Adobe Sensei, and the Impact It Will Have on the Future of Work

Earlier this month, at Adobe MAX, we unveiled Adobe Sensei, a new framework and set of intelligent services built into the Adobe Experience Platform for dramatically improving customer experiences. Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning, Adobe Sensei’s intelligent services glean insights from content and data; apply “human” skills like judgment and creativity; and automate processes, all to help Adobe customers work faster and more effectively.

Disruptive innovation, like that powered by Adobe Sensei, is core to our approach for delivering value to our customers with Adobe Document Cloud. Today we are announcing new mobile scanning functionality – a great example of Adobe Sensei at work – making scanning from paper to PDF on mobile faster and easier than ever before. The new Scan functionality is now available to hundreds of millions of users of Acrobat Reader, on iOS and Android phones and tablets. It uses science – Adobe Sensei capabilities like PDF boundary detection, perspective correction and enhanced text sharpness – to produce clean, secure, sharable PDFs out of paper, that can then be incorporated into your digital workflow with Adobe Document Cloud. Check out more on Scan and get it for yourself!

But Adobe Sensei has been at the heart of Adobe Document Cloud all along, with technology that works on your behalf, automating repetitive tasks and boosting productivity, and paving the way for the workplace of the future. It’s the science behind what we’ve always described as ‘Adobe magic.’ Here are some examples of the ways that machine learning and AI is already being put to work in Document Cloud:

• Creating searchable, editable, sharable documents: Acrobat DC uses technology that classifies words, paragraphs, lists, tables, form fields and figures in order to insert rich semantics into documents that have none. This allows you to capture scans, images of documents or any content and convert it to a PDF that is smart, searchable and easy to share and store. Optical character recognition technology (OCR) turns images of words into text that can be edited in Acrobat Pro or exported to other editable file formats.
• Making documents accessible: Using the “make accessible” feature in Acrobat DC, we reverse engineer the structure of a PDF with AI to help make it accessible for assistive technology like screen readers.
• Filling out forms: Acrobat DC automatically learns the structure of a form (where the form fields are located, what the labels are, the type and order of the fields) in order to make filling out forms easier and less time consuming.
• Cleaning up signatures: Using advanced image processing techniques, Adobe Sign will automatically ‘clean up’ a user’s signature that was scanned or input manually, making it clean, crisp and easy to read, regardless of the original image or scan.
• Capturing and filling out forms on mobile: In Adobe Fill & Sign, we use advanced image processing technology to Identify form fields from a scanned document to make it easy to input personalized information like names and addresses, and also to sign the document. Natural Language Processing (NLP – a field of Artificial Intelligence) looks at text and automatically recognizes grammar, syntax and semantics to derive understanding from it, recognizing the elements of a form.****

These are just a few examples of how Document Cloud, powered by Adobe Sensei, uses sophisticated technology on the back-end to make your life a little easier, a little more productive. And we are constantly innovating to provide even more cutting-edge capabilities, as is evident with today’s release of Scan in Acrobat Reader mobile, with more just around the corner. After all, documents are in our DNA. We invented PDF, before there was an Internet, and then opened it up to the world. And we will help define the future of PDF and document services, tapping into the brilliant work of our scientists and engineers who spend each day thinking about how to make our customers’ work more impactful.

And what can the future bring? We process tens of billions of PDFs through the Adobe Cloud. If you’re an enterprise, imagine being able to deeply understand meaning from all the documents in your company, finding patterns and similarities in content and extracting knowledge from that. A medical research facility, for example, could search thousands if not millions of studies in order to extract patterns in patients’ symptoms and identify the most effective treatment options. Or, if you are in the midst of your digital transformation as a company, using something called semantic structure analysis of documents, we can apply AI and machine learning to analyze and categorize the content of your documents as they’re scanned. The possibilities are exciting, and the use cases are virtually endless.

In all these areas, the workforce of the future expects a shift from technology that holds them back, to technology that works on their behalf – that lets them do their most, and frees them up to focus on the things they’re passionate about. With Adobe Document Cloud and technology powered by Adobe Sensei, we’ll exceed those expectations as we help define the future of work!