Seriously, no marketing BS, no deflection, no big strategy, why add AI to an application that already struggles to live up to it's purpose? I don't think it is a great secret that your applications have suffered in quality over the recent years. I can't say I've seen a Reddit post, TikTok, YouTube, or any other user comments anywhere recently that are flattering to Adobe or Acrobat.
Personally, I don't give two cents about AI in my PDFs and I gotta say, this isn't unique among your users. I think it's great that you're trying to innovate however, the facts are your innovations are taking a toll on your image as a company focused on its users. Of all the software installed on my computers over the last few decades, Adobe software continuously performs poorly against other companie's software. Errors, crashes, slow downs, memory leaks, have all been happened routinely. No software is perfect but I can count the number of times Word has crashed in the last year on zero fingers.
It's absolutely true that you don't have to invest a lot into user experience research to know people want an Acrobat desktop application, but you are slowly forcing people to "Find where the feature is today!" It was in your desktop app, now it's not. It is exaclty like you have lost your way with this and your other applications.
Speaking of other applications, you don't need to snoop through all your users photos. That's just creepy. I'm shocked you didn't realize that people get creeped out by some random company snooping through their images. Don't talk about the security you've put in place because that doesn't eliminate the creep factor. If you want to train your AI, do it ethically. I have to waste time looking into the dissaray that is your application settings and preferences to remove the feature that is preventing me from doing my job efficiently.
AI has its place but right now, every company is rushing to add AI features to their applications without even pausing to see if the users even want that or that it would somehow be beneficial for any number of users. It's just cool right now, like blinking text used to be cool on web pages. I'm sure that some study you have done has confirmed everything that I've said here. I say this because, almost evertything I read online is negative about Adobe recently. If you continue to alienate your users, they will leave. PDFs can be made by numerous programs. There are applications that already do what you are trying to achieve with Acrobat and they do it much simpler and much more streamlined. You may just need to accept that your have a document generation program. That's it. It makes documents. It's not the preferred tool for writing in any alternate universe. The UI is too cumbersome to use for content generation. It's not great for creating documents either.
I'll state what the majority of users do with your product. They make documents for business processes. Do you really think AI can help with that? Oh, sure, change the writing so it's more professional or less techinical, that's great. AI as it is implemented isn't going to make whatever business process the document supports more efficient. I can dump my text into ChatGPT and get an equally useable block of text. There are and always will be better tools for doing the tasks you have added as AI features to Acrobat. You will never be able to compete within your applications with companies and organizations that focus on AI as their core business. That is unless you sell off all your IP for Acrobat, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. and go all in to AI. Right now, this is a distraction from Acrobat.
Now, I do use Lightroom & Photoshop as well. AI is a good feature in these programs as it makes sense in the workflow. Removing objects with AI is still a lot fiddly, like it not knowing that "remove" means "remove" and not replace with some wacky AI generated thing. It would also be good if the last replacement option didn't affect further generations. It seemingly does though so, and so I waste time and probably my AI credits flipping through a lot of crap generations that don't work. So, I do encourage improving AI integration there. In Acrobat though, it doesn't have much if any value for most of your users so, please just fix the issues with the application.
That's my rant. I'm sure it will be ignored
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