Remember when Adobe was the villain? Around 2023, creatives were mass-canceling subscriptions, Reddit threads were on fire, and every design community online had the same hot take: Adobe was a bloated, overpriced dinosaur that AI was about to eat for breakfast. Midjourney was the darling, