Adobe Summit 2026 - outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen on the state of the Adobe nation he leaves behind

The mission continues to be empowering everyone to create.

This might well be Shantanu Narayen’s last Adobe Summit as CEO. The company veteran announced his departure from the top slot last month, but while the search for his successor continues behind the scenes, this week he was still front-and-center at this week’s annual conference in Las Vegas.

That being the case, Narayen took time out to discuss the state of the Adobe nation with analysts at a session alongside the main conference, beginning from a customer-first perspective:

We've been actually ensuring that all our innovation is really focused ruthlessly on the customers that we serve, the three 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.

That last is a point of pride, it seems:

We've been the first company to talk about the fact that we think creativity and productivity are coming together. 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.

These are people who are looking to  AI to bring any media type, any content that they want, to life across any surface, argues Narayen, noting that things are changing across the Adobe user footprint:

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. 

AI, of course

Some 850 million people use Adobe products, he says, alongside enterprises who are all increasingly focused on what we used to be called digital marketing, but which the firm now calls Customer Experience Management and Customer Experience Orchestration. Both consumers and enterprises have a focus on AI, says Narayen:

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.

As for those “surfaces” he refers to, there are increasing numbers to factor in:

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.

AI has also provided an opportunity to provide conversational interfaces as well as agents, he adds:

That further democratizes the ability for you to do content creation as well as productivity. These conversational interfaces and agents that we're seeing is all about achieving your outcomes faster.

He points to media generation models, arguing that every single day, there's probably a new one:

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.

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. So these new AI-first applications is another way for us to attract people to our platform.

Enterprises

At the corporate level, enterprise models play their part, says Narayen:

We're going to continue to push the envelope on making sure that in an intellectually appropriate way we can provide 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. 

Enterprise customers have common need, he suggests:

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’.

He recalls being at a recent executive forum where there was a big topic under discussion:

The [term] that's still being used a lot is AI transformation within the company, but everybody acknowledge that 12 months from now, success for them will be AI execution. 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...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? 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’.

There are additional channels where conversations are happening, he notes:

We have the new LLM (Large Language Model) channels. That's where we have to make sure that we allow people to understand what conversations happening, what's their brand visibility....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.

As for the orchestration angle, Narayen notes that there’s a lot of debate around the impact of 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.

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...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.

He concludes:

We're clearly the largest provider now of sort of marketing technology in the world. 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. 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?

My take

An informed overview of current consumer and enterprise focuses from Narayen. But while it’s AI, AI, all the way - what else? - the most interesting point made at the analyst briefing came from David Wadhwani, Adobe President of Creativity & Productivity Business, when he said:

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.

Human intelligence once again comes back to the fore alongside its artificial counterpart.