Adobe Inc. ($ADBE)

Earnings Call Transcript · April 21, 2026

NasdaqGS US Information Technology Software Company Conference Presentations 72 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Douglas Clark

Executives
#1

Welcome, everyone, and thank you all for joining and to the countless folks online as well. Thank you for tuning in. I'm Doug Clark, Head of Investor Relations here at Adobe. I hope all of you have had a chance over the past 2 days to check out some of the keynotes and the incredible innovation that we've had here on display. This session is an opportunity to tie all of those amazing innovations with our business strategy, especially how we're embedding AI into our entire product portfolio. We have Shantanu, Anil, David and Dan to provide updates, and we'll really have a lot of time for Q&A at the end. So some standard housekeeping. The statements that we make today may include forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainty and assumptions as of today, April 21. Our actual results could differ materially from those set forth in these statements. Please refer to our presentation and our risk factors in our SEC filings for more information. Today's slides, including non-GAAP disclosures, reconciliations and additional information are posted on the Investor Relations website. Also, a brief update on our pending acquisition of Semrush. We've received all regulatory approvals and following the expiration of required waiting period, we anticipate closing Semrush in the coming weeks. We look forward to incorporating Semrush into our business, and we'll provide an update to our full year financials as part of our Q2 earnings in early June. Today is really about the transformation of the customer experience orchestration and making Adobe's agentic vision a reality. It's my pleasure to welcome Shantanu, Anil, David and Dan to the stage.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#2

Great. Thanks, Doug. And let me also extend my welcome both to those who are joining here in person today, as well as those who have tuned online. What we thought we'd do is just actually talk a little bit about all the innovation that we've delivered and put it in the context of what we've always talked to you about. The mission continues to be empowering everyone to create. We certainly believe that AI is going to be a massive tailwind. And over the next few slides, I'll talk a little bit about how we think it both expands and accelerates the opportunity that's available for us across all of the audiences that we serve, which is on this slide. We have been for a while now talking to you about how we've been actually ensuring that all our innovation is really focused ruthlessly on the customers that we serve. The 3 key customer audiences that we serve on the business professional and consumers, making sure that we deliver these AI-powered new conversational quick and easy apps to ensure that we can actually deliver both creativity and productivity. We've been the first company to talk about the fact that we think creativity and productivity are coming together. And anybody who's trying to be productive has to ensure that there's a significant amount of creativity involved in that. The core of the company continues to be everything that we do around creators. These are the next-generation folks who are embracing creativity as a profession as well as the core creative professionals. And for them, ensuring that we have AI as well as the power and precision that they really need in order to bring any media type, any content that they want to life across any surface and David will touch more on that as well. So that continues to be a significant opportunity for us, and we'll touch on that. And we all know that more and more of this digital content is actually being produced by organizations and as part of what marketing professionals do. And today, as you saw, we unveiled significant amounts of innovation as it relates to this area and category that we are calling customer experience orchestration. And we continue to believe that our ability to do what we also call as GenStudio, which is create, deliver, optimize, analyze and ensure that all of the content that's being created is being served to address for every enterprise, their next generation of consumers, we think that's a big opportunity. And you have seen us over the last few quarters talk about how when we think about where all of this creative content is going, it's increasingly going from the creators and creative professionals to the marketing professionals and within enterprises. So the 2 things we thought we'd all touch on is if you take a step back and think about those audiences that we serve, it's clear that we serve a lot of end users. We've talked about MAU. We've talked about the 850 million people who are using our products and enterprises, enterprises who are all increasingly focused on what we used to call digital marketing, what we call customer experience management, now we call customer experience orchestration. So we thought we'd just take a step back and talk about what's happening. As you hear all of these massive announcements that seem to come every single day, how do we put that in context of what that means for Adobe, how do we innovate as well as how do we monetize all of what you're hearing every single day as it relates to AI and we decided to bucket that as it relates to what's happening on the individual side, how are individuals thinking about it and what's happening on the enterprise side. And you see this. And again, as I said, Anil and David will also add to that. But the first thing that we think is that this market opportunity is actually not just changing, but it's expanding. And we continue to believe that it's -- AI is going to be a tailwind for the entire category as it relates to the number of people creating, the amount of money that's spent on creating as well as the same thing as it relates to customer experience. So these additional surfaces, every single time you hear about a new additional surface, whether it's Microsoft Copilot, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Anthropic and Claude, we just look at this and say it's an additional surface, much like when you had desktops and you had mobile devices and then you had the web browsers, it represents another surface on which people want to create as well as they want to consume. And so it's a big opportunity for us to make sure that our technology is available, maybe in different forms, but that's at the highest level, how we think about the additional surfaces. AI has also provide this unique opportunity to provide conversational interfaces as well as agents. There was a lot of announcements. You'll see more information on the second page. But we think, again, that further democratizes the ability for you to do content creation as well as productivity. And so these conversational interfaces and agents that we're seeing is all about achieving your outcomes faster. Media generation models. Every single day, there's probably a media generation model. I think Adobe has done a phenomenal job of incorporating it. They're all going to have different characteristics, different attributes and in our products, whether it's Firefly or Photoshop or Illustrator or Premiere Pro, we're going to make sure that we support these different models and over time, ensure that we can actually deliver for the customer the ability to understand what's the right model for whatever task they're performing, and we'll talk on that. Certainly, there are new AI-first applications that will emerge. We have with Firefly, a new AI production studio, and we can talk about how we're doing semantic editing in there, how we're doing mood boards in there, what we are doing with graph, what we are doing with idea generation. And so these new AI-first applications is another way for us to attract people to our platform. And the business model, as we think about it, and a lot of these are ands as it relates to our opportunity, the business model is also an and. And so in addition to the core subscription-based pricing, we'll talk about how we're doing consumption-based pricing, whether it's credits, whether you call it tokens as well as freemium. So that's what's happening on the individual side as individuals are like, how do I discover where I can go for creative expression? How can I start a marketing process as an individual with an end user application. And on the enterprise side, if you think about it, and again, those who were here both yesterday and today, the excitement around that, every single customer that I've talked to on the enterprise has been talking about, hey, help us take advantage of all of these new things that are happening that we all have to deal with, with your products. And so additional channels, where these conversations are happening, we have the new LLM channels. That's where we have to make sure that we allow people to understand what conversations happening, what's their brand visibility. So these additional channels, whether they're channels to acquire customers, whether it's channels to place their ads or whether it's channels to engage customers, the importance of that certainly becomes more important. And much like on the individual side, all enterprises have to make sure that they offer conversational interfaces for anybody who's coming to their site in order to do that. These new coworkers and agents, the fundamental way in which we can make all of our technology available first as MCP endpoints, then as skills and now as coworkers and agents. And the monetization model for that is when we have a deal with an enterprise, we ask them what kind of capacity that they want for these agents to be able to automate content production. For those who were here this morning, you heard Shailesh talk about for all of his brands across Procter & Gamble, he wants to just create ginormous amounts of content. Some of that will be created by individuals, some of that will be created by coworkers and agents. And that's the provisioning as well as the licensing that we will do with enterprises. Certainly, there's a lot of conversation around AI coding and what's happening with AI coding. We believe this AI coding will allow further personalization and further customization within enterprises. There hasn't been a single customer who's been telling me that they intend to use the AI coding in any way to replace what we are doing, but they all want to know how can they augment everything that they have. And that's the reason why we call it orchestration because orchestration is going to become way more important. There's going to be this proliferation of different workflows, different applications that are built within an enterprise, but we still have this unique opportunity to make sure we bring it together. [ Anjul ] talked a lot today about when you think about wherever your systems of record are in order to orchestrate all of that through whether it's the journey optimizer or customer journey analytics. So AI coding will ensure that people within companies do more coding, but it actually puts even more focus for us on making sure that we can orchestrate all of that, both through individual services that we offer to those customers as well as orchestration across that. An area that we're getting a lot of interest in and excitement, and you heard people talk about that is these enterprise models, which is how can you take whether you're Procter & Gamble perhaps and you think about what is the Old Spice model in order for me to create content. And this is what we represent both as it relates to Firefly and Firefly Foundry as well as what we can do with GenStudio creative production. So we're going to continue to push the envelope on making sure that in an intellectually appropriate way that we can provide these enterprise models that actually leverage all of the data that an enterprise has in their organization, whether it has to be with an individual or whether it has to be across the organization. And similar to the end user that we're doing on the individual side, the business models will also now include consumption and outcome-based pricing in addition to subscription. So if you want to create a whole bunch of content using GenStudio, we can certainly understand how much content you want to produce and price that accordingly. So hopefully, this gives you some flavor of framing all of the things that you're hearing about AI. And what the next slide does is actually then talk about some of the incredible innovation that we've done across each one of these. So I won't spend all my time on this, but I think you can see whether it's, wow, as the additional surfaces have emerged, Adobe has very quickly delivered the appropriate creative technology in there. Conversational interfaces, David will talk on creative agent and the availability of that in addition to what we've done with like the Acrobat AI Assistant or a Photoshop AI Assistant. The proliferation of media generation models, we monetize that through what we are doing with Firefly. And as I mentioned, the subscription as well, we have both the freemium as well as consumption-based models that are now available for us. And on the enterprise side, all of the new offerings, LLM optimizer, the fact that everybody wants to now understand how they can optimize their LLM. Doug mentioned that Semrush, we've got all the regulatory approval. We will now have GEO as well. All my customer visits, they can't wait to hear how we're going to help them both with the SEO as well as with their GEO, and I'm sure Anil will talk about that. Brand Concierge does the conversational interface. So the message, I think, to all of you is our innovation has captured all of the ways in which AI can actually be a tailwind and make sure that we continue to deliver innovation across each one of that. So -- and the metrics that we use in the company, given the breadth of the business, given the scope of the business, certainly, I think as it relates to the freemium, we have to think about MAU. We monitor credits and the consumption of credits, both within our applications and tiered subscription tiers or as additional credit packs. AI-influenced ARR and AI-first ARR were ways in which we want to make sure that we're actually innovating faster and looking around the corner to make sure we deliver that. And at the end of the day, we think that the total ARR for the company, given how customers also want to procure from us is the right way to continue to look at how we are growing the business, as you can see in a profitable way. So with that, why don't I have Anil maybe touch a little bit on Summit and some of these announcements and then David, and we'll give it to Dan then.

