs

Pause to think about it: The PDF is more than 30 years old. Ubiquitous in enterprises, it’s estimated that upwards of 3 trillion are currently in circulation.

But the three-decades-old file format, invented by Adobe in 1993, increasingly comes across as static or wonky, particularly as AI-native tools transform the work environment.

Adobe is hoping its new Acrobat Studio will change that, and keep the company’s tools relevant in a highly-competitive AI productivity space. The platform, introduced this week, allows users to interact more dynamically with PDF files via AI agents.

“Adobe’s advantage is that it created the PDF and has owned the standard for decades,” said Julie Geller, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. “Acrobat Studio doesn’t feel like a radical shift. It’s more like Adobe finally adding the kind of design polish and AI functionality people have been waiting for inside a platform most enterprises already integrate.”

Going deep into PDFs

Adobe is staking its claim in the hot agentic AI space with the goal of transforming from a document productivity app to a dashboard where users can create, edit, collaborate, and work within their files.

One of the central features of Acrobat Studio is PDF Spaces, where users can interact with PDFs via AI assistants. These can be assigned specific roles such as “instructor” or “analyst”, and consolidate information, answer questions about the content, and reason on next logical steps. Spaces and personalized agents can then be shared.

Acrobat Studio provides access to all of the PDF tools in Acrobat Pro, plus Adobe Express Premium’s templates, brand kits, and Firefly-powered text-to-video and text-to-image capabilities. Sales teams, marketers, and other groups can create content including presentations, reports, infographics, flyers, and other materials, creating campaigns without having to leave Acrobat.

“In a world in which many workforce AI solutions, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, offer a mixed record of success, Adobe is banking on being the serious player in the room: More accurate, more secure, more trusted, while also being enterprise vetted and less expensive than many alternatives,” noted J. P. Gownder, Forrester VP and principal analyst. “It might not have the most features, but it tries to do what it does well.”

The platform, which can summarize documents, answer questions, and surface insights, relies heavily on its ability to document its answers via citation, he pointed out — that is, it tells a user how it reached its conclusion, and the content that conclusion was based on.

“This is an important tool in avoiding AI hallucinations,” Gownder noted.

That said, Google’s NotebookLM has this capability, too, as well as many additional features above and beyond Adobe’s. But organizations might not be using Google productivity tools, he noted, and adding NotebookLM Plus might be more expensive than using Acrobat AI Assistant. Microsoft 365 Copilot now has Notebooks, which also aims to compete in this space, but is embedded inside an expensive $30/user/month offering.

Early access pricing for Acrobat Studio begins at $24.99/month for individuals, and $29.99/month per license for teams.

Adobe’s advantages

Info-Tech’s Geller noted that the platform’s AI summaries, document Q&A, and voice prompts help teams get answers and context directly from sensitive files without exposing them to unsecured AI tools. This allows for faster insight and less time lost switching between apps.

“In most of the document space, there is still a trade-off: You either get enterprise-grade security with limited AI capabilities, or advanced AI without the governance enterprises require,” said Geller.

Acrobat Studio deals with that issue by delivering generative AI tools in the same secure, compliant environment organizations already rely on, Geller noted. The platform is purpose-built for document intelligence, not retrofitted from a broader productivity suite. AI features are tuned for annotations, structured reviews, and extracting actionable insight from PDFs, all “wrapped in a polished, intuitive interface” that reflects Adobe’s strength in design.

“That combination of capability and usability makes it easier for teams to adopt and integrate into their daily workflows,” said Geller.

As for pricing, the extra $5 per license per month for team subscriptions is “really about multiplying the value across a team,” and shifts Studio from an individual tool into a “shared, governed knowledge layer,” which is where many organizations will see the real ROI, she noted. Agents will be able to work across a collective document library, apply consistent security settings, and provide summaries, annotations and context for all users. Admins can also set permissions, track usage, and ensure compliance.

“It acts as a trusted repository of insight rather than fragmented information scattered across individual accounts,” said Geller.

Highly-competitive AI productivity space

Adobe’s long-standing relationships with enterprises, the ubiquity of PDFs, and a robust security baseline seem to give Acrobat Studio a strong initial foothold, analysts note.

“In the medium term, though, this space is moving so quickly that Adobe will have to invest a lot in innovating to keep up with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other AI giants,” Gownder said.

Info-Tech’s Geller points out that Microsoft’s Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint is probably the closest platform in scope, but it’s built for broad productivity workflows, not specifically for PDFs.

Foxit PDF Editor and Nitro PDF Pro both bring strong editing and enterprise pricing with optional AI features, but those features often come at extra cost and aren’t really designed for pulling deeper insight from complex documents, she noted.

She added that DocuSign is still the leader for contract-focused workflows, but its scope ends there — it doesn’t stretch into full-spectrum PDF editing, annotation, or document intelligence. PDFelement, UPDF, Smallpdf and PDF Expert are all easy to use and affordable, which works well for individuals or light use cases, but they don’t bring the governance or enterprise-ready AI that Acrobat Studio is offering.

“Adobe’s advantage is that it created the PDF and has owned the standard for decades,” said Geller. “Acrobat Studio doesn’t feel like a radical shift. It’s more like Adobe finally adding the kind of design polish and AI functionality people have been waiting for inside a platform most enterprises already integrate.”

Forrester’s Gownder suggests that enterprises trial Acrobat AI Assistant for document workflows with particular roles, alongside the Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI tools.

“How well Acrobat Studio fits an organization’s needs varies by what its environment looks like and how advanced the skills of its employees are,” he said.