The top 3 ways to use generative AI to empower knowledge workers 

Our approach

When it comes to AI at Adobe, my team has taken a comprehensive approach that includes investment in foundational AI, strategic adoption, an AI ethics framework, legal considerations, security, and content authentication. ​The rollout follows a phased approach, starting with pilot groups and building communities around AI. ​

This approach includes experimenting with and documenting use cases like writing and editing, data analysis, presentations and employee onboarding, corporate training, employee portals, and improved personalization across HR channels. The rollouts are accompanied by training podcasts and other resources to educate and empower employees to use AI in ways that improve their work and keep them more engaged. ​

Unlocking productivity with documents

While there are innumerable ways that CIOs can leverage generative AI to help surface value at scale for knowledge workers, I’d like to focus on digital documents—a space in which Adobe has been a leader for over 30 years. Whether they are sales associates who spend hours responding to requests for proposals (RFPs) or customizing presentations, marketers who need competitive intel for their next campaign, or legal and finance teams who need to consume, analyze, and summarize massive amounts of complex information—documents are a core part of knowledge workers’ daily work life. Despite their ubiquity and the fact that critical information lives inside companies’ documents (from research reports to contracts to white papers to confidential strategies and even intellectual property), most knowledge workers are experiencing information overload. The impact on both employee productivity and engagement is real.  

Lessons from customer zero

Adobe invented the PDF and we’ve been innovating new ways for knowledge workers to get more productive with their digital documents for decades. Earlier this year, the Acrobat team approached my team about launching an all-employee beta for the new generative AI-powered AI Assistant. The tool is designed to help people consume the information in documents faster and enable them to consolidate and format information into business content.

I faced all the same questions every CIO is asking about deploying generative AI across their business— from security and governance to use cases and value. We discovered the following three specific ways where generative AI helped (and is still helping) our employees work smarter and improve productivity.