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Company: Adobe, San Jose, CA
Nomination Submitted by: Edelman, Seattle, WA
Company Description: Adobe is a multinational computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California. It provides specializes software for creation and publication of content including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, video, motion picture and print alongside enterprise software. Adobe has more than 24,000 employees worldwide.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Business Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning Solution
 Nomination Title: Adobe Document Cloud’s Acrobat and Liquid Mode
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR written answers to the questions for this category? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video.
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- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this first question: If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:
September 23, 2020
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this second question: Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 350 words):
Total 349 words used.
While Adobe invented the PDF more than 25 years ago, it remains the standard document file format the world relies on. Yet, Adobe research revealed 65 percent of Americans find reading documents on mobile frustrating. Separate Adobe research found 84 percent of Americans feel that their coworkers would benefit from workplace accessibility and 58 percent of respondents with disabilities listed remote/hybrid work policies as a top preference when evaluating a work opportunity.
To improve digital document experiences and further enable productivity in the era of hybrid work, Adobe launched Liquid Mode, a revolutionary Acrobat Reader experience using AI that makes reading documents on mobile devices easier and more accessible.
Powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and ML technology, Liquid Mode understands the components of a PDF (headings, paragraphs, images, lists, etc.), and automatically reformats documents for quicker navigation and consumption on small screens. This enables users to customize reading formats and eliminates the need to pinch and zoom, as images are tappable and expandable, tables are responsive, and words are resizable and reflowable, which support the WCAG 2.1 Resize Text, Text Spacing, and Reflow Success Criterions.
The Herculean effort to make PDFs more accessible involved 90+ people across user experience, research, and engineering teams, who used millions of documents to train Sensei to assign structure to inherently unstructured PDFs, creating a huge accessibility improvement for users’ mobile PDF experience. Like with all machine learning, Liquid Mode also gains knowledge and evolves the users’ experience over time, further expanding its functionality and improving its readability.
Liquid Mode is just a first step in a multi-year vision to fundamentally change the way people consume digital documents and how organizations extract document intelligence from PDFs to gain a competitive edge. Adobe is exploring new ways to integrate AI with its digital document tools, which enables teams and organizations to spend more time on high-value work by digitizing and automating tedious tasks. Adobe’s goal is to fuel the modern-day office and make digital document consumption, collaboration, and processing as seamless as possible – regardless of when or where work is being done.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this third question: Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable (up to 350 words):
Total 347 words used.
Adobe has delivered continuous innovations like Liquid Mode to improve productivity and make documents easy to use for people of all abilities and businesses of all sizes, which was essential in helping users manage the uncertainty and challenges brought on by COVID-19.
For instance, workers can use Liquid Mode to easily review and manage the vast number of complex documents housed in their storage systems, improving employee productivity. Users expressed their appreciation how Liquid Mode transformed their PDF experience on social media saying they were “super excited at what it offers” and claimed it was the “best thing that happened to PDF in years.”
Accessibility is also a key tenant of Adobe’s vision for Liquid Mode. Adobe founded the Readability Consortium in partnership with the University of Central Florida and Readability Matters, which aims to make digital reading and reading comprehension more equitable by investing in cognitive research, open-source tools, and user testing across age groups and abilities levels. Through this initiative Adobe and partners uncovered how an individualized reading experience led to more proficient readers. Google joined the Readability Consortium this year, further expanding where users can customize their reading experience across the web.
Insights from the Readability Consortium have inform the development of Liquid Mode to help create a more productive and accessible experience for differently abled users. In fact, the American Council for the Blind noted Liquid Mode “provides a much easier way to read documents on mobile and comes with some incredible benefits for a more accessible PDF reading experience.”
In the past year, more than 400 million files were successfully opened in Liquid Mode. Adobe is now processing 30 million documents per month in Liquid Mode. Additionally, Adobe Document Cloud delivered strong results in 2021. In Q4 2021, Document Cloud generated $532M in revenue, a 29 percent YoY growth, and $141M in net new Annualized Recurring Revenue.
In a world where work needs to be done from anywhere and with anyone, Adobe Doucment Cloud is accelerating document productivity, redefining how people engage with digital documents across every surface and platform
- You have the option to answer this final question: Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
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