3 Ways to Use AI to Summarise PDFs

How we can save months of manual work to “work smart” and “work fast”

We have all been there. When I was studying for my PhD degree, I downloaded over 150 journal articles and book chapters in PDFs per week. I read between 20 and 30 PDFs daily in order to manually conduct extensive narrative reviews.

The upside is we feel very productive if we spend eight to 10 hours daily reading PDFs with technical terms, computational formulas and abstract concepts. The downside—which is very obvious—is that such a labourious process wastes our valuable time.

We are now living in 2025. With the hype and popularisation of technological and AI development, learning, working and researching are far easier and more efficient than we might imagine, so long as we are willing to incorporate advanced yet user-friendly tech hacks into our daily lives.

Nowadays, we can easily grasp the core concepts of a lengthy (up to 60-80 pages) PDF in minutes. So, you want to learn how to easily and accurately summarise a PDF?

Here’s how.

#1: AI Inside Our PDF Software

In this article, I highlight the three most popular ways to use AI to summarise PDFs easily and accurately. The first approach to seamlessly summarise PDFs is using tools built directly into the PDF software that we may already have. Industry leaders such as Adobe Acrobat and Xodo have now embedded powerful AI features directly into their own platforms.

How it works: Typically, you just need to open your document and look for a new icon or menu option (which is often labelled as “AI assistant”, “Generative summary” or simply “Summarise”). With a single click, the software analyses the document’s structure and content—from headings and paragraphs to data tables. The software then presents you with a concise, structured overview. Sometimes, the overview even contains clickable headings that take you directly to the relevant section in the full document.

So, you may think: This seems too good to be true.

Well, if you have access to Adobe Acrobat and Xodo, then this approach is unmatched—fast, concise and accurate. However, the main drawback is that such features are often deemed premium, which require you to have a paid subscription in order to use them.

#2: The PDF Summary Specialists

The good news is there are alternatives where you do not need a paid subscription but can still freely summarise your PDFs. For example, websites such as PDF.ai and Scholarcy have both free and paid plans. For the free plan, PDF.ai allows you to upload a PDF of no more than 10 MB; and Scholarcy enables you to upload up to three PDFs for summarisation per day.

How it works: The process is very straightforward. You simply navigate to their websites, upload your PDF file, and the platform’s AI gets to work. Within seconds, it generates the summary of your PDF file. Some of these specialist tools go a step further, helping you extract key data points, find all cited sources and/or even raise specific questions about the content of your PDF.

These specialist tools are more powerful and feature-rich than the integrated counterparts mentioned above. However, one of the concerns is privacy. Before uploading a sensitive corporate report or confidential research, for example, you should be comfortable with the platforms’ security policies.

#3: The Conventional Approach: AI Chatbots

Another easy hack is very general but practical: which is to use AI chatbots to help you summarise uploaded PDFs. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and/or Gemini all allow you to directly upload files, including PDFs.

How it works: You simply drag and drop your PDFs into the prompt input box of any AI chatbot. If you want generic summarisation, you can simply input the prompt, “Can you summarise this PDF?” Alternatively, you can be more specific.

For example, you can try prompts like:

Summarise the key arguments and counter-arguments in this PDF for a non-technical audience.
Extract all the statistics from this report and present them in a table.
What are the three most important conclusions the author(s) make(s)?
Explain the methodology section as if I were a freshman college student.

Major AI chatbots give users the ability to interact, probe and ask follow-up questions, making this approach the most flexible and insightful among the three approaches/hacks I mention in this article. Using AI chatbots to summarise PDFs allows you to tailor the outputs precisely to your own needs. Not only are these AI chatbots free to use, they mostly live up to the hype as capable personal research assistants.

Final Thoughts

Working hard is fine. But in this era, the sexy terms are “working smart”, “being productive” and “job efficiency”. Imagine that you can now capture all key content and arguments among a large pool of PDFs within hours, or days at most, while the previous generations used to read all PDFs manually and exhaustingly in months, if not longer.

Whether you are an industry professional, an academic scholar, or a college or grad school student, using AI-driven PDF summarisers helps save a large chunk of your time.

Remember: Work smarter, work faster, and work more.

Thanks for reading my sharing on productivity and life hacks for efficient work. If you would like to learn more about (mental) health, personal development and/or (online) education from me, please feel free to subscribe to my newsletter below. Also please feel free to browse my blog — Society & Growth — for more content at https://jasonhungofficialblog.com.

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