If We’re All So Anti-A.I. – Why Do Adobe’s Profits Keep Going Up?

This morning an article on Fortune caught my eye. The headline of said article was:

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is stepping down after 18 years—as pressure on the company mounts to deliver on AI

… and there were several reasons why I clicked on it in order to find out more.

Firstly, of course, it’s about Adobe – the company that started the digital editing revolution 36 years ago (!) when they released Photoshop. Secondly, the CEO is stepping down, which is always a big deal in any massive international conglomerate. And thirdly, the last bit of that headline, “deliver on AI,” was what finally breached my clickbait barriers.

There are some interesting financial statistics in that article, including the fact that subscriptions are up 13% this quarter alone, and that sales are up 12.1% over the course of the last year. This is not a company that is failing in any way, shape or form.

Narayen has been at the helm of Adobe for nearly 20 years now and has helped steer the company from a meagre $1bn annual profit to $25bn. I think we can all agree that, under his stewardship, Adobe’s shareholders have done very well indeed, thank you.

And yet, if you were to cast your eyes over the comments section on any of my videos that pertain to Adobe – or indeed in the comments section on any Adobe-related video on YouTube – you’d find a loud and growing percentage of people expressing their dislike of Adobe, of subscription models and of A.I.

Yes, I accept that averaging sentiment in YouTube comments is hardly the most accurate means of measurement when it comes to company satisfaction, but it is (at the very least) an indication of a change of some kind. Or perhaps this is a classic case of bias, because people who are happy to pay to rent their software from Adobe don’t generally feel the need to comment about it on YouTube videos.

But it’s not just the ongoing complaint about Adobe’s subscription pricing models that figures heavily in public discourse on YouTube and elsewhere on social media – it’s that creative types doing creative things and making creative stuff – don’t like A.I.

Which brings us back to that headline. For a CEO to step down after nearly 20 highly successful years in the role, it seems to me like ‘the board’ have identified a problem and they want to deal with it before it gets any worse. That problem, if we are to believe the industry insiders at Fortune, is that the CEO doesn’t have a fucking clue about AI. He has “failed to deliver”.

And I don’t think that anyone who’s suffered through the woeful iterations of Adobe’s Firefly generative AI model will disagree on that matter. I mean, they did such a poor job that they had to lease decent generative AI models from TopazLabs.

It’s bad enough that Adobe charges you a monthly fee to use their tools, but to then shove a half-baked generative AI model into those tools and expect applause? My friends, that takes a special kind of corporate nerve.

Narayen took Adobe from one billion to twenty-five billion in annual revenue. He oversaw the shift to subscriptions, the acquisition of Figma (well, you know, the attempted acquisition), and the transformation of Adobe into one of the most dominant software companies on the planet. And none of that was enough, because the board looked at all of it and said, “Yes, but AI.”

Twenty-five billion dollars, and the bloke got fired for not being good enough at robots.

Welcome to 2026.

So why do the profits keep going up if we’re all so anti-AI?

I have two words for you: vendor lock-in.

Your files are in Adobe formats. Your workflows are built around Adobe tools. If you do this stuff professionally, then your clients expect Adobe ‘deliverables’. Switching isn’t just inconvenient, it requires the complete deconstruction of your entire workflow. Adobe doesn’t need you to love Firefly. They don’t even need you to open Firefly. They just need you to not cancel.

Then there’s the enterprise side, which nobody ever talks about. Agencies, studios, universities, governments buying thousands of licences in bulk – sometimes because Adobe bribed them to do so. Those decisions are made by procurement departments, not by photographers who are furious in a comments section. The enterprise world doesn’t watch YouTube. The enterprise world reads spreadsheets. And Adobe’s spreadsheets make them feel aroused.

The next CEO will not be that different from the current CEO and given that the company’s issues with AI are to do with their engineers and not the management, I don’t think they’ll improve anything.

‘Delivering on AI’ in a boardroom doesn’t mean making tools that creatives actually want. It means making tools that creatives will pay for regardless.