Adobe at Adobe MAX: AI and Creativity Drive Future Growth

On Tuesday, 28 October 2025, Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) showcased its strategic direction at Adobe MAX - The Creativity Conference. The company highlighted its commitment to integrating artificial intelligence (AI) across its product suite, reaffirming its financial targets for Q4 and fiscal year 2025. Despite facing competitive pressures, Adobe aims to maintain its position as a leader in creative solutions by focusing on AI-driven innovation and customer-centric strategies.

Key Takeaways

• Adobe reaffirms its Q4 and FY25 financial targets, emphasizing strong AI-influenced revenue.
• The company is investing heavily in AI capabilities, with a focus on products like Firefly and Creative Cloud.
• Adobe’s operating margin remains robust, supported by significant R&D investments.
• The firm is expanding its market reach with partnerships and innovative product integrations.
• Adobe aims to become a one-stop shop for creative professionals, leveraging AI to enhance productivity.

Financial Results

• Q4 & FY25 Targets: Adobe remains confident in meeting its financial goals for the fourth quarter and full year 2025.
• AI-Influenced Revenue: The company’s AI-influenced revenue has surpassed $5 billion, with expectations for this to eventually encompass the entirety of its business.
• Operating Margin: Adobe reported a non-GAAP operating margin exceeding 46% over the past year, alongside over $3 billion invested in research and development.
• Cash Flow: The company generated nearly $10 billion in operating cash flow.
• Share Repurchase: Adobe has repurchased over 28 million shares, reducing its share count by more than 5%.

Operational Updates

• Max Attendance: The conference attracted over 10,000 in-person attendees and hundreds of thousands of online viewers, signaling strong interest from enterprises, agencies, and individual creators.
• Acrobat and Express: New integrations, including PDF spaces, aim to enhance user collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Firefly: The launch of Firefly boards and the Image Model 5 received positive feedback, underscoring Adobe’s AI advancements.
• Creative Cloud: New features like Photoshop Harmonize and 3D conversion in Illustrator demonstrate Adobe’s commitment to innovation.
• GenStudio and AEM: These tools are designed to optimize content creation and management for enterprises.

Future Outlook

• Customer Focus: Adobe is targeting a diverse range of users, from business professionals to marketing experts, with tailored solutions.
• Growth Drivers: Key areas of growth include Acrobat and Express, Firefly, and Creative Cloud, with a strong emphasis on AI-driven enhancements.
• Reporting and Visibility: Adobe plans to provide detailed insights into its business operations, focusing on revenue, subscription metrics, and AI-influenced growth.

Q&A Highlights

• Segmentation vs. Scalability: Adobe is expanding its product lineup to cater to various market segments, offering solutions like Express and Firefly at different price points.
• Generative AI and Seats: The growing demand for content is driving new customer acquisition and monetization opportunities.
• Third-Party Models: Adobe is exploring monetization strategies for third-party models within Firefly through a consumption-based approach.
• Image Model 5: This model is touted as leading the industry in precision and image preservation.

In conclusion, Adobe’s strategic initiatives at Adobe MAX highlight its focus on AI and creativity as key drivers for future growth. For a deeper dive into the conference details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Adobe MAX - The Creativity Conference:

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Welcome, everyone. Thank you all for joining. This is the Investor Session at Adobe Max 2025. That was just a small glimpse of all the incredible innovation that we have been showing here today at the keynote, and you’ll see a lot more of tomorrow as well. I’m Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations. I want to thank you all for joining us in the room, members of our executive team. We also have a number of our board members here joining us today. Very excited to have all of you, and then everybody globally on the webcast as well. Quickly, before we start, traditional housekeeping items. The statements that we make today involve forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as of today, October 28th. Our actual results could differ materially from those set forth in these statements.

Please refer to the presentation and our risk factors for the SEC filings for additional information. Today’s slides, including non-GAAP disclosures, reconciliations, and additional information, are posted on the Investor Relations website. We’ll keep this efficient. We’re going to start with Shantanu to discuss Adobe’s strategy, then turn it over to David and Anil to discuss our growth initiatives and the highlights here at Max. Then we’ll have Dan follow up with our financial strategy. We’ll leave plenty of time for questions at the end, so don’t worry. We will get to as many as we possibly can. With that, it is my pleasure to welcome Shantanu Narayen to the stage.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Okay.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Thank you.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Thank you. Wow. This is the first. Normally at FA meetings, nobody has applause or claps. Let me, in addition to Doug, actually add my welcome to everyone joining us here at Max, as well as those on the livestream. Hopefully, you were able to attend this morning’s keynote. Somebody was telling me earlier, correctly, Keith, that it is our largest keynote. Trust me, when I said the amount of stuff that we weren’t able to show because of the amount of innovation that we had probably exceeded the amount of stuff that we were able to show. I really encourage those who weren’t able to watch it to please watch it because I think it reflects all of the innovation that we’re doing. I’ll certainly touch on that as it relates to all of our strategic priorities.

If you think about Acrobat plus Express, what we are doing certainly around Creative Cloud, Firefly, GenStudio, Adobe Experience Manager, and the Agentic Web, and Adobe Experience Platform and Apps, I think we just showed a really good sort of smattering of all of the innovation that was happening in there. Before we get going, we did want to make sure that we also said that we were, given the strong performance that we’re seeing in Q4, reaffirming our targets for Q4 and as a result for FY25. Today is really more about the future, but I thought I’d just get that across.

For a while now, we have really been talking about, if you think about Adobe’s real reason for being, it’s always been about creativity, which is in our DNA, and making sure that as every industry thinks about creative expression in a more fundamental way, that we look at the evolution of the growth opportunity associated with Adobe and really targeting these customer groups with more tailored offerings, different go-to-market models, different partnerships, we believe is really going to be fundamental to continuing to drive growth for the company. As we think about creativity and how pervasive it’s become across every industry, we have done, I think, an absolutely spectacular job of making sure that we tailor our offerings, our routes to market, to anticipate the growing needs of our customers.

The reality is the amount of content that’s being created, the amount of content that’s being consumed is greater than it’s ever been before. I think, as we show on the left side, all of the different industries for whom creative expression and content creation is fundamental is just absolutely exploding, and I think will continue to explode. As we think about what we are trying to do with the customer-focused strategy, we’re really focused on business professionals and consumers, creators and creative professionals, and marketing professionals. The creative professionals will always be the core because they have the most exacting standards for Adobe, and making sure that we deliver an absolutely comprehensive set of offerings across every media type with the power and precision that people want will continue to be the focus. That then bleeds out into all of the different segments that we serve.

Today, we demonstrated not just all of the incredible innovation that’s happening in our Creative Cloud products, but also, and David also will touch a little bit more on that, what we are doing as it relates to supporting third-party models, our own extension of the Firefly model. We released Firefly Image Model 5, as well as what we are doing with the Agentic AI interfaces. Creators and creative professionals continue to be a growth opportunity for us. More people are entering the creative community than ever before. The focus for Adobe is to make sure that we deliver the most comprehensive offering with the power and precision. Increasingly, if you’re a business professional or a consumer, you also want to produce the best content.