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#3

Awesome. Thank you, Shantanu. Summit has been an extraordinary response from our customers and our partners, nearly 14,000 people in person. 3 key highlights I would call out. One, this -- the category that we have talked about customer experience orchestration in the era of AI, resonating really well with enterprise customers. Enterprise customers telling us, look, customer experience is a fragmented area for us. We have 25-plus applications, lots of manual processes. We are looking to you, Adobe, to really help us with this agentic software to help unify that and bring that in orchestration and help us use the AI technology in the context of what we are doing and really help with business outcomes like revenue growth, additional customer satisfaction and loyalty and also with cost savings as well. So that's been one great one. Second, all the innovation has resonated extremely strongly. I'll touch upon that in the next slide. And the third was the partnerships we announced, especially with all the major AI platforms. If you think of today, who is playing in the enterprise AI platforms, we have Claude, OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, NVIDIA, all announcing partnerships and expansions with us. So that's been very gratifying. And we've clearly seen that response from our customer base as well. In terms of the highlights, the ones in red are some of the ones that I'll call out as Shantanu went through the exact framework. It's been extremely well. The response has been great in terms of understanding what we do and how we can help them bring the orchestration to life in the customer environment. A few highlights. additional channels. Shantanu started talking about the LLMs, the LLM optimizer, especially with what we can do with the pending acquisition of Semrush has been extremely well received because customers already see that as part of one process. I want to have the same team do both search engine optimization as well as generative engine optimization, whether it's for Google or AI Overviews or for ChatGPT or Perplexity, and so on. And you guys are bringing that together. That's awesome. So that's something that's been extremely well received. Brand Concierge enables them to offer a conversational experience and also enables them to have direct interactions with their customers without getting disintermediated. So we've seen a lot from customers in retail, travel and hospitality and other verticals show a lot of interest. And we were one of the launch partners for ChatGPT ads. Actually, Kramer from OpenAI was here for one of the keynotes yesterday, and we launched GenStudio for ChatGPT ads to enable our customers, our brands to have ads placed through ChatGPT, that the ads that they develop through GenStudio get activated directly. A couple of examples of the new AI coworkers. We launched CX Enterprise Coworker, which is really a specialized AI agent that knows the entire context of customer experience in a given customer and can augment the capacity and dramatically increase the productivity of marketing teams. Every marketing team that we talk to tells us that they are bottleneck because they just have too much work to do. They have too many markets, too many customer segments, too many products, too many brands, all demanding attention, and they just don't have enough capacity to do it. So it's not just capacity, you also need governance because you got to make sure that just because you have capacity, the same consumer doesn't get 10 different offers from you in the space of an hour. So you got to make sure that it gets done in a governed manner, and that's what CX Enterprise Coworker does. And we really brought the entire power of what we do with all of our AI and Agentic technologies through the CX Enterprise Coworker. And then we are surfacing that not only through our platform, but through third -- through all the major AI platforms. We -- for example, the Adobe Marketing Agent, which runs with Microsoft Copilot was one, and we saw the example yesterday in the keynote where Charles Lamanna talked about how we are using Microsoft Copilot Cowork with all of Adobe's portfolio. In terms of enterprise models, one of the things that customers tell us is, look, we now know that generating content is getting easier. But to make the content really usable, like David was talking about yesterday, to make sure that the content stands out, it reflects the brand, it is compliant and it's available in any channel that they want, they need to be able to infuse their brand intelligence into the content. You get the output of the generative models, but to turn that into usable marketing content, that's what Adobe Brand Intelligence does and the response to that has been phenomenal. You saw the example of Xfinity on stage yesterday, and we expect to see a lot of customer demand for that going forward. In terms of our new AI-first applications, the family of applications we announced called the Agentic Web, where LLM Optimizer, Sites Optimizer, brand concierge, all part of that is -- takes the footprint that we have in our content management systems. Virtually every major website runs on Adobe Experience Manager. And that is probably the best content that a lot of companies have because it goes through a governance process, a validation process and every product, every brand gets described on their websites. And now they need to make sure that, one, they're allowing the LLMs to pick that up. Many of them block it because they're blocking all bots, and that's not a good thing to do. They need to be much more selective about allowing whether it's ChatGPT or Perplexity or other LLMs to pick up that content because that's the only way they show up in the responses to prompts. And then they want our help to truly understand how these LLMs work, how these -- the new personal agents work like OpenClaw or NemoClaw, how are consumers actually looking for information? How is the discovery process happening? And they want us to help understand that so that they can get their content in the right place. And so when the consumer asks for something that's related to them, their brand shows up in the right way in a trusted and accurate manner. Huge demand for that because there's really no comprehensive solution like we are offering with Adobe Experience Manager and the Agentic Web for what we call as brand visibility. And the last area Shantanu touched on is around business models. We -- the subscription business model, we've obviously started to expand that already with AI credits for all of the agents that we have. We started doing that last year with AEP Agent Orchestrator. We're now expanding that with more consumption-based token-based approaches. Our unified pricing has been super successful. It was -- it's internally named as Pangea, which is our unified pricing model. Virtually all of our largest deals right now are done with a unified pricing model that gives the customer the ability to swap without having to do any paperwork, extra, without having to do any kind of extra agreement, being able to swap one Adobe product for another. That way, they have the assurance that even if they get the demand wrong in terms of how much they're expecting, they're able to -- they will not have a capacity problem within their Adobe agreement. That's been super popular. And with customers like the one you saw with DICK'S Sporting Goods, for example, today, with leading customers, we have a lot of forward deployed engineering going on and outcome-based pricing that we are doing based on business metrics that matter to them. So those are some of the things that I wanted to highlight. But overall, I would say it's been a very, very heartening response here at Summit.

David Wadhwani

Executives
#4

