Name: Adobe’s Secret Weapon in the AI Race? Trust—and Millions of Subscribers
Uploaded: 2025-05-22
Duration: 10 min 18 s
Description: Adobe is going all-in on AI, integrating generative and agentic tools across its Creative and Experience Clouds. As the company shifts its strategy, creative and marketing professionals—especially newcomers—face growing pressure to keep up. Here’s what Adobe’s AI push means for the future of creative and marketing work.

Adobe is going all-in on AI, integrating generative and agentic tools across its Creative and Experience Clouds. As the company shifts its strategy, creative and marketing professionals—especially newcomers—face growing pressure to keep up. Here’s what Adobe’s AI push means for the future of creative and marketing work.

Adobe’s Secret Weapon in the AI Race? Trust—and Millions of Subscribers

Adobe is doubling down on AI by integrating generative and agentic tools into its platforms. 

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Adobe is going all-in on AI, integrating generative and agentic tools across its Creative and Experience Clouds. As the company shifts its strategy, creative and marketing professionals—especially newcomers—face growing pressure to keep up. 

For decades, Adobe set the standard in creative software. Tools like Photoshop and Premiere helped define entire industries and shape creative careers. But in recent years, the company has been staking its claim in the fast moving world of artificial intelligence by embedding generative and now agentic AI directly into its legacy products. And creators are noticing Doby's new AI called Firefly. They've done a very good job of taking that loyal following and producing Gen AI in the format that most of those developers have been used to. And Adobe's ambitions don't stop at creative software. The company is now releasing AI tools that are transforming how global brands deliver marketing campaigns. But these transformations across the industry are raising tough questions about AI's role in creative fields and who benefits from this new era of automation. Junior creatives are being pressed by the market to react in AI timing, which is light speed. Here's a closer look at how Adobe is adapting to the AI era and how it's helping to shape the future of creativity and marketing. For years, Adobe sold box software like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere for a flat fee. That changed in 2012, when it moved to a subscription-only model with Creative Cloud. Definitely a cloud. Subscriptions gave Adobe a steady predictable revenue stream and allowed it to update products continuously. They've moved from where you buy the product and then can use it essentially for free from there on out to charging on their way. That's Steven Messer, the co-founder of an AI sales company called Collective Eye. With over a decade of experience in the field, he's had a front row seat to the AI boom. The speed at which its adoption took place, the speed at which people learned to write prompts, prompt engineering was a word that no one had ever heard of, but the speed at which they did that was unfathomable. Gen AI has really changed the creative world dramatically. By 2022, Generative AI was already reshaping how creative work got done. Tools like OpenAI's Dolly and startups like Midourney let users generate high quality images in seconds. No traditional software needed. And when you ask Dolly for an image of a koala bear riding a motorcycle, it knows how to create that or anything else with a relationship to another object or action. After years of layering smaller AI features into its tools, Adobe made its biggest move in 2023 with the commercial launch of Adobe Firefly. Unlike newer AI startups, Adobe integrated generative AI into familiar tools across its Creative cloud, giving it a head start with a built-in audience. Across its Creative Cloud and acrobat applications, the company reaches over 750 million monthly active users. I think Adobe has a loyal base of customers, so a user of their products can just incorporate GenAI as part of their workflow as opposed to having to learn entirely new applications. Similar to other generative AI tools, Adobe Firefly can generate high quality images and video from text prompts, but it goes further, powering tools within creative cloud apps like Generative Fill and Expand in Photoshop. Watch. Boom, and text to vector graphics in Illustrator. Take your sketch from this to this in seconds. Adobe has a legacy of people who know how to use those products very well, which means they're already trained, they're already efficient. They know what they're doing, so if they want to create something very specific, then make it 3D, then have it do different things or be in different environments. Now you're talking about taking that creative license of a professional and just blowing it out um in a much more efficient. And the company is also taking a more cautious approach to AI training. Many AI platforms train their models by scraping content from across the web, raising copyright concerns. The New York Times suing OpenAI, the creator of Chat GPT, and Microsoft for copyright infringement. But Adobe says Firefly is different, trained only on licensed and public domain content. Unlike a lot of other software companies, they've actually chosen to build most. Their