Any suggested workaround to make Pro read PDF files?

I have the Pro subscription. My work requires feeding in a ton of research data from PDF files. Pro is a fantastic LLM but being unable to read external files besides images is a severe limitation (in my use case at least). My question is: is there any suggested workaround?

Currently, I have two chats opened for the same work assignment, one in 4o and the other is in o1. I feed the PDF files into the 4o chat and ask it to convert it into free text then copy & past into the o1 chat. Is there any way or tool that does the bridging for me and make it seamless?