All right. And I'll talk to the other red boxes that show up in a second. So as Anil and Shantanu talked about, I'm going to use this as the framing. I'm going to try to use this to actually tell the narrative. I think many of you have been following what we've been up to over the last few years, but give you a little bit of that narrative thread and then tie it back to the products and the monetization. Let's start at the proliferation of media models. We started by building our media models in a very different way. The foundation of Firefly was around commercial safety and making sure that everything we developed in there, people knew that they were able to use for production output, but also with a high degree of focus on editing capabilities. So the pixel preservation as opposed to just the generation. And that's really been the foundation and control and precision that we've been relying on the Firefly models for. Over time, we started to incorporate more and more third-party models from Google and OpenAI, Runway, Flux and a whole host of others that, as Shantanu mentioned, bring in different personalities and different strengths that each of the models have into that family. So we've created this really great foundation of model capabilities that are across the industry's best models, including Firefly and third parties into our platform. We realized, though, as we were working with brands that out-of-box generation was not sufficient for production output for these brands. That's why we then evolved and we introduced this idea of Firefly Foundry and custom model development because when a brand generates something, they want that generation to be pixel perfect to the brand elements and the historical way that they've been creating content or their franchise and their characters and their scenes and their props if they're a media and entertainment company. So we started to evolve there. And as Anil just talked about, brand intelligence is the next step in that direction because what we find is that not everything is necessarily codified in what they've done to date. There's a lot of implied value based on things that they've released in the past. So Brand Intelligence now takes all of the capabilities and understanding of what an enterprise is trying to achieve and integrates that into the generation models across the board. So that's been a really, I think, powerful foundation that we've built on. On top of that, we think that the introduction of conversational interfaces has been a huge opportunity for us. And we started investing heavily in that about a year ago. About 6 months ago, we released Photoshop Express and Acrobat into the wild in OpenAI. And the way we did that was we took the 40 years of technology development for Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Premier, After Effects. And we took all of the capabilities within those products, and we started to atomize those as individual, what Shantanu referred to as MCP endpoints. And what that means is that any feature in those applications can now be called on by a chatbot or an LLM. And that fundamentally changed the way I think people are going to be able to experience our applications. No longer they're going to use one application or another application, they're going to conversationally use across these applications. And we took those and we exposed those in ChatGPT and Copilot with Gemini and Claude coming in the not-too-distant future. But as we did that and as we were working with Anthropic, we realized that the generic LLM capabilities still lack the awareness and the depth of what a creative professional understands. It still lacks the depth and the precision of what a knowledge worker in a marketing group or a salesperson understands in terms of how they want to use those MCP tools. And so working with them, we introduced this idea and announced last week this idea of a creative agent. And the creative agent is a more deterministic agent that understands how creative professionals work. And it is a better outcome. It drives a better outcome using all of those 40 years of innovation in those tools. And that's what we announced last week, along with Anthropic talking about how impactful that will be both in terms of what shows up in Claude, but then what also shows up in our first-party applications. And the other thing I just want to emphasize here is we've done this, we've done this in partnership with all of the chatbot providers so that the conversational experience has also evolved. No longer is it about ask a question and get a response. Now when you ask something to be done, we've worked with them to insert UI responses. So if you ask for something to happen that requires more input that might be more precise through a slider or through some sort of UI mouse-based input, it will give you that opportunity to do that. So that has fundamentally changed the way we look at the top of funnel here because now if anyone wants to engage with creative or productivity capabilities in these interfaces, we're right there for them. And because our creativity and productivity agent understands it better, we're going to do a better job on their behalf. But we also have the user interface to journey them into richer, more precise capabilities in our first-party applications as well. So that becomes a really productive form of top of funnel for us. So then if I take all of this and I say, if I take a step back and let's look at it through the lens of business professionals and consumers and creators and creative professionals. For business professionals and consumers, what that's meant is taking everything we're doing with Acrobat and Express, and we're bringing those closer and closer together, as you know, so that you have a single experience for content comprehension, content creation and content publishing into one integrated experience across that -- those surfaces. And what these -- what the productivity agent means in that context is I don't have to do everything myself manually by pointing and clicking. I can actually ask that of Acrobat and Express, and it will do that for me. Similarly, in terms of Firefly and Creative Cloud, the creativity agent is now a sidebar in all of those applications. The creativity agent for those of you is actually launching next week. And so you'll be able to start to see that. And in the context of that, you'll be able to have conversations, entire conversations around designing a logo, taking that logo that you've designed, putting it into on different merchandise and then taking that and prepping it for social, all through these conversational capabilities using our underpinning capabilities from Photoshop Illustrator and so you're having a fully conversational element, opens up the top of funnel so more people can participate but drives the usage there. In both of these context, we monetize the same way we've been monetizing. We talked about the growth of generative credit consumption, the tokens that we drive has been very significant for us. We talked about in the last earnings call, the growth in Firefly add-on packs as well. What these capabilities do with these conversational experiences, it drives more utilization, drives more token consumption and more value to the user. So that's how the monetization flows. And then similar to what Anil was saying in terms of enterprise, because of Firefly Foundry, Custom Models, brand intelligence, all coming together in Firefly creative production, now what we're able to do is move to outcome-based pricing. So we all know when a marketing organization wants to create content, they sometimes want to create that content and publish it across multiple social endpoints. If they do that, the creative production and the creative agent will take that and actually do all the work to resize, reframe and publish that content and recharge based on outcome there. Or similarly, for -- you heard [ Shailesh ] today, as a CPG brand, they have a lot of content that's physical content, 3D digital twins. How do you drive that all the way through. So all of that -- those capabilities that the creative agent does on behalf of enterprise customers is really capable of being priced at outcome. And so all of this is about growing the number -- amount of usage, growing the value, growing the token and that becoming a new line of monetization that's additive to Adobe.

