Adobe Aims to Reassure Investors as AI Transforms Markets for Creative Software

While Adobe’s annual conference held this week focused on retaining the business of marketers, filmmakers and content creators, it reportedly also sought to reassure investors.

The company has been adding artificial intelligence (AI) to its software for creative professionals, but it is being challenged by other companies that are offering new AI tools, Bloomberg reported Friday (Oct. 31).

Facing competitors like Google’s Veo, OpenAI’s Sora, and Canva, Adobe’s stock has dropped by about a quarter this year, according to the report.

This drop occurred even as Adobe’s AI features in products like Photoshop have been used tens of billions of times, per the report.

The report said that while some software companies have been challenged by investors’ concerns that AI was not taking hold in their industries fast enough, Adobe’s problem is that AI is rapidly transforming the markets it serves.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told Bloomberg Television this week, per the report, that the company’s stock is undervalued because the market is focused on semiconductors and AI model training.

An analyst at Evercore, Kirk Materne, told Bloomberg that Adobe’s latest annual conference was “another step toward addressing the ‘existential risk’ question as it relates to Gen AI tools in the market.”

PYMNTS reported Tuesday (Oct. 28) that Adobe announced at its event that its Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere and Illustrator will now include an AI assistant powered by agentic AI to handle repeatable tasks and surface personalized recommendations.

Adobe also highlighted more than 100 updates that are part of what it calls “collaborative intelligence,” where human input and AI capabilities operate side by side. These features include image upscaling, generative editing and batch-image processing via the company’s Firefly suite.

During a December 2024 earnings call, Adobe said its AI strategy spans across its entire product portfolio, with its Firefly family of AI models being integrated into its flagship applications, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro and its web-based Express platform.

“The integration of Firefly across our flagship applications in Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud is driving record customer adoption and usage,” Narayen said during the call.

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