Making sure that we have these AI-powered, quick, and easy apps, Adobe Express, and now increasingly integrated within Adobe Acrobat, a single product that enables you to be both creative and productive is a huge market opportunity for us. We look at the opportunity there and say, how do we ensure that AI can be used effectively to have a conversational interface to describe exactly what you want to do and really leapfrog the template era where everybody started off with the template, which was a leap forward. We think this AI conversational interface, and we’ll talk about that, as well as all of the different platforms in which we’re supporting it, is a big opportunity for Adobe. What we’ve done with Acrobat Studio and integrate now PDF as well as Express, because the reality is most people start with existing content when they want to create more.

We’ll touch a lot more on business professionals and consumers. We are the company that provides more marketing technology. If you look at the content that’s being created, increasingly, all of that’s being created in order to create ads, in order to have personalized customer engagement with customers. For marketing professionals, people who need this customer experience orchestration to create, deliver, and optimize the personalized digital experience, it represents a massive opportunity. That’s where GenStudio is so exciting because GenStudio really represents a way in which for every enterprise, as a combination of what they want in seats for creators and creative professionals, as well as what they want across the automation of all of that content with what we are doing around our customer experience orchestration solutions, I think we’re the only company that can provide that in a really seamless way.

I’m also particularly proud of the fact that while we have all of these different initiatives that I’ll talk about, we have done an absolutely great job at ensuring that the integration of Acrobat and Express with Creative Cloud, of Firefly with GenStudio is something that we will continue to focus on because that’s where we deliver great value. If I think about the six initiatives that are a priority for us as a company, Acrobat and Express, as I said, we have this vision of bringing together creativity and productivity for empowering billions of people. The new Acrobat Studio and the innovation that we’re doing around Acrobat Studio, what we’ve done with PDF spaces in order to allow people to have a conversational interface with PDF, as well as collaborate with other people. It transforms collections of PDFs, web pages into a knowledge hub on which you can behave.

We continue to see great momentum with what we are seeing around Acrobat AI Assistant. Huge initiative for us as a company. Firefly is really the opportunity for us to deliver this single end-to-end ideation solution. For those, again, at the Max, you saw so much functionality, whether it was the ability to support third-party models, whether it was text-to-image, text-to-video, audio capabilities, whether what we were doing around a new functionality with boards, what we are doing with providing video editors, new semantic image editors, and making sure that all of that’s an on-ramp to Creative Cloud. Very excited about Firefly as a strategic product initiative. Will be available as a separate new subscription. We can talk about that as well. In addition to that, it really represents a big value for those of our customers who are already using Creative Cloud.

Creative Cloud Pro, which combines the best of Firefly and Express and Creative Cloud, continues to be the preeminent creative solution. Creative Cloud, I can spend all day talking about Creative Cloud, but the amount of innovation that we’re doing in that as well with imaging, video, 3D, After Effects, and video production will always continue to be sort of the core zen of the company and the ability for us to attract that next generation of creatives. APN apps for customer experience orchestration, we talked about our vision that the future of customer engagement will depend on a platform. We talked about the fact that we wanted APN apps to be a billion-dollar business. We are the leading provider of a real-time customer data platform.

The new apps that are built on it, whether it’s Customer Journey Analytics or Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Anil will touch on that, continue to do exceedingly well. This is an imperative for every enterprise in the world, including Adobe, whether you’re a B2C company or a B2B company. Continue to be excited about APN apps and the potential for that. AEM and the Agentic Web, just like search revolutionized how people discovered services and offerings on the web, clearly everybody recognizes that LLM will be the next on-ramp for discovery, for new business models, for monetization, and what we are doing with AEM and Agentic Web. Anil will touch on this thing that we call Brand Concierge, which is how do you transform every single enterprise’s own site to being able to create an experience for a customer where they can have a conversational interface.

If you go to business.adobe.com or adobe.com now, in order to select Creative Cloud and the right offering for you, we are using our own Brand Concierge technology in order to make that happen. GenStudio, as I said, as a single solution in order to do ideation, creation, and production, activation of all of that content and delivery, asset management, as well as analytics and insights. GenStudio, again, represents for us a really comprehensive way to address every need that exists for a CMO or a CRO in the enterprise. I’ll touch a little bit on the AI platform as well and what we are doing as it relates to the AI platform. If you can go to that slide, yeah. I think today was really also very significant in how we showed not just all of the advancements that we’re doing in Adobe Firefly generation and editing models.

As I said, we released Firefly Image Model 5. Equally important, what we were doing with all the partner models and the ability for Adobe to have the single-stop shop for every single creative person to say, Adobe, you best understand the visual characteristics and the aesthetic style of all these models. Just make sure you select the right model for us. We will offer all our customers the ability to access whether it’s Google, OpenAI, Luma, Runway, Black Forest Labs, all in a seamless way. The fact that you can mix and match really allows every creative professional or business professional to say, I’m going to just stick to my interface. Behind the scenes, you’re picking the right AI platform for me.

We also now have an ability to actually create a model where they pay Adobe for it, and then we pass the appropriate revenue on to the other partners. I think the single-stop shop allows people to say, I don’t have to worry about any of the AI models. Pick the right model for me. If I have a choice that I want to make, I can make that model. I think some really great progress that we’ve made this year on both the Firefly generation and editing models, as well as the partner models. The other thing I really wanted to just touch on here is we now have Firefly custom models. People are going to ask us, how does this evolve? We think every single individual and every single enterprise will, at the end of the day, just want their own model.

We now have the ability through Firefly custom models, as well as Firefly Foundry, to allow people to say, whatever level of sophistication you want, Adobe can provide that for you. Whether that’s a combination of your assets that you have, whether it’s a combination of Firefly plus your assets, or Firefly plus your assets plus third-party models, we have the ability, we have the expertise, and we have the science in order to enable you to do that with Firefly Foundry. I’m really, really excited about what we’ve done to ensure that we infuse AI into all of our products, as well as abstract the complexity that’s happening.

Because at the end of the day, we certainly believe that integrating AI across the industry-leading product portfolio that we have is the way to allow every customer to access all of this incredible technology without worrying about friction of which interface they’re using or to go from application to application. I think today was a really important milestone for us to show how good we’ve become with our AI platform to infuse all of that within our applications. I could spend hours on all of these strategic accomplishments. I think what’s really important is across each one of these, if you look at the accomplishments, and I think David and Anil are going to touch on this a little bit, we’re executing well on both the product front and on the go-to-market.

Last year, if a lot of you were here, you were, I think, pleased with the amount of innovation, but you had a lot of questions, perhaps, about how we are partnering and/or competing with other third parties. I’m really pleased because every single model provider wants Adobe’s support because they recognize that whether it’s a creative or a business professional, they want to use our tools. I think the slide does a good job of just showing all of the accomplishments that we’ve had over the last year in terms of product, as well as go-to-market. I’m really proud, again, of all the stuff that our team has done and how we’re partnering, whether it’s with OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, as well as a whole host of other companies.

I’ll hand it over soon to David, but let me just say that the innovation that we believe we’re delivering allows us to both anticipate as well as meet the evolving needs of a much, much larger expanding set of customer base. We do believe that DNA of creativity is at our core, and the fact that we have all the offerings, that we have the right business models, we have the right technology in order to be able to deliver that for our customers gives me a lot of confidence that the best days of Adobe are ahead. I am more excited about the momentum in the business today than I have ever been before. With that, let me hand it over to David to talk about what we’re doing on the creative side.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Great. As Shantanu mentioned, this is uncomfortable. You guys are clapping. Keep it going. This is incredible. Just really quickly, talk a little bit about Max. How many of you were at Max? I know there are a lot of people that are online. OK. About half the people, more than half the people in the room were there. Max is really a fun event for us. Obviously, we do a lot of work here, but it’s also a great opportunity for us to connect with our customers in a really intimate setting where we get feedback. We actually start putting a lot of that feedback to work that eventually leads to the work we do throughout the year and culminates in next year’s Max. Again, over 10,000 attendees. We’ll have hundreds of thousands of people with millions of video views online in the coming days and weeks as well.

It’s a huge amplifier for everything we’re doing. What was interesting about this year’s Max was that we continue to have the traditional creative pros attending. Every year, we have more and more enterprises and agencies coming because they see the work that Anil and my team are doing together to bring more production and automation into enterprise workflows. We continue to increase the number of enterprise customers here as well, not just at Summit. This year in particular, I think we had the highest number of creators and influencers come because as we’ve started infusing more AI in our tools, as we brought in tools like Express, as we brought in tools like Firefly, the application, we’re seeing more and more people saying, hey, this is the way I want to create in the future. The entire flow of Max was really around enabling that to happen.

Shantanu already talked about the investment we’re making in models, whether it’s Adobe’s models and the innovation we have going on there, the long set of partner models that we announced, and also increasing customization of those models. We talked about it both in the context of me as an individual creator, but also for large brands wanting to create proprietary models for their content trained on hundreds of thousands or millions of their assets. We can do Adobe Firefly Foundry models for them as well. That foundation of being the one-stop shop, whether you’re an individual or a large organization, to say, I’m going to go to Adobe for media content creation, I think is a really profound moment that we’re getting across here. On top of that, we also talked about the importance of Agentic and how agents are coming into the flows for creative pros.

We talked about it in two contexts. The first was around in our application. We showed what I think is a first of its kind with Adobe Express having an AI assistant in there. You could ask some very complicated things in prompt. It would update multiple parts of the design. It would reason over those tasks and decide what the right thing is to do as it has a good world knowledge. Just as easily, while you’re having those conversations, you could actually just go and directly manipulate things. We think for creativity, that blend of conversational and direct manipulation is going to be important. We also showed you how we’re taking that capability, not just in our tools, but we’re bringing it to third-party LLMs. We showed how that looks and works in ChatGPT. Very excited about that flow.

Last but certainly not least, it was great to have Google on stage. We had Eli Collins from Google DeepMind on stage talking about the partnership that we have that we think between Google and Adobe, we can transform the creative industry and the kind of things people should expect to be able to imagine and create. We went from those capabilities, those foundational capabilities, and we talked about what we’re doing for creators, specifically in Firefly with Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creation from ideation to creation, all the way to some production capabilities. As part of that, we also had YouTube come up on stage and talk about the partnership there. We have Premiere Mobile that’s released recently, off to a great start. It’s a beautiful application. People love using it.

We have a great connection that’s going to come in with YouTube in a few weeks that, think of it as a fully integrated experience for YouTube creators and what we’re doing with Premium on mobile. Of course, the bread and butter of the show is the creative application. Photoshop Harmonize was obviously a huge win for the creative community. We did see intelligent layer renaming. You never know what people are going to get excited about. The fact that they don’t have to keep updating their layer names seems to be a huge winner for the show. Some of the other things, like assisted culling, when you have lots of images come in. One of the things I think is going to have the biggest impact was in Illustrator, a huge base of users.

When you illustrate something and you want to change the angle of it, it’s a lot of work. You really have to literally start illustrating from scratch. The ability to actually convert that to a 3D object and be able to spatially reposition it is going to be a huge time saver. We had literally dozens of those kinds of capabilities in those applications. Last but not least, is everything we’re doing with Anil and the team around GenStudio. Firefly Foundry, Shantanu touched on that. That’s another big announcement. We’ve been using custom models, and now we’re extending to Foundry, which allows you to train on all your assets in an enterprise. That, of course, is built on top of Firefly services. We showed the next version of that, which is allowing you to actually visually orchestrate the kind of production flows you want.

You can accelerate that and extend that through the entire production process in GenStudio. All of this, of course, there’s a lot that we announced. Just to put it in the context of our core strategy, from the digital media perspective, it’s really about business professionals and consumers, creators and creative professionals. We work with Anil when it comes to marketing pros. On the business professionals and consumers, that connection between Acrobat and Express has been working incredibly well for us because, as Shantanu talked about, when you consume content, you often consume it. I think this is probably true for all of you as well. You consume it with the intention of resynthesizing it and creating something on the back end of that.

That’s really the power of what we’re going after and what we think we can enable there with the hundreds of millions of monthly active users we have in that cohort. Creators of Firefly, this continues to be an area that we want an all-in-one AI studio so that you can find all your models. You can ideate with those models. We showed you boards and everything we’re doing with boards directly flow into a video or an image editing workflow. That whole package is something that we think is going to be a fantastic offer for the next generation of creators and influencers, which we see a lot of momentum around. Last, certainly around creative professionals and everything we’re doing there. As you look at how that then translates into the next set of deliverables that I think we’re, are we moving forward? We did.

That we’re trying to move into with the innovation that’s coming to market with Acrobat and Express. I’m sure you guys have seen, and I know many of you have used Acrobat AI Assistant. We have now expanded that to include PDF spaces so you can have multiple documents and links and any content in a single space. You can share that with other people and have shared knowledge hubs. You can also, as you have a conversation, say, actually generate something from, generate a presentation or create a flyer or an infographic or an audio track out of this. That idea of being able to consume, to create, and publish, I think, is a really profound one for literally everyone in the world. We see that as billions of users. When it comes to creators, Firefly boards went GA a few weeks ago. The response has been fantastic.

You saw it plastered all over the demos today. We continue to do a lot of investment there. The Firefly models work we talked about, I think we have the richest set of orchestration across these models, even things that are integrated in small ways, but incredibly profound ways into the tools. We integrate things like Topaz, as an example, into Firefly. Every creator wants to bring in images and up-res them. The ability to make that part of their workflow, in addition to all the things we showed you on stage, is very powerful. As you look at further and further refinement, being able to do that work directly and iteratively in Firefly, the space, whether you’re doing video editing or image editing, connecting it all to Photoshop and Express.

That offer for creators, I think, is a very strong new offer for us that, frankly, really launched for the first time in February of this year. Very excited about what that can mean for us. As we talk about Creative Cloud, you saw all the innovation that’s in the core tools there that we’ve released. I do want to spend just a minute on generative AI and the agents. On the generative models, you saw the number of announcements that we had today. That’s just the beginning. We have a long list of partners that we’re talking about bringing onto the platform. I think, as everyone recognizes, the complexity of how to use these models is getting extreme. Sometimes, if you want to generate a landscape versus generate a crowded city street, the model might be different.

