Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant boosts productivity, helping knowledge workers complete document-related tasks 4x faster: Pfeiffer report

In this era of information overload, generative AI presents an incredible new opportunity to empower every knowledge worker to get more value from their documents and work more productively. That’s why Adobe introduced Acrobat AI Assistant, a generative AI-powered conversational engine that can be quickly and safely deployed and used, enabling the customers to turn informational overload into actionable insights that supercharge productivity.

To better assess the impact that AI Assistant has on enterprise productivity, Adobe commissioned benchmark research from Pfeiffer Consulting. Using their Pfeiffer Consulting Methodology for Productivity Benchmarking, the research analysed the impact and productivity gains of Acrobat AI Assistant across 16 different workflow benchmarks and five key lines of business — human resources, legal & compliance, marketing & communications, finance, research & development.

Here are the key takeaways and insights from the research about each line of business. Overall, it reports that AI Assistant was found to be nearly four times faster than traditional methods on average for a wide range of tasks including text summarisation, document analysis, information retrieval and organisation as well as text composition:

• Finance: Finance teams report spending over 2 hours creating an analyst brief or annual report. This involves time-consuming tasks like skimming the document, creating an outline, writing an overview as well as compiling and formatting detailed data. With AI Assistant, they completed this activity in nearly a third of the time (40 min, 44 sec) by simply writing prompts in AI Assistant for introductory text, overview and detailed results, verifying the insights and then bringing the results into Word to fine tune. With the time saved, finance teams can focus more on strategic financial planning, including long-term forecasting, budgeting and capital allocation.

• Legal & compliance: According to the research, just under 1 hour (59 min, 22 sec) is spent creating a legal brief from a research report — reading and highlighting the report, extracting five key subjects and then writing the brief as well as extracting case references. AI Assistant helps legal teams cut down the time spent on a legal brief to just under 9 minutes (8 min, 54 sec) through a prompt asking for the five key subjects and then copying and pasting the results into Word for further editing. The time savings enable legal professionals to pursue activities like investing more in professional development as well as focusing on more complex legal matters.

• Marketing & communications: While marketers are voracious consumers of information, creating a blog post from a 3000-word article is not easy. The research reports that it takes nearly an hour and a half (1 hour, 23 min) to read the article, highlight key information, create an outline of the blog post, then write it. AI Assistant cuts the time it takes to write the blog by a third (19 min, 24 sec), with the ability to ask AI Assistant to generate two versions of a blog post. Then the writer can paste the blog post into Word for additional editing and refinement. By saving time on writing blog posts, marketers can concentrate on other strategic aspects of their work, such as keeping up with the latest marketing trends and technologies and developing comprehensive marketing campaigns.

• Human resources: Human resource professionals spend a lot of time digging for information to share with executives and employees across many documents including resumes, employee records and policy documents. Using Acrobat AI Assistant, HR professionals completed tasks in 76 percent less time. For example, creating an email summarising leave benefits from an employee handbook took under five minutes with AI Assistant, compared to almost 20 minutes without it. With more time saved thanks to AI Assistant, human resources professionals can focus on strategic HR initiatives such as talent acquisition and retention, employee development and training, performance management, succession planning, and organisational development.

• Research & development: Researchers want to spend more time on experimentation and idea generation, not administrative tasks. The research reported that by using AI Assistant, researchers were able to cut the time spent creating a detailed presentation based on an industry trend report from 90 minutes to 27 minutes and 41 seconds. The increased efficiency and focus on core research activities can lead to faster innovation and development cycles, as well as allocating more time to conducting in-depth research, exploring new technologies and methodologies as well as experimenting with different approaches to problem solving.

The benchmarking project underscores how a broad spectrum of lines of businesses from HR to research and development can reap a range of benefits from AI Assistant including increased productivity, reduced manual effort, improved accuracy and enhanced compliance. The productivity gains highlighted in the research shows that AI Assistant can simplify document-related tasks, allowing knowledge workers to concentrate on higher-value activities to further drive business success.