Daniel Durn

Executives
#5

Thanks, David. And thank you all for joining us, both in person online. It's great to be here with all of you. You heard from Shantanu, Anil, David on Adobe's strategy, on our product innovation and how we're thinking about that opportunity ahead, particularly as AI reshapes how our customers create, how they work and how they engage. And what I'm going to do is connect that to how we're executing on our customer-focused strategy because ultimately, for me, it comes down to 3 things: executing with discipline, driving durable growth and creating long-term shareholder value. Adobe, we're operating at scale, and we're doing it from a position of strength. We've got over $26 billion of ARR, and we're delivering double-digit customer group subscription revenue growth. But at the same time, we're seeing strong momentum from our AI-first solutions with ending ARR more than tripling year-over-year. And if you take a step back and look at the demand signals, the signals are clear. We're seeing growth across our user base. We've got over 850 million monthly active users, and that's growing 17% year-over-year. Just think about that. Over 850 million monthly active users, we're touching greater than 1 in 10 people on the planet each and every month in the Adobe ecosystem, and that's growing greater than 17% year-over-year. That's a significant addressable market. Engagement, engagement is increasing, credit consumption. Credit consumption is increasing. And that's the clearest signal that you see of customers who are embedding AI into their creativity and productivity workflows. And that's translating directly to growth of the Firefly family of solutions. And in the enterprise, we're helping their customers. We're helping our customers transform how they operate in the era of AI. And we have 3 solutions now. Each of them is greater than $1 billion. And in the aggregate, those [ three $1 billion ] businesses are growing greater than 20% year-over-year. That is incredible growth at that scale. And I think it illustrates and underscores both the importance and differentiation of our content supply chain solutions, our customer engagement and our brand visibility. And it reflects both the scale of the opportunity we're pursuing as well as the differentiation and durability of the Adobe platform. And all of this is underpinned by a strong financial model. And we continue to deliver durable financial performance, and we're generating significant operating cash flows. We've generated more than $10 billion in FY '25 alone. And that gives us an incredible amount of flexibility to continue to invest in the innovation that's fueling the growth and also return capital to shareholders. And it also reflects the confidence we have in the long-term opportunity ahead of us. In the past 3 years, we've reduced our net share count by almost 10%, and that's through disciplined capital allocation. Today, we're announcing a new $25 billion share repurchase authorization, which is a strong commitment to significantly reduce the shares outstanding in the next several years. And it also underscores the long-term optimism that we have in the business opportunities in front of us. We've got a clear strategy. We've got strong momentum, and we've got a disciplined approach to execution. And we're focused on driving durable growth and delivering long-term value. And so with that, let's switch to Q&A. And Doug, turning it back to you.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#6

Thanks, Dan. Thank you, everybody. We have, I think, ample time to get to as many questions as possible. Please try to limit yourself to the best you can to one question where possible. Let me see where the [ mic runners should ] start. Jessica, there. Let's start close to you.

Peter Burkly

Analysts
#7

This is Peter Burkly here on behalf of Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI. A lot of focus for obvious reasons around just the concept of orchestration. And I guess I would be really curious to just have you guys explicitly state what's your right to win in terms of being that orchestration layer within the enterprise? And I guess secondarily, I'm sort of curious, do you view it as being more of a domain-specific type of concept where maybe you guys own the marketing department and other vendors can still also exist within the enterprise? Or do you view a scenario where it's one or a couple of platforms sort of dominate this orchestration conversation?

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#8

I'll start and then maybe Anil can go. I mean when we talk about the orchestration solution, just to clarify, we're talking about it as it relates to customer experience. So there may be orchestration as it relates to dealing with HR within the company. But I think as it relates to what needs to happen to both have the fundamental customer platform, which was the Adobe Experience Platform, you mentioned 70 billion profiles, the 1 trillion experiences. That's really what we are focused on as well as all of the content that needs to be created, the infrastructure to engage with customers so that the entire customer funnel is something that we address.

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#9

Exactly. Yes, we don't see ourselves as a general purpose orchestration layer. We are focused clearly on customer experience orchestration. We have the Adobe Experience Platform, the agent orchestrator for what we build, but those agents are accessible through any other major orchestration layer as well, ServiceNow, Microsoft, et cetera.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#10

And I will say that we're clearly the largest provider now of sort of marketing technology in the world. And I think with the innovation that we have, we feel we're further going to differentiate ourselves, both in terms of the focus as well as in terms of the delivery of what needs to be done in that particular space because customer orchestration will come with all of these different channels, how do you deal with it? How do you make sure you have your presence? How do you then engage with them? How do you do commerce. So we think it's a massive addressable opportunity, and that's really what we continue to be focused on, which, again, as Anil said, it's an evolution of what we started with digital marketing, what we did with customer experience management and now we're doing with customer orchestration. And customer validation seems to be even more positive as it relates. And I hope you've had the chance also to talk to customers while you're here.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#11

Okay. Great. Keith.

Keith Weiss

Analysts
#12

Excellent. Thank you guys for hosting Summit and the investor meeting. I wanted to ask a question about timing, right, and when this comes to fruition. I would say like coming to Summit for the past decade or whatnot, the broader story has always been how do we get our customers to use a broader set of our solutions here, right? We have a lot of capability. We want to consolidate that capability. And there's new technologies that enable that. Like we were talking about workflow 5 years ago. We were talking about GenStudio on the data side. And now we're talking about agentic layer on top of it. But the timing is still an open question. And I think Dan talked about GenStudio is like it's almost like an ERP uplift, right, in terms of the structural change needed within your customers. So the question is, when does this occur? Like are these innovations getting to a point of where it's enough to really catalyze these ERP-type migrations to get people to restructure how they're doing marketing? Or should we temper our expectations on, this is going to take a while. This is going to be a 3- to 5-year cycle as people go through this heavy lift of restructuring how they're doing their marketing. And then the other side of the question is monetization, right? Does this entail a shift in monetization away from seat-based, away from consumption? And is that something that we should be starting to think about in our models of what does it mean moving from primarily a seat-based business model to these other new types of whether it's outcome-based or consumption-based types of pricing models?

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#13

Maybe the 2 of us can touch on that. Keith, first, we look at it and say, are we pulling away already from the other providers in this space as the provider -- platform provider of choice for customer experience management. We certainly believe that. As you look at the approximately $6 billion book of business as it relates to ARR, the double-digit subscription revenue growth, we think we are already pulling away from anybody else who's been there in that market. We think that the small single product providers of technology will be even more challenged. But to your point, I think this agentic stuff will continue to be now an accelerant to allow more people to adopt different pieces and scale it because the urgency of it from the customer is more significant than it's ever been before.

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#14

Yes. And I would add that the agentic software enables enterprises to integrate applications much faster than before. In the old world, you needed a lot of things to line up. You had your data models had to line up, the schema had to line up, the user interfaces had to line up. There was a lot more that you had to line up. The beauty of the agentic model is because of the way these layers work, you don't have -- you can have -- within -- underneath the MCPs, it can be very different, but the MCPs enable you to have loose coupling. And the reasoning capabilities enable you, so you don't have to have perfectly defined interfaces to get going. So that will make the integration go much faster. And we believe adoption will be faster as we move towards more like outcome-based pricing and other things that show the customer that our interests are aligned more closely with theirs.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#15

Okay. Let's come down in front to Brad.

Brad Zelnick

Analysts
#16

Awesome. Thank you, Doug, and thanks so much for hosting us, Brad Zelnick, Deutsche Bank. This is one of the best summers that I can remember for real. I've been to many, especially as we consider the agentic capabilities that you've shown us, things like Enterprise Coworker are really showing the incremental opportunity that can be captured, not just cost takeout, which everybody associates with AI. My question outcome-based pricing, Anil, you mentioned it, David, you followed up on it. Can you expand how do you implement this in a way that avoids friction with the customer? Where is it appropriate, for which types of customers? And maybe for Dan, what are the upside and downside risks to the financial model?

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#17

I'll start in the context of customer experience. In the deals that we have done, the best deals of outcome-based pricing are the ones where customers say, look, we do want it to reflect the risk sharing that we have. We want you to show that the technology is working in our environment. We want it to align with the business outcomes that we are looking for. But we also want predictability. We don't want runaway costs. And we also want to make sure that over time, as we get the benefits of revenue growth and so on, we really want to make sure that you have predictability that you don't have a curve that's actually outpacing our revenue growth or you're even keeping in pace with our revenue growth. We want to get the benefit of scale. That's what we've been able to do. When we look at metrics like, for example, how many campaigns they're running, how much content that they're actually producing, what time it takes for them to actually get a campaign out to market? Those are the types of outcomes that we have seen in these early customer engagements that we have done. And then what we have done is to translate them into -- ultimately into subscription, which is we'll define the outcome. This is your subscription cost until we get to that. It might be -- we might start at a lower base level. Once you get to that, the subscription goes up in a stair step. That's what works very well from a predictability perspective for the customer and obviously works for us from our subscription and ARR perspective. So that's what we will intend to continue, and we'll see where it goes. This is obviously a market that's moving quickly.

David Wadhwani

Executives
#18

I can add maybe one very specific example of where we're doing this. Firefly Creative Production. This is what we've been talking to you about the automated content creation part of it. We've been working with customers, and we've basically broken it down into for every content creation action that you take, how much are you actually spending on that content creation? So I'll give you a simple example that I've shared before. I've got a video, and I need to resize and reframe that video for every social network. right? I need to translate that video into these languages. How much are you spending on each of those tasks? And if we were to automate it, you'll have it faster and we'll charge you a fraction of the cost you would have done the traditional way. And so that becomes a very easy way, as Anil was talking about earlier, to align our pricing to their -- the way they think about it. And it takes risk out of the equation for everyone. And the good news is it's deterministic in the outcome. And so that's been what's driven the growth that we've started to see so quickly. Dan talked about Firefly crossing $250 million. That was a $0 million business a couple of years ago, right? And so that continues to be the foundation of it.

Daniel Durn

Executives
#19

In terms of the error bar then from a financial model, both Anil and David touched on it. I think when you go and evolve from just a pure subscription model to augment that to either consumption or outcome-based, there's a bit of variabilization in the outcome. But what I get really excited on was the point that David just made, when you capture a fraction of the economics versus how it was done before, that gives you a ton of value headroom to price into. And it's based on tangible outcomes. There's a direct through line between outcome, value delivered and what portion of that becomes ours. And so I really like the cleanliness and the look-through on outcome to pricing and the headroom that gets created versus the way things are currently done.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#20

Maybe, Brad, just one other trend that we are seeing actually, we certainly monitor and inspect each of the deal bands significantly, which is -- and I think this was Keith's question as well, how are you doing on the deal bands, how are you doing on the selling? The one way in which people want to actually engage with us much faster, I think Anil and I were talking, we have over 50 people trying out the stuff that we announced today. So you're also seeing a lot more as it relates to proof of concepts where people are like, hey, can we just get going? And so that's happening in parallel. In the past, you probably would have gone there and said, okay, what is your capacity? How much can you -- what do you want? And that process -- so it's a different process. But the good news is it's already embedded in how they're using it. And so actually, that allows a different kind of conversation. So again, that's a clear trend that we're seeing differently.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#21

Okay. Let's stay down the middle, I'll go to Jay.

