Adobe this week moved to make it simpler to construct workflows around editable PDF documents via an update to Adobe Document Cloud that has also been infused with additional artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Lisa Croft, group product marketing manager for Adobe, says that with more organizations incorporating PDF documents within business processes, there’s a greater need to be able to share those documents in a way that allows an organization to keep track of approvals and comments appended to the document.
“It makes it easier to co-edit and review documents,” says Croft.
Those comments can now also be added to the document using a series of touch-enabled tools that Adobe has added to its mobile PDF software. The goal is to reduce the need to rely on email as a mechanism for sharing and editing documents, says Croft.
In terms of AI capabilities, the Adobe Sensei AI framework makes it possible to recognize the field type, size and position within a document so that users can just tap and type content without having to change tools manually or align text in field boxes. Adobe software for scanning business cards using AI technologies has now also been expanded to support French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
Croft notes that PDF documents were opened over 200 billion times last year, a huge percentage of which are incorporated in a wide range of business processes that are increasingly being digitized using PDF documents. To facilitate that transition, Adobe has now also embedded Adobe Sign electronic signature software directly within the Adobe Reader software found on Adobe Document Cloud.
As AI continues to be embedded in productivity applications residing in cloud services, it’s apparent that the user experience enabled by those applications will be richer than applications that run on a local machine. The degree to which those AI capabilities will drive more organizations to rely more on cloud applications remains to be seen. But it’s clear that organizations that don’t embrace cloud applications may soon be having a much different application experience than those that do.
