How to pass a PDF file to an AI agent where appearance of the file is important?

Questions
1

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to ask how to give a PDF file to an AI agent so that the agent can use it directly? I know that the content of a PDF file can be extracted and be given to the agent, but is there any method where the AI agent can use the exact file?
I’m creating a workflow where my agent needs to upload a file somewhere.

Thanks

2

Are you willing to pay for an integrations like PDF.co Api
or do you want to do it for free?

3

I am not familiar with PDF.co, does it allow “to upload a file somewhere”?

4

Hi, You can absolutely import a PDF into a database and store it as vectors for an agent to use when needed. This is a common approach in RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architecture.

5

I prefer a free method

6

Can I store it in my Google Drive and give agent access to it? Or using this method it will only gain access to the contents of the file not the file itself?

7

Hi! Yes, you can store the PDF in Google Drive and give the agent a shared link, but that only gives access to the file, not the content inside it unless your agent is able to download and parse it.

For using it with an AI agent in a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) setup, here are two key points:

  1. You can use free embedding models to convert the PDF into vector format. Once embedded and stored in a vector database, the agent can retrieve context efficiently. This is often much cheaper than prompting the LLM with large chunks of text directly.
  2. **If you give the raw file ** and extract content at query time, it can work — but if the content is large, sending that into the LLM prompt will cost more tokens per request and may hit token limits.
8

thank you for your reply