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Analysts
#22

Thank you, Jay Vleeschhouwer. This is largely a product management or complexity management question. Over the last couple of years, GenStudio has been arguably the center of gravity, let's call it, within DX. I'd still like to call it Dx in terms of customer upselling...

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#23

Within the company, we get everybody to pay $20 the moment they say Dx, I'll collect later, Jay.

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Analysts
#24

Okay. I'll say it again. And in terms of customer upselling and migration now, however, GenStudio is sitting at the top of the new CX Enterprise stack, which is a very interesting architecture, but along with brand intelligence and customer engagement. The question is, how are you thinking about GenStudio as still a focus area in terms of upselling and migration? Or what is the focus in terms of more broadly upselling the base to the new broader architecture that you've shown in the last couple of days? And secondly, what is the right number of agents? That is to say, how do you decide against having too many agents versus too few agents? The road map sessions in the last couple of days like Marketo this morning and GenStudio yesterday, very interesting, but a lot of agents coming. So how do you avoid having too much complexity in the portfolio in that regard?

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#25

Maybe I'll start on the GenStudio stuff. As the team knows, I'm particularly passionate about GenStudio because I actually view GenStudio, Jay, and others as a way to actually integrate everything that the company is doing. I mean the 5 pillars of GenStudio for me have always been creation and production, which is, if you think about it, that's Creative Cloud, and that's Firefly in terms of now ideation with boards and graphs. How do you think about the beginning of a campaign or the beginning of a content workflow as it relates to everything that you're doing with Firefly. I mean, Frame as well as what you're doing with Workfront, core asset management. I mean the first thing I asked when I was acting as interim CMO was like, tell me how much pieces of content that were created. And if I want to, as Shailesh said, move from 1 campaign every 2 years to 1 campaign every 10 seconds. How do I think about that? The activation and the delivery of that and then the analysis. So I think the way, in particular, Anil's field organization is now selling GenStudio. It's part of that entire what content are you producing? How much are you going to be producing within the company? How are you going to be producing it with individual seats. So it's actually really served for us as the way in which people are like, yes, I want that strategic partnership with Adobe, and we want it. Now they may have already provisioned for some parts of Creative Cloud, they may have provisioned for some parts of Workfront, but this actually allows us to really elevate the relationship. And so as an overarching solution of how we deliver it, I think we are positioning it as the umbrella for all of Adobe, in terms of the content supply chain. And then the second thing we're doing is we're introducing these new products. So as you have GenStudio for performance marketing and you think about, hey, there's a new channel. I think you talked about OpenAI and the ads associated with ChatGPT or what we are doing with Amazon. So it has both the benefits of individual new components that are being monetized separately. But I think more than anything else, this has been the best way in which we go in and say, we're going to be a strategic partner for all of your content creation tools. And I have to mention that this is where all of the agency and SI partners have been great because the way they also think about it, they want a GenStudio within the agency to run it. They want a GenStudio that's shared between us and them and the client for how the client wants to operate. And if some people want to bring it in-house, they have a Genstudio between the client and us. So I think there are just many ways in which we're monetizing GenStudio. And so that's the way I look at it. On the MCPs and -- it's an M multiplied by M multiple. I thought you'd ask the question, so how many MCP endpoints do you have? How many skills do you have? And then how many agents do you have? But I'll let these 2 folks answer it because there's clearly -- the benefit of that for Adobe don't underestimate. It allows us to take our ton of technology and make them available in very different ways at the speed at which nobody can do it. So I think the benefit is not just in offering these agents. It's the fact that we can take in Photoshop, you have how many agents and how many skills?

David Wadhwani

Executives
#26

Hundreds of MCP endpoints and probably 100-or-so skills already sort of in pipeline.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#27

Does that answer your question, Jay?

David Wadhwani

Executives
#28

And just one thing to think about as you think about these agents and these skills, not everything is generative, right? The reasoning can happen. But because we have this proliferation of these across the Anil's Group and my group, the proliferation of these skills and MCP end points so much of what you can do is more deterministic, faster and cheaper. It doesn't cost the generative effects that used to have in the past.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#29

Let's go to Alex in the middle.

Aleksandr Zukin

Analysts
#30

Alex Zukin from Wolfe Research. I echo the sentiments about a great DX Summit and great seeing you again, Shantanu, for the -- for everything that you've done for Adobe over the many, many years. I guess, I want to ask a question about AI anxiety. And specifically, it feels like we're in the midst of this anxiety period for customers, obviously, for investors around cost, around security, around quality, around whether the investments they've made in their platforms are the right ones. And it seems like it introduces more pausing and lengthening of sales cycles. But as you are talking to customers today, with respect to all of the innovation and all of the integration that it's driving across your platform. How are you both managing that anxiety? How does it impact your ability to actually get more out of the contracts or the expansion opportunity in these deal bands? And when you think about kind of where that money is coming from, ultimately, whether it's from experimental AI still [ FOMO ] budgets, whether it's from lines of business, whether it's from impacting hiring plans for their marketing organizations going forward. How do you kind of think -- how are they sharing their thoughts about that and influencing the growth rate of the product portfolio?

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#31

I'll just start with 2 quick thoughts, and then actually, Anil and David have you add. The 2 things I'll say is we were at an executive forum, which all of the executives associated with big companies, the word that's still being used a lot is AI transformation, to your point, within the company. But everybody acknowledge that 12 months from now, success for them will be AI execution. So the good news is from where the customers are, they are talking about, yes, we recognize it's an AI transformation but AI execution is how we will measure ourselves success. So it feels like they've crossed that bridge associated with saying it. And the anxiety, the one thing I'll say is -- when people see the technology, I was actually very curious when people saw all of the stuff that we did, these agents and coworkers and conversational interfaces, what would the response be? And I actually think seeing it in action and what it does actually reduces anxiety because now it's real, it's the innovation. They can get their feel on it and they're like, "Oh, my God, I can do more as opposed to, am I going to be impacted by it." So in my own way, I feel like the more you make it real, the more people actually will embrace it because they're like, wow, this actually can help me do my job.

