You've got a folder of PDFs and you want summaries — not by hand. Here are three approaches that actually work in 2026, roughly from "most control" to "least effort," plus an honest note on when you shouldn't build this at all.
The part everyone underestimates: extraction + length
Before any AI sees your PDF, two things bite you:
Text extraction. Native PDFs give you text directly. Scanned PDFs are images — you need OCR first.
Length. A 200-page report is way more than a single model call wants to swallow. Dump it all in and you'll hit context limits, get truncated tails, or pay for tokens you didn't need to send.