Gen AI on their own. Their argument is that it's always licensed creative that they're using, so that anything that's that's going to train their Gen AI is going to be safe from threats of copyright infringement, trademark infringement, etc. And so their real goal is to go out there and say this is a safe environment. But Adobe is far from alone in this space. In just two years, the generative AI market has exploded from a market of 191 million. In 2022 to more than 25 billion in 2024. When you see foundation models coming up at the speed they're coming up, it is all over the map. It's not just meta, which is a risk to them. It's not just runway. It's not just mid journey. It's literally a range of people coming out of nowhere, and it might be people building on top of those models. Competitors like OpenAI, Canva, Sigma, Runway, Stability AI, and Mid Journey are moving fast. With some AI first tools that can be simpler and cheaper than Adobe's offerings, the risk they run is that their loyal audience looks and says, Wait a second, this new tool actually is easier or is faster or is cheaper or is better, and if I don't use this new thing, I'm going to lose in the overall game of competition. Meanwhile, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are flooding the space with their own generative AI models. I look at that. When they released their new Llaa model, they came out with a cartoon version of everyone, and everyone quickly flew on to Meta to make a cartoon version of themselves. Well, that is the risk to Adobe. You've never seen the speed at which people are willing to change products just to get one capability that is at the edge or really hot and exciting. But Adobe still dominates when it comes to the creative software market, commanding over 80% of market share in 2024. But the rise of generative AI like Adobe Firefly is reshaping how creative work is done and who gets to do it, especially for junior talent breaking into the industry. Junior creatives are being pressed by the market to react in AI timing, which is light speed. Bruno Lemgruber is an associate professor of design at the University of Southern California and a creative director at Tabaruba Design with over 2. Decades of experience in the industry. So things have shifted in such a dramatic way. Before, you would do something in a week or in 40 hours and now you can do it in 1/10 of the time. And if the market is pressing people to respond in AI timing, then you're being neglected the time to reflect and to use critical thinking. And for senior designers, senior creators. You have enough experience to know what you're skipping, but if you're a junior, you're actually skipping a learning curve. AI is also changing the structure of creative teams. Tasks once given to interns or junior staff can now be done instantly with generative tools. Before, I would have interns or junior designers to try things that I kind of have a vague idea that will probably not work, but I say, hey, let's try it out. Now I can quickly experiment that with AI. There are many things that before you would require junior creatives to be involved. And now you don't need them. When it comes to the creative process, AI has advantages too, like saving time and making it easier to experiment. AI gives you the time because you didn't invest like hundreds of hours. You can quickly experiment, prototype something. Do I like that? Is there where I wanted to go? No, it's not. And like. and do it again. You're not stuck on like, oh, I already spent like 200 hours. I need to keep going. Now some creative professionals say they're under pressure not just to use AI, but prove they're keeping up in design and creative direction in general, if you don't embrace AI, you're most likely going to become irrelevant. As creatives adapt to a shifting landscape, Adobe is pushing beyond generative AI into what's known as agentic AI or AI agents. While generative AI creates content based on data patterns, Agentic AI acts more like a digital assistant, automating multi-step processes. Agenic AI is generally a new concept that people are talking about, and this is where the AI does its own thing on its own, and it starts to make decisions on behalf of the end user for you. Adobe is integrating these AI agents into its creative cloud and marketing products like Gen Studio and the recently launched Agent Orchestrator. The company says these tools help marketers streamline their entire content supply chain. Adobe Gen Studio for performance marketing lets marketers create their own on-brand email, paid social ads, and display ads. The tools are built to automate tasks like asset creation and performance tracking, helping brands scale and adapt campaigns more efficiently, and that strategy appears to be driving results. In fiscal year 2024, Adobe reported record breaking revenue with joint creative and marketing enterprise deals growing by more than 100% year over year. I don't think people have been paying enough attention to Adobe's approaches to Gen AI. They are doing some pretty interesting things. They are playing with different ways to incorporate Gen AI into existing products, but I don't know if they've really gotten the attention of the world, and I think that's what people keep waiting for is what are they doing on the frontier that's really going to blow people away.