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#32

I would say exactly that. The feedback has been -- the Coworker has made it really tangible, right? It used to be very abstract. We have put all marketing departments out of business and so on. It's just very abstract or very simplistic. You see something like the coworker you say, that's solving a real problem. I need to find audiences. I need to have the right content. I need to make sure the campaigns are launched. I need to measure them and then I trade and test and go. And that is something marketers know is bottlenecked today. And if you can help me do that for all my markets and so on, it's actually very tangible. And what they -- what the other conclusion that we have seen so far at least the feedback we've heard is, they know the AI platforms are moving really fast and innovating fast. Sometimes too fast. They announce things and then they back away from things and you just -- you can't build a long-lasting enterprise system based on that. So they see us as a great partner that can help them balance that out.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#33

And as it relates to the budget, Anil, where it's coming from, I do think there's an AI budget that people have because everybody has to say, "hey, here's how I'm using AI budget." And this is a good way to actually leverage that.

David Wadhwani

Executives
#34

Yes. Alex, I think AI anxiety is exactly the right phrase that I think people are feeling. And what do you do when you're anxious, you go to someone you trust, right? And I think the brand that Adobe has represented in marketing, in media and entertainment, in the creative space, even in productivity, it's the place you can go. The one thing they know is something is going to happen tomorrow that completely upends their strategy or their thinking. But if Adobe is the company that's coming in and saying, we've got your back. And whatever that is, to Anil's point, because of the orchestration work we've done, because of the agentic work we've done, we will incorporate that in a way that has the least impact and the most upside to your organization. That trust is one of the most important things I think we bring because we also have the domain expertise and empathy of what they go through every day that I don't think the broad-based AI companies have the time to think about.

Jackson Ader

Analysts
#35

It seems -- my perception is that like Express has taken a little bit of a back seat the last couple of days. I just always thought it was the marketers tool, right, to create content. It was a lighter weight version of the flagship stuff on the creative side. And so it was like a nice -- there's some synergies there. And it seems like some of the agentic things that Adobe is coming out with, along with some of the third-party kind of general use agent stuff is filling that need instead. And I'm curious whether that is just my perception or whether it's true that these agentic capabilities still a need that Express used to.

David Wadhwani

Executives
#36

Yes, happy to take that. First of all, I assume you all noticed how much innovation was on stage. And how much we can jam in is a function of how long you guys are able to sit in your seats. And so what we did over the last couple of days was talk about sort of the rise of agents and how people are engaging. What we are seeing is that there's a transformation of away from sitting down with a blank screen or sitting down with a template and more to a generative capability to generate an outcome, as you saw with Firefly, with the creative Agent and what you saw with Firefly Creative Production, all of this content is being generated. How you then do the last mile of editing continues to be a focus for us in that ecosystem. So we are seeing adoption of Express continuing to rise very quickly in the enterprise. We're seeing adoption of Express actually doing -- growing very quickly in individual users as well. The input into that is the agentic and generative capabilities. But it's a significant part of that freemium monthly active users that we're talking about grew to over 80 million, and I think it was 50% year-over-year growth. It's the fastest -- this whole ecosystem of freemium onboarding is the fastest we have. And it's also an integrated part of the GenStudio content supply chain work for marketing self-service that we have at the end of the chain with -- in the enterprise.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#37

Let's come back up to the middle in front.

Stefan Slowinski

Analysts
#38

Stefan Slowinski from BNP Paribas. Dan, on the shift to consumption and outcome-based pricing, does the long-term gross or operating margin look different for Adobe?

Daniel Durn

Executives
#39

Yes. So I actually think the growth profile will get enhanced as we, again, think about the way work gets done today, the friction cost in the ecosystem and putting the power into the hands of our customers to take campaigns on a global basis and ramp their content to connect in a more personalized way through that digital channel, that has significant benefits not only from a top line standpoint, but from a bottom line productivity standpoint. And when you think about that equation and our ability to price into that headroom, I actually think it's an accelerant as we begin to proliferate these capabilities across the customer base. From a margin structure standpoint, I think there's a couple of factors at play. We've done a great job with unit cost of compute today. And you can see even though like generative credit consumption up 3x quarter-over-quarter in Q4, up again 45% quarter-over-quarter in Q1, you see the margin structure and profile that the company is driving forward. We're going to continue to stay hyper-focused on the things that we can control, make sure we drive training in the right way and make sure we drive unit cost of inferencing down over time with the models we bring to market. But there's also going to be an industrial response. to the cost equation at play. And semiconductor industry is going to drive better cost of compute profiles, and we will all take advantage of that as that cost of compute comes down structurally from an industry response, but also controlling the company-specific issues that we see over time. So we're going to continue to drive our strategy, give the customers the tools that we know they want, and we're uniquely positioned to provide and then stay hyper-focused and diligent and disciplined in how we do that and drive value for shareholders long term.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#40

Matt.

Matthew Swanson

Analysts
#41

Yes. Great. Matt Swanson from RBC. Maybe going back to that conversation about transformation versus execution, transformation feels very much like what can we do conversation and execution becomes the what should we do conversation. And that ultimately really feels like it's going to come down to ROI, right? And can you just talk more about what experience cloud's role is long term in justifying the spend of the Creative Cloud and really getting away from any of these conversations people are having about AI slop or just the proliferation of content not being the end goal, but driving better results being the end goal.

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#42

Yes. I mean we see -- from a customer perspective, what we see is, look, we need to -- when you think of what it takes for customer experience orchestration, we need the entire spectrum of all the way from going -- understanding the customers, addressing all of these different challenges that we saw, the proliferation of channels, the explosion of content required. When customers look at the content that's required, obviously, they don't want to produce [ slop ]. Nobody is going to click through it. It's a waste of marketing dollars and a waste of campaigns. So they're looking to say, "I want to use the power of the generative AI. I want to use the power of these models, Firefly and third-party models, but it's got to be in the context of the marketing campaigns." That, I believe, is the unique role that we play. Shantanu referenced the Adobe Experience Platform. We have that information in the billions of profiles that we have, in the segment analysis that we have. So we can make it very specific and then bring together GenStudio, Firefly Enterprise. That's what makes the content very relevant, very personalized. That's where you get better open rates, better click-through rates, if you're doing it on other channels, you get the most effective response. So that's what we believe that we bring together by putting all of this into a single orchestration platform.

David Wadhwani

Executives
#43

It's important to also sort of realize that Creative Cloud and Photoshop and Illustrator Premier are fully formed part of GenStudio and what we do with creative and production. I don't know if you were here yesterday, as an example, but we showed that end-to-end workflow about how we're moving from a world where marketers and creatives are working to create these campaigns to a world where marketers, creators and agents are coordinating to create this. So that core human element is what ensures that you can not produce slop, but the production and the scale production at the end is what gives you the personalization.

