GenAI makes its way into Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat Studio
The new AI features transform documents and spreadsheets into interactive tools that enhance productivity and streamline workflows across industries.
As part of the ongoing effort to integrate GenAI technology into business tools, Adobe and Microsoft both integrated AI into regular workflows for their flagship products this week.
On Tuesday, Adobe launched Acrobat Studio, a platform that combines Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Express and AI agents.
The Studio turns PDFs into conversational knowledge hubs, according to Adobe. It includes PDF Spaces: a new work environment that transforms PDFs, text docs, and web pages into conversational knowledge hubs. Users can engage with the files with agentic AI assistants. The Studio also includes Easy Content, which helps users generate copy and drafts. The platform aims to help professionals in sales, legal, marketing and finance industries.
Microsoft also introduced a new Copilot function in Excel on Monday. According to Microsoft, users can save time by entering a natural language prompt in their spreadsheet, referencing the cell values and watching Copilot generate the results.
Acrobat Studio and Copilot in Microsoft Excel are examples of ways vendors are making the AI technology available within existing workflows.
Acrobat Studio
While Adobe has a history of integrating AI, the new Acrobat Studio is a significant change, said Liz Miller, an analyst with Constellation Research.
The change stems from Adobe's announcement of the AI assistant in 2024, which infused GenAI into Acrobat and PDF. The launch of the AI assistant showed how users from different industries could integrate AI into their workflows, whether by generating summaries or documents.
With Studio, Adobe is capitalizing on where users find value and using that value to create a new workspace.
"It was really about understanding how people use documents to work, and that's where this new Acrobat Studio comes from," Miller said.
With Studio, Adobe shows users that Acrobat is more than a place to look at PDFs, she continued. Users from different industries can pull in their PDFs, Microsoft PowerPoint and Office documents.
She added that, as a user, Acrobat Studio felt more like a Canvas. For example, PDF spaces allowed her to bring in different reference documents or even a research document and have them all accessible within one space, along with the AI assistant.
"Imagine being able to put all of your reference documents, all of your backgrounds, all of your interview transcripts, all of your audio, video, eventually," Miller said. "Their goal is to bring all of that into one space so that not only do you have that, but you also can share that with people you are collaborating with on what will eventually become a PDF.
"This takes what knowledge workers have already been using in Acrobat, if they're on Acrobat Pro, the Enterprise Edition, this kicks it up another notch by giving you this new interface, fresh tools," she added.
Another part of Acrobat Studio that would be helpful for users is the citation feature, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of Deep Analysis. The feature tells users whose response it came from and cites it down to the page number, hesaid.
"It sounds small, but in a world where generative [AI] keeps making stuff up and always will, I think that's a big deal," he said. "If you're a law firm or just want to make sure you're compliant, or in education, where citations are used a lot, they can see that being a real selling point for them."
Microsoft Copilot in Excel
He added that Microsoft's integration of Copilot into Excel has been a long time coming but will still receive considerable scrutiny.
"LLM [and] generative AI for arithmetic has not been its strong point to date," Pelz-Sharpe said. "Time will tell how well that works."
Both Acrobat Studio and the introduction of Copilot into Excel are examples of technology vendors trying to find the right GenAI use cases to generate revenue. While using AI within PDFs and other documents is important, it's not such a high-risk use case, Pelz-Sharpe said.
"Excel gets into the world of real, hard business decision makers," he said. "That's why it will have to work well."
He added that while it's unclear whether LLMs and GenAI tools are ready to be used in high-risk industries, for enterprises where one mistake could lead to a catastrophe, that risk is not worth taking.
Adobe’s challenge
Miller said Adobe's challenge will be articulating what the tools it has incorporated into Acrobat Studio mean for users' businesses in the next phase.
"It is one thing to say 'I can create these images.' It is a completely different thing to apply analytics on top of it," she said. She added that she anticipates that Adobe will be a vendor that will help knowledge workers unlock "knowledge from places and spaces we have not been able to get to easily."
She continued that Microsoft has a role to play because it is foundational.
"What is changing is how the ecosystem and all of these tools and technologies need to be able to partner and just share and to natively integrate these data streams and those poly strains across the ecosystem," she said.
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
