Adobe diversifies beyond its cash cow to sell AI to businesses

Alongside selling on-cloud, AI-integrated tools to generate content for a business’ marketing operations, California-headquartered Adobe’s new software platform will look to capture a share of customer service automation, technical support and other aspects.

Its ‘Agent Orchestrator’ will allow companies to access Adobe’s family of ‘Firefly’ foundational AI models, as well as third-party models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 and Google’s Gemini 2.0., the company said at its annual ‘Summit’ in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday.

Adobe has started selling its agentic AI platform to enterprises, counting technology integrator IBM, India’s flag carrier Air India in aviation, and the largest domestic private bank HDFC Bank Ltd as three key early customers for its agentic AI push. Two senior executives confirmed, requesting anonymity since they were not authorized spokespeople, that the company is already generating revenue from its AI push.

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“In the long run, we see AI agents through our ‘Experience Cloud’ offering to be a key revenue generator for Adobe, alongside our existing Creative Cloud and Document Cloud services to businesses,” Sundeep Parsa, vice-president of Adobe’s ‘Digital Experience’ business, told Mint at the sidelines of the Summit.

“We’re using our internal models for any text or visual content generation, while for other tasks such as reasoning, responses and debugging, we’re partnering with third-party foundational AI model providers such as OpenAI and Google,” Parsa said.

Businesses can use Adobe’s platform to use their internal datasets, training AI models to integrate automation into customer service and digital marketing operations to start with. To sell the platform, Adobe is working with top technology outsourcing partners around the world, Parsa said, without naming any company.

Adobe, which follows the December to November financial year cycle, reported its first-quarter earnings for this fiscal on 12 March. Its quarterly earnings of $5.71 billion beat the $5.66-billion consensus estimate of analysts polled by Bloomberg. However, its earnings guidance of $5.77-5.82 billion for the second quarter didn’t impress analysts, causing its shares to tumble.

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While the stock opened at $437.74 per share on Nasdaq in the US before its earnings were announced on 12 March, the shares ended the day 3.8% lower at $420.98 apiece. The following day, it further dropped 10%—but has since recovered by just over 5% to close at $399.34 on Monday.

Analysts, however, are optimistic.

“Adobe is a large enterprise service provider, offering marketing tools for digital content creation and customer experiences to very large companies around the world. The move to roll out a complex agentic AI operation had to happen for a company like Adobe—it’s a must-have if it wants to capture a larger share of businesses,” said Kashyap Kompella, AI analyst and founder of technology consultancy firm RPA2AI.

Kompella said the company’s ‘ethical AI’ approach could further improve the company’s chances of roping in businesses—which can help Adobe break out of its stagnant growth.

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“It will be a gradual journey—aspects such as multi-agent integration on Adobe’s new AI platform for businesses will need time to really work. From a revenue standpoint, the more complex AI integrations could take longer to impact the company’s stock and financials. But in the near term, investing in agentic AI capability is compulsory if Adobe would want to retain its large clients,” Kompella added.

Last week, Prativa Mohapatra, managing director for India at Adobe, told Mint that the company similar approach for its regional markets as well.

“We’re still in the initial years of AI, let alone using AI to drastically ramp up sales or clamp down upon unauthorized usage of software to increase monetization potential. But AI is steadily making a difference, and we expect to see its reflection in Adobe India’s growth potential in an equivalent way in the years to come,” she said.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s India-origin global chief executive, was yet to deliver his keynote until press time.

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The writer is in Las Vegas, USA at the invitation of Adobe.