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AI and generative AI have enormous potential and we believe that these disruptive technologies will drive further acces­sibility and adoption of our products, Adobe Chairman and CEO Shantanu Narayen has stressed.

According to him, AI is an accelerant for idea generation and refinement among the world’s creative minds and for businesses, “it presents opportunities for greater automation, productivity, and personalisation".

In a latest November-December issue of Harvard Business Review, Narayen wrote that Adobe has invested in these technologies for more than a decade, and delivered hundreds of innovations across portfolio through Adobe Sensei, which helps customers improve the precision, ease, and speed with which they do their work. 

“Our ongoing R&D investments have also enabled us to develop and deploy Firefly, our generative AI technology — a copilot that augments rather than replaces human ingenuity— with impressive speed,” he mentioned. 

According to him, every disruptive technology presents exciting opportunities for Adobe to innovate and increase its addressable market. 

This has been true for cloud computing, mobile, and, most recently, artificial intelligence. 

“But with any hot technology trend, the leadership challenge is to distinguish between hype and reality so that you can make an informed decision about its potential for your business,” said Narayen.

At the recently-concluded creativity conference ‘Adobe MAX 2023’, the company unveiled over 100 new features across flagship Creative Cloud applications, including new Firefly-powered features and web-based workflows in Illustrator and Photoshop, new AI-powered editing capability in Lightroom, plus new AI-first Generative Fill and Text to Template features in Adobe Express.

Narayen wrote that AI will help us do things that we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. 

“Adobe is at the forefront of its development and use because we have always been, and always will be, focused on enabling art through technology. Before launching Firefly, we talked to hundreds of customers, including those who were concerned that generative AI would hurt their careers, and enlisted their help in making our product the best it could be,” he explained. 

“Of course, we don’t expect everyone to like the way we use generative AI, and that’s OK. But our approach to building it puts accountability, responsibility, and transparency at its centre, the Adobe CEO emphasised.

Adobe has been a beacon of innovation, had been profitable since its first year, and was on track to announce $3.16 billion in revenue later that year.

Today, the company has more than 29,000 employees and more than $18 billion in annual revenue.