Broker guide
Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant: Safe for Client PDFs?
Acrobat AI Assistant reads the PDFs you submit, including payslips and bank statements. See what Adobe keeps and how to turn the assistant off.
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Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant is suitable for client PDFs only when your brokerage approves its cloud processing and retention terms. Asking it to summarise a bank statement can send document content to Adobe’s cloud and its model provider. Adobe’s promise about model training doesn’t remove that transfer or the retained chat history.
If your brokerage hasn’t approved that use, turn off generative AI features before working with identifiable client documents.
What Acrobat AI Assistant Does
Acrobat AI Assistant answers questions about documents and generates summaries in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Its generative AI features can help you find a passage and turn document content into a draft explanation. Adobe’s Acrobat AI overview describes the available document questions and summaries.
For example, you could ask where a statement records a particular payment. Follow the answer’s citation back to the statement and read the surrounding entries. A summary can omit a qualification or attach the wrong source passage, so use the original document when assessing income or expenses.
Adobe’s user disclosures explain that answers and citations can be inaccurate. A generated explanation of a payslip doesn’t establish that a lender accepts that income.
Is It Safe for Client Documents?
It depends on whether your brokerage authorises the document’s processing, including the cloud transfer and retained copies. Treat a client bank statement or payslip as a disclosure decision before using the assistant.
Adobe’s enterprise security explanation says users activate document summaries and answers through the AI controls. It describes processing through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Opening a locally stored PDF and submitting it to the assistant are different actions.
Training and Processing Are Separate Questions
Adobe’s content analysis FAQ states, “We do not analyze your content to train generative AI models”. The FAQ gives an exception for content users submit to the Adobe Stock marketplace. Adobe separately says it doesn’t train or fine-tune large language models on Acrobat customer data.
That commitment concerns model training. The service still needs document content to generate its answer, and Adobe’s security documentation describes sending that content to its cloud service and Azure OpenAI.
The 12-Hour Cache Has Exceptions
Adobe’s Acrobat AI Assistant security fact sheet says it “stores the PDF content, user questions, and generated responses in a cache for 12 hours”. Its storage explanation treats retained chat history and user-reported content separately.
Desktop and mobile chat history is stored on the device. Acrobat on the web stores chat history in Adobe cloud storage. Reported content can be retained for review, so the 12-hour cache period isn’t a promise that every copy disappears after 12 hours.
A brokerage deciding whether to approve the assistant needs to account for those retained copies as well as the processing itself. Keep client documents out of feedback submissions unless your approved process permits that disclosure.
Adobe’s Guidelines Also Restrict Sensitive Inputs
Adobe’s Generative AI User Guidelines say, “Do not input sensitive personal information”. The clause permits an exception where the product is designed to process that type of information. It also requires respect for other people’s privacy rights.
A no-training statement alone doesn’t establish that a particular client document is an approved input. Use the assistant for identifiable documents only when your brokerage’s approved process covers that document type and the service’s data handling.
Turn Off AI Assistant in Acrobat
You can disable generative AI in Acrobat’s preferences for your own installation. An organisation administrator can restrict access through the applicable product profiles.
Disable It for One User
Follow Adobe’s desktop disable instructions.
- Close every open document in Acrobat.
- Open Preferences from Menu on Windows or View on macOS, then choose Generative AI.
- Clear the checkbox labelled Enable generative AI features.
- Select OK to save the change.
- Reopen a non-confidential sample PDF. Confirm the generative AI setting remains off and the assistant’s document tools are unavailable.
On a phone or tablet, open your profile icon in Acrobat, select Preferences and turn off Enable generative AI features in Acrobat. Adobe documents the same toggle for Android and iOS.
Closing an AI panel only hides that panel. Use the generative AI setting to disable the features.
Disable It for an Organisation
An administrator with product-profile permissions can use Adobe’s service controls in Admin Console.
- Open the Products tab in Admin Console and select the relevant Acrobat product.
- Select View Details for a product profile.
- Turn off the Adobe Acrobat AI service for that profile.
- Repeat for every profile that grants the affected users Acrobat AI access.
- Have a test user close and reopen Acrobat. For web or mobile, have them sign out and back in.
- Use a non-confidential sample document to confirm AI Assistant is unavailable under the organisation’s profile.
A service enabled in another assigned profile can preserve access. A personal Adobe subscription can also retain its own access. Check those two cases if a user can still use the assistant after the organisation changes its settings.
Safer Ways to Read Client PDFs
For ordinary document review, read the PDF directly and keep generative AI disabled when cloud processing isn’t approved. Before an approved AI task, remove information the task doesn’t need from a separate working copy.
Use permanent redaction for visible identifiers. The redact PDF tool helps prepare that copy. A black rectangle drawn over text can leave the underlying text available to copy or extract.
Remove hidden information too. A metadata remover addresses document properties that a visible-page review can miss. Adobe’s PDF sanitisation guidance also covers hidden content in PDFs.
Metadata removal and visible redaction perform different jobs.
In a hypothetical statement review, you might need to discuss the wording of one transaction. Keep the relevant wording in the working copy and remove account identifiers and unrelated transactions. Remaining details can still identify a person, so a redacted copy still needs an approved destination.
Reopen the saved copy and search for the information you removed. Check copied text as well as the visible page, then inspect the document properties. Share only that checked copy, and retain the original in your approved client-file system.