Michael Turrin

Analysts
#44

It's Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo Securities. I echo thank you for hosting a great event. And Anil, you mentioned the partnerships. There are a number of announcements across the hyperscalers, OpenAIs, Anthropics of the world. And a question we get often is just are there ways that you ensure that the value accrues from those partnerships back towards Adobe as the core incumbent system of record versus starts to flow in different directions. So can you talk more about how you evaluate and approach these partnerships and how you ensure that the value stays and ideally continues to accrue on top of Adobe?

Anil Chakravarthy

Executives
#45

Yes. When you look at the Adobe CX Enterprise, which is the main offer that we -- the main offering that we launched, we think of that in a couple of different architecture layers. And that's the easiest way to understand how the value accrues to us. You think of the UI layer where we're really bringing together the conversational capabilities but really combining that with the things that we are really good at, whether it was the user interfaces that really people know well that they can do -- perform their activities in. So we allow for flexibility and that is something that really that our customers value. So more often than not, while it's open to other UIs, we do believe that a lot of customers will use our UI because it commands the power of conversational as well as the other kinds of UIs that we provide. At the next layer, which is the agentic player. We have all of the domain capabilities that we produce as agents. They are open. You can use them through agent orchestration systems. But by combining that with everything that they do with the partners, we can also let them integrate third-party agents and agents that they build into our system. That again provides that flexibility there. The third layer is the model layer. Again, in addition to Firefly, we now have 30-plus models. So we'll have a lot more models. Customers are building their own small language models that we can integrate with. And that openness provides for the agentic reasoning and provides for the autonomous operations. And the data layer is where we really differentiate. That's when you have the data that -- like the AEP has with the 70 billion-plus profile activations, 1 trillion experiences every year. That's very hard to replicate outside our context. It's not that it's locked in. It's just very hard to replicate outside our context. So if you're going to run a full-fledged campaign, a full-fledged orchestration system, you need all of that together. So we believe that optimization, the ability to integrate with their layers is very, very appealing to customers. If you have to replicate that in the context of a cloud or in the context of Google Gemini, for example, that's a lot more work for the customer than doing it with the architecture that we provide.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#46

Anil talked about the sort of differentiation. The other way I would actually answer that question as well is every time we've added another "infrastructure" or hyperscaler, it's accelerated the business. So as you know, we first came out with AEP on Azure. When we added AEP on AWS, that accelerated the business. One -- and same thing with GCP, et cetera. So you have to be available where it is. One trend that we're definitely seeing is that the customers are actually saying, "Hey, I may have an allocation for Anthropic, and I may have an allocation for GCP, and I want to have an allocation." And actually, everybody is sort of saying as long as the Adobe consumption is on one of those, we can use it. And so I think our flexibility actually helps us say, it doesn't matter what your infrastructure allocation is. And they are also working well to make sure that, that is not negative for them as a company. So we're very convinced that making this available on every platform that's out there is actually in our best interest and in the customer's best interest.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#47

This is going to be our last question. We'll come up in front, Keith.

Keith Bachman

Analysts
#48

Keith Bachman from Bank of Montreal. I wanted to direct this maybe to you, Shantanu or Anil, but sort of a similar vein that the last question, but through the eyes of the consumer and trying to understand how the value chain may alter. And so in the keynote today, there was an example of DICK'S Sporting Goods and buying a golf club. And in that example, you're interacting with the brand and/or the retailer. And just recently, I was buying a new set of golf clubs. I did 80% of my research through Claude and then a little bit of interaction with either the brand or the retailer. And so I'm just trying to understand how that dynamic still creates value for Adobe through brand identity or the orchestration layer, if most of the perceived value from the consumer perspective, actually arises through Claude rather than, say, the brand or the retailer.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#49

I actually think -- I'll start maybe -- that's the exact value that DICK's Sporting Goods in that particular example or Titleist. I don't know which set of golf clubs you bought, TaylorMade, actually wants to make sure that the content that they're producing actually shows up the way that they want that content to show up in Claude. And so when we talk about brand visibility, when we talk about LLM optimization, it's to make sure that when you're having that conversation irrespective of where you're having it, I mean how do the LLMs get that? They go get the information from the websites, and this is again what Anil said. When we produce all of that content so that it actually shows up with the right attributes across all of that, that's a significant value that we are providing, again, whether it's to the golf manufacturer or to the retailer. And so that's actually the value add for us. So we get value because every single company is now saying, how did the content management business actually grow? The content management business, when we acquired Day Software, I think we saw that, wow, everybody is now going to create an alternate representation on a mobile device. Then everybody is going to create an alternate representation on a tablet. Now they have to create an alternate representation with a conversational interface. And they have to represent a conversational interface that's happening on a channel that they don't own with the fidelity that they want. And so that's actually our opportunity and that's what we are providing. And so when we say, hey, we'll make sure that your content is available everywhere, whether it's social, whether it's search, that's why it's an and, and, and. And that's what every company wants to know, which is they all spend all their time creating these websites where they actually turned away bots. I mean, remember when we all had to go through those 14 hoops about, are you a human? CAPTCHA, exactly. Now they have to completely revamp that website so that the right agents, if the right agents aren't allowed, you're definitely not going to transact and you're going to get upset and go away. So as a company providing that content as a company providing that infrastructure and a company providing that visibility, our role becomes more important, right? And it ultimately serves you as a consumer and it serves the right company that's providing the product. That's why I think it's an immediate opportunity going back to the transformation as well as the AI. One last story, which is in a customer visit yesterday, they actually, in order to bring urgency to where they wanted the budget, they apparently did this demo with their leadership team to say, look at the conversation that's happening on LLM and that company was conspicuously missing. Now if you're a C-level executive, and you see that demo, what's the first thing you're going to do, you're going to fund that money to say, "Hey, go make sure that we're available, " because if this is where the conversation is happening. So that, I think, is the reason why all of the innovation that we showed today is actually more relevant, more important and more critical to roll out ASAP.

Douglas Clark

Executives
#50

Okay. Thank you, team. Thank you, everyone, for coming, for tuning in for your time, for your support of Adobe. We really appreciate it, and we look forward to seeing you again next time.

Shantanu Narayen

Executives
#51

I'd also maybe like to add my thanks as well. I mean when you spend your time and come to Summit, I think it's the best way, frankly, for you to learn about what the innovation is, to wander the hall. So again, from me, a personal thanks because when you come here and you spend the time, I think that's the best way to understand what the customers, what's important for the customers. So I just wanted to express my appreciation as well for coming here and being at this event. Thank you.

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