Pfeiffer Report: AI supercharges enterprise knowledge work

Alex Gay, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Adobe Document Cloud 

Enterprise knowledge workers face numerous obstacles that hinder their productivity, including information overload, manual data entry, and repetitive tasks. Documents are at the center of their work, containing critical information that knowledge workers need to extract, analyze, and transform into valuable insights. That is where AI comes in; it has immense potential to help knowledge workers quickly analyze large volumes of data, identify patterns, and provide valuable insights. Today, we announced new advances in Acrobat AI Assistant with those benefits in mind, helping customers unlock new levels of productivity by supercharging their document-related tasks including data extraction, summarization, content generation, and review. 

But exactly how much time is saved? What are the quantifiable productivity gains? To better assess the impact that AI Assistant has on enterprise productivity, we commissioned benchmark research conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting to analyze the efficiency and productivity gains of AI Assistant across various lines of business. ​ The study covered 16 real-world workflow scenarios in Sales, Human Resources, Legal & Compliance, Marketing & Communications, Finance, and Research & Development. ​

The research findings revealed that Acrobat AI Assistant was on average four times faster than traditional methods for 16 different knowledge worker tasks. ​For complex assignments, such as summarizing complex safety protocols, AI Assistant saved almost two hours. ​ The research reported that by speeding up time-consuming and repetitive tasks, AI Assistant frees up time, concentration, and creativity for higher-value aspects of a project. ​ The versatility of AI Assistant allows it to execute a variety of document-related tasks, including providing insights, answering questions, retrieving, and organizing information, comparing documents, and composing texts in various styles. ​

Driving productivity gains across all departments

The research highlighted 5 key lines of business that represent common tasks and challenges faced by knowledge workers. Each covered different levels of complexity, from simple fact-finding tasks to more complex assignments such as summarizing safety protocols or creating detailed presentations based on industry trend reports: 

1. Sales: Traditionally, summarizing a product brochure, creating a short presentation, and summarizing findings in an email for clients took 46 minutes. ​ However, with AI Assistant, the same workflow could be completed in under 12 minutes, representing time savings of over 70%. ​This allows sales professionals to focus on higher-value aspects of their work, such as client interactions and strategic planning. ​
2. Human Resources: Human resource professionals spend a significant amount of time digging for information across multiple documents, including resumes, employee records, and policy documents. With AI Assistant, HR professionals completed tasks in significantly less time. For example, summarizing leave benefits from an employee handbook took under five minutes with AI Assistant, compared to almost 20 minutes without it. This enables HR professionals to be more efficient in sharing information with executives and employees.
3. Legal: Creating a legal brief from a research report traditionally took just under one hour. ​ AI Assistant reduced the time spent on this task to just under nine minutes by prompting the five key subjects and copying and pasting the results into Word for further editing. ​ This significant time-saving allows legal professionals to allocate more time to other critical tasks.
4. Research & Development: ​ AI Assistant resulted in a substantial reduction in time spent on administrative tasks in the research and development domain, which can help drive more efficiency and focus on core research activities, leading to faster innovation and development cycles. ​​
5. Marketing & Communications: ​ Creating a blog post from a 3000-word article traditionally took nearly an hour and a half. ​ AI Assistant reduced the time it takes to write the blog post by less than a third, thanks to its ability to generate two versions of the blog post. ​ The writer can then paste the blog post into Word for additional editing and refinement. ​ This time-saving allows marketers to produce content more efficiently.

The City of Gilbert, Arizona is one example of a large organization using AI to turn document data into actionable insights and free up time for more valuable tasks. 

“With one of the highest population growth rates in the country, Gilbert, Arizona is undergoing rapid transformation, and our organization is exploring AI technologies to support this growth,” said Eugene Meijia, Chief AI Strategy and Transformation Officer, City of Gilbert, Arizona. “We see a lot of potential in Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant to enable our town to significantly cut down the time it takes to review and update policy documents, synthesize large plans or proposals, and analyze prior events. With Adobe’s document expertise and approach to protecting the integrity of data and AI responses, getting our security and compliance team on board with Adobe was quite straightforward.” 

Adapting to knowledge worker styles

AI Assistant caters to both non-specialized and specialized knowledge workers. ​ Non-specialized users, such as students, bloggers, social media professionals, and HR assistants, can benefit from AI Assistant’s ability to quickly parse and extract data from PDFs and generate summaries. ​ Specialized users, such as auditors, patent attorneys, financial analysts, contract attorneys, and senior research scientists, can leverage AI Assistant to streamline complex tasks involving specialized material. ​ It enables them to retrieve specific information, perform comparisons and compilations, structure documents, and even generate sophisticated texts based on document content. ​

The Pfeiffer research highlights the diverse advantages AI Assistant offers across various business sectors, from HR to research and development. These benefits include boosted productivity, diminished manual effort, enhanced accuracy, and improved compliance. It also underscores that AI Assistant significantly streamlines document-related tasks, enabling knowledge workers to focus on more valuable activities that drive business success. Download the full report and learn more about how customers can use AI Assistant to supercharge their productivity here.