Adobe’s latest Acrobat update is a good example of where AI is headed in everyday work software: it’s no longer a shiny bonus feature — it’s quickly becoming something people just expect to be there.
The headline addition is a new “Generate Podcast” option inside Acrobat Studio, which can turn PDFs and other documents into a podcast-style audio summary. You can feed it meeting transcripts, reports, study guides, or a shared workspace of notes, and Acrobat will produce an audio recap you can listen to instead of reading. Adobe is even pulling in outside tech to make it work right now, using a Microsoft GPT model for transcription and a Google voice model for the audio — with the company saying that could evolve over time.
That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, mainly because it removes friction. People don’t want to jump between five tools just to turn a document into something more digestible. If you already live inside Acrobat — which a lot of businesses do — having audio summaries built right into the same workflow makes the feature far more likely to get used. It also taps into a very real workplace behavior: executives, managers, and busy teams want information in a format they can consume while multitasking, commuting, or bouncing between meetings.
Adobe is also pushing Acrobat beyond PDFs as static “read-only” files. Alongside podcast summaries, users can now generate a presentation deck based on their documents, pulling highlights and framing them around whatever angle you ask for. If you’ve been building out research, competitor analysis, and product notes inside Spaces (Adobe’s shared document workspace), you can prompt Acrobat to create a pitch deck that pulls from that material — and then polish it in Adobe Express, using themes, stock images, branding, and slide-by-slide edits. It’s a clear move to keep users inside Adobe’s ecosystem while cutting down the time it takes to turn raw info into something client-ready.
On top of that, Acrobat is getting more practical with AI-driven editing. Instead of manually digging through menus, users can now make changes using chat-style prompts, with actions like removing pages, deleting text or images, finding and replacing phrases, and adding things like e-signatures or password protection. It’s less about replacing humans and more about making Acrobat feel faster and less tedious for the work people already do every day.
Adobe is also leaning into collaboration and credibility — shared files can now include AI-generated summaries with citations that point back to the exact spot in the document where the information came from. And for people who want different tones or styles, Acrobat lets you pick assistant “roles” like analyst, entertainer, or instructor, or even create a custom persona with your own prompt.
Taken together, it’s a pretty clear message: the AI arms race isn’t just happening in chatbots anymore. It’s showing up inside the boring-but-essential tools people use constantly, and the winners won’t be the ones who simply “have AI.” They’ll be the ones who make it feel so natural and useful that you stop thinking about it as AI at all.
This analysis is based on reporting from The Verge.
Image courtesy of Adobe.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