If you’re doing ideation, you might want a model that has a lot of style. If you’re doing production work, you may want a model that has less style so that you can then do the work you want on top of it. The ability for us to build a layer on top of all these models that knows the action you’re taking and intelligently selects the model you want to use, I think, is a profound transformation for people in the creative space that are looking to take action. We want them to focus on creating, and we want them to stay in the flow. All the details of which model and how they use it, that’s something that shouldn’t get in their way. We’re just getting started with agents.

What I do want to make sure you understand is we have the broadest set of capabilities and actions around images, video, illustration, 3D, audio, and documents with PDF. We have decades of work that we’ve done to build this infrastructure and the surface of capabilities that we have. Now, as we move to the Agentic layer, we’ve taken all of these and turned them into what’s called MCP endpoints. Now it’s really about enabling the LLM to reason over how to use these things. What you saw on stage today is just the beginning. You’re going to see that accelerate to more and more capabilities as we go forward. Very excited to talk more about this, but I’m going to turn it over to Anil to talk about how all of this stuff gets into the enterprise as well.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Awesome. Thank you, David. Awesome. Thanks, David. I’ll focus on what we do in the enterprise with marketing professionals and creative professionals. As Shantanu mentioned, as the largest provider of marketing technology in the world, we have great mindshare with CMOs and their creative teams, as well as with other C-level executives focused on customer experience, like the Chief Commercial Officers, CIOs, and CROs as well. We are uniquely positioned to serve these audiences for three reasons. One, we bring together the integrated AI-powered platform with best-in-class solutions for three important use cases: content supply chain, customer engagement, and brand visibility. I’ll talk more about all three of them.

As you heard from Shantanu, and as you’ll see when you go into the creative park, we’ve built a strategic partner ecosystem, including the leading AI and LLM providers, all the major cloud platforms, ad networks, enterprise SaaS companies, SIs, and agencies. That’s what the enterprises need for them to be successful. What we’re doing is this rapid pace of innovation, just like David talked about, and I’ll showcase, the rapid pace of innovation to take all of this AI and to enable our 20,000-plus enterprise customers to turn this AI promise into true ROI for them, both in their marketing investments and their customer experience investments. When you look at the three key areas, we’re focused on content supply chain, customer engagement, and brand visibility.

Just to give you a sense of what we do in each of these areas, in the content supply chain, David mentioned in the keynote that the demand for content in the enterprise has never been higher than it has been before. We provide that end-to-end content supply chain to optimize the process, the entire process of going from ideating, planning, creating, managing, activating, and analyzing that content across the enterprise and being able to do so both effectively in terms of providing it in the right time through all the right channels and efficiently. In terms of customer engagement, that’s where we provide our solution around the Adobe Experience Platform and the native applications we built on that. It is now the industry-leading platform and the set of applications to orchestrate and deliver personalized customer experiences.

Brand visibility increasingly is top of mind for CMOs as they figure out how to make their brands visible through ChatGPT, through Perplexity, through Gemini, all these other new platforms. We have the industry-leading content management system, as well as the Agentic apps, to make sure that we are driving brand visibility across all of these new channels, as well as the performance of their websites. We do that across a common integrated AI-powered platform. To dive into each one of these a little bit on the innovation we have been delivering on the content supply chain, our solution is GenStudio. We’ve done a phenomenal job of bringing all of the power of Firefly and Creative Cloud together with GenStudio.

One of the things that GenStudio really allows brands around the world to do is to build their own brand brain that reflects the essence of their brand, what is important to their enterprise, as well as their customers, and make sure that that brand brain is reflected across all the content that they produce, whether it’s content for their TV advertisements, whether it’s content for what they’re producing for their social media, their ad networks, their own properties like websites. All of that will reflect the essence of their brand and their specific messages. That’s unique to how we have integrated GenStudio with Firefly, all aspects of Firefly: Firefly app, Firefly services, and some of these new capabilities like Firefly Foundry. In terms of customer engagement, our solution there is the Adobe Experience Platform and the apps we’ve built around that.

We really help enterprises bring together all the key aspects of what they need to drive these kinds of agile marketing campaigns across all channels. That means bringing the right content together with the right customer data that they have, as well as the enriched data they get from their partners, and putting it into the right customer journeys so that they can activate those in real time across any channel to hundreds of millions of consumers, or if they’re a B2B company, to hundreds of thousands of B2B customers. The third key use case is brand visibility. Here, we’ve announced a bunch of new capabilities. Just last week, we went GA, generally available, with our Adobe LLM Optimizer, which is really a unique product that helps brands make sure that their brands are visible across ChatGPT, Gemini, all these new LLM platforms.

It actually started as a use case for Adobe. When we looked at our own Acrobat traffic and we saw a lot of new traffic coming from these LLMs, we said, how are people discovering Acrobat? We discovered that they had new prompts, their new ways of searching and looking for information related to PDFs and what they wanted to do with the PDF capability. We built an LLM Optimizer for our own use, and now we have made it generally available. We also have a bunch of other capabilities that we have launched that we announced at Summit about six months ago, and all of them are generally available now, Sites Optimizer being one of them.

As websites become even more important, once you have qualified traffic coming from your LLMs, you want to make sure as a brand that you are delivering the best possible experience through your website and making sure that every page on your website has the best Lighthouse scores, has the best web vitals, has the relevant information, and making sure all of that is available to the LLMs to optimize their own references is super critical for brands. We are the leader in all three of these critical use cases that are top of mind for our Chief Marketing Officers. We’re doing it across a common AI platform that cuts across Adobe. One capability I would like to highlight is the Agent Orchestrator, which, again, we announced at Summit, and which is now generally available.

We are not a general-purpose agent provider, but we make sure that all of our capabilities are available as Agentic capabilities both within our own portfolio and, like David highlighted, through MCP and A2A protocols to whatever our enterprise customers want to do. Overall, we’re in a really good place to serve these creative and marketing professionals, and we look forward to continuing this momentum. With that, let me bring up Dan.

Dan, Adobe: Thanks, Anil. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Adobe Magic, it’s on full display at Max this week down in LA. The innovation, it’s absolutely incredible. The innovation, it’s stunning. I want to thank all of you here today, as well as those on the webcast, for your continued engagement and support. Adobe, we’re powering the future of creativity with AI for everyone. I couldn’t be more excited about the incredible opportunities that we see on the horizon. Today, today’s about Max. That said, I didn’t want to leave any questions unanswered as it relates to Q4 and the end of the year. Performance for the first three quarters has been strong, and that continues into Q4. We’re executing well against our growth initiatives. As a result, we’re pleased to reaffirm our Q4 and FY25 targets.

We look forward to sharing our results and FY26 outlook at our earnings call in December. The strategic growth initiatives that Shantanu shared, they’re addressing the critical needs of our customer groups, and they’re fueling our business momentum. For business professionals and consumers, we deliver creativity and productivity for all. We do it with unparalleled scale, distribution, and creative power. Growth drivers: Acrobat and Express, key growth drivers: user growth, engagement, MAO, and scaling a freemium business model with a robust product-led growth motion. For creative and marketing professionals, we deliver content production with marketing automation solutions. We redefine the end-to-end content lifecycle. There’s multiple growth drivers for this customer group. In the Firefly app, it’s MAO, user growth, engagement that’s across both web and mobile.

In Creative Cloud, it’s value expansion that’s tightly connected, tightly coupled to the innovation that we’re delivering as we continue to more deeply infuse AI across the product portfolio. GenStudio, APN apps, Adobe Experience Manager, it’s about deeper value-based selling. It’s focused on serving the content supply chain end to end. We’re enabling enterprises to automate personalization at scale and do it in real time. Taking a step back, you can clearly see the success, the strong execution that we’re driving. You can see the FY25 highlights that we’ve called out on the right side of this slide. More MAO, more value, more One Adobe deals, more MAO through product-led growth, more value through AI innovation, and more One Adobe deals in the enterprise. With our AI-influenced revenue that’s already exceeding $5 billion, you can clearly see the momentum that we’re driving with our AI strategy.

Over time, we expect AI-influenced ARR to grow to 100% of our business. We’re going to measure the success of our growth initiatives through the lens of customer group subscription revenue. As a leading indicator of overall company growth, we’re going to look to total Adobe ARR that represents annualized recurring revenue across both customer groups, business professionals and consumers, and creative and marketing professionals customer group. Together, these metrics connect the product momentum that we’re driving directly to the financial performance we’re delivering. It better aligns with solutions like GenStudio, Express, Firefly Services, and the newly released Adobe Firefly Foundry, all of which help automate the content supply chain across creativity and marketing like never before. It is a clear continuation of our customer-focused strategy, our customer-focused innovation, our customer-focused go-to-market strategy that we at Adobe are driving. Taking a step back, we have corporate targets, revenue, and EPS.

We’re going to provide business insights into the customer groups, as well as subscription revenue. We’ll provide total Adobe ARR as the lead indicator of overall company growth. We’re going to provide historical total Adobe ARR to help with modeling. We’re also going to continue to provide digital media and digital experience subscription revenues during FY2026 to provide additional visibility and continuity during the transition. Here’s a detailed visual of how we expect to report and guide next year. We’re going to continue to provide visibility into the business through our reporting, our guidance, and our disclosures. Guidance cadence remains unchanged. Our targets are going to be centered around our customer group subscription revenue and total Adobe ARR growth. To end where Shantanu began, Adobe, Adobe’s igniting creativity across all our audiences.

As we engage here at Max with creators, creative professionals, marketing professionals, our ecosystem partners, that sentiment, that sentiment’s alive and well and shared by everyone. Consistent execution and financial discipline underpins our ability to deliver durable growth while investing in groundbreaking innovation. We continue to operate with a world-class financial profile, and we do it at scale. Double-digit growth of our customer group subscription revenue, combined with our non-GAAP operating margin of greater than 46% over the last 12 months. Remember, that 46% operating margin includes more than $3 billion of R&D investments over that time period. We’ve generated nearly $10 billion of operating cash. We purchased more than 28 million shares, and we’ve reduced our ending share count by more than 5%. Our priority is to continue to drive consistent execution, deliver profitable growth, invest in the business, and generate shareholder value.

Adobe, we’re leading the AI-driven creative and marketing transformation. I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities we see on the horizon as a company. With that, I’d like to invite the rest of the team up. We look forward to taking your questions. Thank you.

: Standing.

Just give us a quick second to get set up here. As we’re doing that, a reminder would be, please, one question per person. We’ll get to as many folks as we possibly can. Clearly, the focus has been on the product innovation, the strategy, the new technologies and capabilities that we’re focused on here today. We’ll have a couple of mics running around the room. We’ll start on this side, and I’ll go to both sides. Let’s start with Jay in the front here.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: It is Doug’s first meeting when he said he’s expecting one question from everyone.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: We’ll do our best. We’ll do our best.

Yeah, good luck with that. Jay, please tower. The one question then is, at Max 2022, the company, David specifically, alluded to your forthcoming implementation of new branding, pricing, packaging techniques. You may remember that conversation. Certainly, over the last three years, you’ve progressively been doing that. We saw more of it today. The general purpose portfolio management question is, how do you think about balancing, on the one hand, segmentation and granular toolability that you need for your various markets versus, on the other hand, the needs of scalability and commonality, which is often a very tricky thing to do for a large software company to get right? You have a lot of products. How do you think about that balance?

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Yeah, happy to jump in. You have a very good memory. You only went back three years. Typically, you go back 15 or 20 years. What Jay’s referring to is that about three years ago or so, we were talking about the evolution of the market, where really, if you stop and think about it, we had two basic offers when it came to creativity. We had Creative Cloud All Apps, and we had Creative Cloud Single Apps. For a creative professional, there was an incredible amount of value oriented in those tools. For hobbyists, it was less. We were trying to do double duty with pricing and value and these things. We have been stretching the lineup, in effect. If you think about it, we have introduced Express. We’ve introduced Firefly now, the application, which is lower price SKUs, freemium model, web and mobile.

We’ve taken some of those things like Express and integrated it into Acrobat for broad value and distribution for consumption to creation workflows that we see. We’ve moved up market. We’ve moved up market by introducing more generative capabilities into our core flagship applications and done price to value there, as well as more consumption capabilities associated with the number of generative credits you have. We’ve stretched all the way into the enterprise, too, with things like Firefly Services for automated content workflows and Firefly Foundry and the things that we’ve been talking about there.

That stretching of the lineup was possible because of the years of work that we had been doing, taking the technology that we had that was inside Photoshop or inside Illustrator and creating basically an API layer that can get very easily reconstituted into those specialized use cases for those specialized audiences, which is how and the evolution we’ve made to business professionals and consumers, creators, creative professionals, and enterprise and marketing professionals. All of that was part of the strategy. We have that underlying infrastructure. We’ve layered in the AI platform. Now we have these solution areas that are very specific to an audience.

: Maybe the 30 seconds I’ll add to that, David, is it’s actually, Jay, become easier for us on the go-to-market. Because if you think about it on the go-to-market for any enterprise of any size, we go in and we’re like, GenStudio is the solution. We will help you with whatever you want. What’s the studio team? How many business professionals do you have? How many consumers? How much automation do you have? I think in the enterprise, it’s a very good unified solution that we can sell. For creative pros, that’s the core DNA. Creative Cloud Pro, without a doubt, that’s the hero offer in terms of what we sell. That’s what everybody will continue to aspire for. I think for creators, starting with Firefly, a very simple, easy-to-use app that’s well integrated with Creative Cloud. For business professionals and consumers, starting with Acrobat Studio.

You’re right in that the product has evolved. I think the ability to target the customer with the right offering has actually become simpler on Adobe.com because we know what you want and how you want to use it and the on-ramp associated with it. For Creative Cloud Pro, as David mentioned, it’s all about the value. They want power and precision, and they want the value. Actually, the segmentation has clarified how we get people on the on-ramp and how they go to whatever solution that they want.

OK, perfect. Let’s go to Kash. For a change, I don’t have questions because it’s my last Max and last analyst day. Shantanu, I wanted to just thank you for everything. I have fond recollections of, I keep telling you this, you must be thinking, Kash, enough. I’ve heard it a million times. November 2011, Radio City Music Hall, you pivoted the business model. You told me over drinks, Kash, you like the Salesforce recurring revenue model. That’s what we’re going to look like. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be OK. Thank you for giving me the confidence. That night, I had dinner with, I don’t know if Brad Zelnick is here. Brad, you’re not here. Brad helped me build confidence in this new business model. Thank you, Brad, you’re not here. I wanted to call on a couple of others who may or may not be here.

Brent Thill, are you missing? How is it possible that Brent Thill is missing? He’s the guy that I’ve known the longest. He looks very young, but we’ve known each other over 30+ years as sales analysts. Thank you, Brent, for that journey. Who’s next? Mark Murphy. Most amazing channel checks. We’ve been friendly to each other, nothing but an awesome friend all through these years. Keith Weiss, are you missing, really? Love that intensity in the opening questions on all conference calls. Alex Zukin, I will absolutely miss your intensity of the multi-part questions. Last but not the least, Jay Vleeschhouwer, your millionth Max. He keeps returning over and over again. I don’t know how you do it, buddy, but congratulations. Congrats to Team Adobe for putting up such an amazing Max. I thought the integration of AI into your core product family was a lot more seamless.

The blending of the two, consumer, the perception of consumer, power of AI, and how it can have an impact on the enterprise was very evident today. Keep it up. Congrats. Thank you so much.

Maybe Kash, Doug, sorry, 30 seconds. I’d like to say thank you as well. I’d like to say thank you as well for all of the incredible insight that you’ve provided to, frankly, the buy side who look to people like you on understanding Adobe. I know you’ve covered us through multiple companies. We appreciate that and wish you all the best. Thank you.

OK. Let’s go to Saket next.

Excellent. Thanks so much for taking the question. Echo the congrats, Kash, as well. David, maybe for you, it’s obviously still very early in the AI adoption curve. One of the fears over time has been whether generative AI could be dilutive to seats. We’ve talked about it for probably the last three MAXes, right? The counterpoint to that has always been that demand for content will explode. That will only offset the seat productivity that hopefully your customers will get. I’m curious, as we’re sort of on the second and third MAX of talking about this topic, even anecdotally, how is that all playing out? Is that seat dilution happening? I know everybody on the stage spends a lot of time with customers. Is that seat dilution happening? Is that content explosion happening? Curious your thoughts.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Content explosion is definitely happening. We continue every year, we do a survey to ask businesses and creators what kind of expectation they have for content. It continues to be growing at a disproportionate rate, especially as people are consuming different types of content. What we’re seeing is continued growth in terms of seats with Creative Cloud. When you look at Express MAO, when you look at Firefly growth and Firefly MAO, we’re seeing more users coming into the franchise, and we’re seeing that increase happening. We are also seeing a growth in automation. We’ve talked a little bit about this in terms of some of the guidance for Firefly Services and Firefly Creative Production and how we do all of that assembly and that rich. We’re seeing both seat growth, increasingly, also new customers coming in at the low end and the freemium side of the business.

We’re seeing real opportunity to monetize automation and production in these enterprises. The good news for us is that we are literally playing across that ecosystem. However things evolve, we’re there to catch it. We think there are going to be a lot more people creating. This is why we have Express inside of Acrobat. This is why we have Firefly targeting creators. We believe that the value and the kind of content that creative professionals are going to have to do is going to go up, which is why we’re embedding so much AI in there. We believe automation is going to play a much bigger role in terms of personalization. We’re investing in all of that, and as those dynamics play out, we’ll all see, but we benefit wherever the market goes.

: I’ll just punctuate what David said by it’s unambiguous that seat explosion is happening. It’s your definition, perhaps, Saket, of what is that offering that’s there. There’s no reason why you won’t have 5 billion people a few years from now all wanting some part of creative tools or 7 billion. Seat explosion is absolutely happening, and that’s the way we look at it. David did a great job of describing it. It’s the different offerings that people will be using. Across the board, seat explosion for creativity, absolutely no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s exploding.

Perfect. Let’s go to Alex next.

Hey, guys. Kash, you will be missed.

In true multi-part one-question form, if you think about the ability, I think the partnerships with Google were really, really interesting and exciting, specifically the ability to kind of really embed and remove the anxiety for customers when they’re making a choice around kind of where they’re going to standardize their content creation strategy with all the model innovations continuing to come down the pike. How do you monetize the ability to use third-party models within Firefly, specifically? What is the CapEx intensity required for Foundry and custom model development?

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: We have embedded, as you mentioned, Alex, we’ve embedded Veo. We also have Flux and Runway and Luma. We have a whole host of models, and we have a rate card associated with that. The more content that gets consumed or generative capabilities that get consumed, frankly, the more conversational experiences that users have, they will consume those credits. I know a big question for you guys for a long time was, when are you going to start metering and actually enforcing the limits? We’ve started doing that. We see that as one of the many growth algorithms. The other thing we’re doing is we’re differentiating on the value that we provide in the base plan. We launched Creative Cloud Pro recently. Creative Cloud Pro is a higher price plan, and we have Creative Cloud Standard as well, which is a lower price plan.

The number of creators selecting Pro as their default has been fantastic to see as well. It’s the combination of those two things. When it comes to Foundry, just to spend a few minutes on this or a few seconds on this, when we go and we talk to large enterprises, think of it as large media and entertainment companies, or think of it as large brands, they have franchise model needs. If you’re producing a Hollywood movie, you want a model that’s trained specifically on the movie and the hours and hours and hours of videos and the characters and the styles and the scenes and the settings associated with that. We can do that on top of it. We do that on top of Firefly. The announcement with Google is we’ll also do that on top of Veo or Gemini Image.

Now we have this growing set of things that we can do these Foundry models on. That one, of course, we charge a premium based on the training, and the value to these organizations is enormous there.

Dan, Adobe: Yeah, just to build on that a little bit, if we go back in time, we landed the generative credit model. We talked about a consumption-based economy alongside the subscription economy. The reason for doing that was, as we bring people more deeply into the products enabled by these capabilities, it allows us to better align economics with the deep value that they’re deriving from those products. As you think about generative credits, they’re a currency in our products. That currency gets adjusted based on a rate card, which is connected to unit economics associated with the action they’re taking. Our ability to adjust credits and our ability to adjust the rate card bring those two in line with each other to preserve a set of economics based on the deep usage patterns of customers. Casual users will operate within the base credit envelope.

Power users will have to start augmenting their base credit allocation with additional credits to make the economics work. We drive, from a first-party model standpoint, fantastic unit cost economics on compute. We partner with the partner models to buy in a bulk way that allows us to drive an attractive set of economics through the rate card and deliver those capabilities on an attractive set of economics for the customers. The unique approach that we’re taking to bring all of these models deeply into the workflows that define our customers day to day and the attractive set of economics that we can provide those capabilities at makes this a really interesting strategy to deepen the monetization of the power users over time.

OK, great. Let’s go down the line.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Sorry, did I intercept the pass there? Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. I wanted to double-click on a comment. I’ll pass it right back to you, Michael. There was a comment today. This comment was, we believe Image Model 5 is the best in the industry at making precisely the changes you want and only the changes that you want. It looked like that in the demos. I wanted to get your take on this because I think, frankly, all these third-party image generators really struggle with that. David, you had said something about using MCP endpoints. Can you talk about the work that you’ve done there? Kind of economically, what is that going to unlock for you? If Adobe becomes, it looks like you’re going to become this one-stop shop. Frankly, what you’re doing, architecturally, it’s very reminiscent of what Microsoft is doing with Azure and the Model Foundries.

All the developers go there. All the creatives end up in Adobe. Can you maybe speak to that work that you’re doing? Yeah. First of all, I don’t know if some of the work that we, with everything we had, as Shantanu said, we have so much that we couldn’t put on stage. The amount of work that the Firefly Models team has been doing is off the charts. We talked about soundtrack. We talked about audio. We talked about avatar generation. We have so much that’s coming. The big announcement today was Image Model 5. Exactly to your point, first of all, huge step forward in terms of quality, huge step forward in terms of the density of the pixels that we’re generating and the resolution that we generate. The biggest news today was we talked about two things. One was we talked about image preservation.

When you want to change something, you really don’t want drift in the other pixels. Otherwise, it stops being productive for multi-turn edits because at the end, you end up with something that looks like a pretty bad approximation of what you had before. We believe we’re the best in the industry around that preservation, which is great for creative expression and toolability. The second thing, which we didn’t even have time to put on stage but we announced, was the ability to edit layers. When we generate an Image 5 now, and this is going to be rolling out in the course of the next few weeks, we’ll actually generate with layers. You can actually just click on an object and move it. It’ll reharmonize and resynthesize there. That’s another point of controllability that we’re talking about.

We also, as we talked with Google today on stage, you heard Eli, the VP from DeepMind, talking about the focus that they have in terms of working with us on controllability of the model. We believe that at the end of the day, the plethora of models that are out there, these training runs that we do, they’re a little non-deterministic. You get these emergent behaviors that you get excited about. Sometimes you end up changing those, which is why you need that layer on top, which is Adobe, to work across these models and automatically pick the best outcome and the best model for the action you’re taking. I think all of this plays into where we are. At the beginning, it was a prompt in and an image out. Everyone was amazed.

When you get down to the work of creating, you need that next level of creativity. Every model provider realizes that that’s really best done surfaced in Adobe Tools. Maybe, Mark, I’ll just add one quick thing to that. Again, the state of the art in both generation and hallucination and editing, and I think what Adobe Eli Greenfield was talking about was the ability to do the semantic editing in our applications. That’s really the magic. Our ability to control it and control it across every single model that’s out there, that is groundbreaking. That’s groundbreaking because you can take whatever visual characteristic. The one thing I think both David and I will again re-emphasize, the North Star of this is actually every single one of you, whether you’re an individual or you’re an enterprise, you’ll have your Adobe model. It’ll be the Mark model.

Maybe there’s a JPMorgan model. I think that magic we can make happen for customers. That’s the way we look at it. Alex, to your question, I think Dan said that. For us, on the third-party models, it’s not our CapEx. I think Dan said that it’s subsumed in whatever consumption-based model we charge for a subscription. We control the ability to have that customer interface with us.

Please.

I just hold the mic. It’s Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo. Thanks for taking the question. In looking back at Q3 results and preparing for this, our takeaways seem to be that the trend line on some of the key growth metrics that Adobe is providing are improving. I think it’d be useful to hear the team opine on what’s driving that, the durability of those drivers as we look at some of the new product offerings that you’re announcing today at Max. Secondarily, if that is the case, shifting some of the metrics into next year, can you just give us a bit more in terms of what went into that thought process? Because we’re naturally going to get questions. I know the shifts might be subtle, but just kind of help bridge some of that for us as well. Thank you.

: Maybe I’ll start. You can certainly add. First, in terms of the metrics, and this is more future-looking, more so than just Q3 and Q4 because we’re talking about it. I think the metrics that we look to as early indicators for the success that we’re having is MAO usage, generations on the Acrobat plus Express. How many people are using Acrobat AI Assistant? Is that going up and to the right? How many people are using PDF spaces? How many people are doing conversational interfaces in Express? The amount of exports, the amount of content that’s being created in PDF that then is now going into Express in order to create content. Using those trillions of PDFs out there, on that metric, that is a big early indicator for us on Acrobat plus Express momentum. I wanted to make sure that was clear.

Firefly as a standalone subscription offering, today you saw Firefly has so many parts to it. The core Firefly app, as somebody coming in wanting a subscription for Firefly, either standalone or within Creative Cloud Pro, if you’re a creator, that’s your on-ramp to Adobe and being able to use all of these third-party models, whether it’s for ideation with what we call boards, whether it’s for editing, with the video editing, semantic image editing. That’s another metric, and we look at every single day. How many people understand Firefly? What is coming for that? How is it being distinguished as a result of it being commercially safe? That’s another metric that we look at as saying, hey, the underlying growth associated with that.

I think today, David and I also quickly saw the results that we were having today, and we may have a capacity problem, which is a problem.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Because there’s a lot of excitement around people wanting to try this out, we’ll take care of it. I don’t want anybody to think that we don’t have enough in any way, shape, or form. I think Firefly is a big one. On Creative Cloud, it’s the number of generations. We’ve been talking about the fact that in Photoshop Beta, two out of three people are using generative stuff every day. I don’t know what better way to talk about how we’ve infused AI into our creative tools. It’s seamless, right? Whether you’re doing generative fill, Creative Cloud will continue to be who are the new people attracted to the platform. If they came, as David said earlier, from single apps, now they’re increasingly coming from Firefly or Express, and how does that on-ramp come? That’s an indicator that we look at. In Anil’s business, GenStudio.

This was the question that I think Saket asked and others keep asking, which is, what are you seeing around seats? What are you seeing around automation? I can tell you, every single enterprise wants to do more in marketing. I haven’t met a single person. It’s the same with code, ironically. We’re a software factory. When we use Cursor, we use Claude Code, or everybody is like, how can I do more? How can I do it faster? Lara is all about, I want to create more campaigns. I want to drive accelerated growth. I want to drive it in an automated way. GenStudio adoption, how is it going into all of the various channels? For you folks as investors, that’s why we try to outline Acrobat Plus Express, Firefly, Creative Cloud Pro as an offering, and then GenStudio and AP and apps. Those are the metrics.

Across all of them, infusing AI, getting that message across, and demonstrating that we have innovation on that, that’s what we feel excited about. That’s the way we look at it. Maybe the second.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe: Yeah, and just to build on that, if you take a look at the momentum we’re seeing in the business, it all starts with the success of our customer-driven growth strategy. That’s what drives our innovation roadmap. That’s what drives our go-to-market. That’s what drives the way we deliver cross-cloud solutions to solve the customer’s highest value problems. That’s how they’re buying from us. Framing the dialogue through the lens of that customer-centric growth strategy, it’s what’s delivering the momentum that we’re seeing in the market. We’re going to continue to execute against that. We’re going to continue to drive success of customers. We’re going to do it through the lens of our customer groups.

That’s the right framing of the dialogue so that we can highlight the business insights that are derived from that growth strategy, the innovation roadmaps we’re pursuing, the way we go to market, the way our customers engage and buy from us. It’s the right metrics to bring to life the best business insights about how we’re running and how we’re engaging with customers.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Maybe just double-clicking on that, because you asked the question of sort of, again, we are more transparent about more data right now. Hopefully, that’s the takeaway. I think we went into a lot of detail because when you look at the business professional and consumer, and you look at subscription revenue growth, I consider that a proxy for ARR. We’re giving you the subscription revenue around business professional and consumers. Marketing and creative professionals, we’re giving you the subscription revenue growth associated with it. That’s increasingly the go-to-market. Giving you total ARR to say, hey, is Adobe going to increase the amount of ARR that they are growing year over year? That’s why Dan also said we’ll go back and give you historical data for 2025, 2024 so that you can actually see the ARR and the growth associated with net new ARR.

For transition, and this is sort of deja vu for me because we did all of this when we went to the cloud. We said we’ll give you digital marketing and digital experience and digital media subscription revenue growth for fiscal 2026, so you can look at it. We want investors to get as excited as we are about these two different customer groups, the subscription revenue growth associated with that, the total ARR. You’re looking at it and saying, hey, cumulatively across the portfolio, is the company growing? Help you transition along the way, which is why those numbers are there. We look at it as we’re giving you more data.

I think last year, if you were to go back and look at it, when we first said we’d give you the business professional and consumers, as well as what we were doing around creative and marketing, we gave one year. You said, hey, can you give us a little historical data? We provided that historical data. It’s a simple spreadsheet exercise. Maybe AI can also answer that in terms of actually unpacking all of the data. Hopefully, you look at it as our desire to be transparent, but our desire to also show you what are the forward-looking growth indicators that we want you to get excited about because we’re really excited about it.

Dan, Adobe: OK, I promise to give this a chance. Keith, let’s start with you. We may have time for one more question. We’ll see.

: All right, thanks very much from the lonely side.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Yeah, because you know they all want to, after this, then gather David and Anil and say, what’s that?

Dan, Adobe: That’s right.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Get more questions. Keith.

: Yeah, thanks very much. Keith Bachman from BMO in the lonely side of the room. I wanted to ask, Shantanu, for you, there’s a few, I think, reasons why the stock multiple has been under duress. One is seats as Saket identified. I think the other is just broader dislocation associated with AI and the impact to Adobe. One of the ways I think about it is the conversation you and I were having prior to this meeting where you’re introducing a lot of partners into your value chain. That historically hadn’t been the case. I know you felt Microsoft and Apple maybe, but you had Google on stage talking about the value proposition within the broader ecosystem of Adobe. The way to think about it is, does that drive the same longer-term growth potential?

The way that I break that down a little bit is you have your own leading engine, Firefly. Within that, users can apply other engines, Google or what have you. You want to remain, as part of your value proposition, the workflow and editing tool. Does that drive the same value on a longer-term basis, whereas a user can use a third-party LLM? Where I’m going with it is one of the risks associated with it is those same third-party tools could introduce editing and workflow capabilities that would create dislocation opportunities associated with what we call Adobe’s, I think, Shantanu, these were your words, single-stop shop. Maybe you could just address what you see as perhaps ongoing competition from your partners that users may apply. I think about it in different segments. The higher end is probably going to need Perfect. You’re always going to use Adobe editing tools.

Maybe the middle and lower tiers might use third-party editing tools that would put some pressure on your longer-term growth rates. Thanks for the question.

Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations, Adobe: Yeah, I mean, Keith, I think if I were to take a step back, I think there have been sort of three questions that people want to know what’s Adobe’s point of view around AI and innovating around AI. Let me cover it maybe from that perspective. The first is, as you point out, there’s a plethora of models. Is the plethora of models that are being created a good thing or a bad thing, correct? I think you answered your own question in a certain way, which is just having a model without the interface and without being in front of a customer to do a workflow, that has limited value. We believe that we have the best offerings across all of these models to deliver the value that customers really want. I think the support of third-party models for us was a very strategic aspect.

It was the second phase of delivering our own models. Because unless you understand the models, you cannot truly do the magic of controlling those models to do the kind of semantic editing that we’ve done. I think people look at it and say, wow, you can select six models in Photoshop. To be able to do that magic across all layers in the way in which we can, that’s truly magic. That’s not something that’s built on this decades. Acrobat and Acrobat AI Assistant and Express, it’s the same thing. People have shown how I can do a simple one conversational interface editing. We’ve shown how we can do that across six different sequences of steps. Models are going to be an enabler. Models are not a business model. It has to move to inference. We think we’re very uniquely positioned across all of that.

Now, it feels like you said, hey, for creative pros, I get that. For individuals and consumers and business professionals, that is going to move way past the template era into becoming this conversational interface. We believe that the combination of Acrobat and Express gives us this unique technology platform, as well as distribution vehicle to deliver the value that customers want. We’re very excited at the low end, what you’re calling the low end, of this ability to completely transform it. If you believe, like we do, that there are trillions of PDFs that are being out there, and that’s a big basis also for new creation, the number of people who look at a PDF and say, hey, create a presentation for me, I think we’re uniquely suited to solve that problem. In the enterprise, we continue to get really excited where there will be models.

I frankly think half the model companies that you’re looking at today may not exist a year from now. You’re going to see that because they’re all going to desperately try and say, where is the value associated and accruing to that to customers? That’s with us. I think the work that we’ve done, the fact that we can offer all those models, it’s a unique differentiation for us. We have to keep executing. I could not be more proud of the product innovation that people saw today. You saw that spread across every product on the creative side. You saw that spread across Acrobat and Express. You saw that in custom models. You saw that as a Firefly Foundry. You’ve seen that in GenStudio. That’s what I think for people who want to know Adobe’s future, you have to say, is creativity going to expand or not?

We think that’s unambiguous. It’s going to expand. Are interfaces going to be across these different customer segments? Are all of them growth opportunities or not? We certainly believe all of them are. This enterprise offering, can any company, if you’re using all of this content for marketing, have the depth of offering that Adobe does? That’s why we’re excited. All these partners are coming to us because they also look at it and say, the way to accelerate their consumption of model inference is through applications. That is going to happen. You look at what OpenAI has also announced. OpenAI wants to create this app interface because they realize that is how they will also be able to monetize it with an app interface. Copilot, what Microsoft will do, they want these new interfaces.

The battle will happen, I think, where those people will say, we just want the ability to initiate these applications. Who is the trusted party for creation, for financial services, for health care? We want to be the company. We think we will be the company for creative across all of those different new environments. That’s why we’re excited.

Dan, Adobe: I think that is a terrific place to wrap it. Thank you, team. Thank you, everyone, for joining. We really appreciate it. We will talk to you again soon.

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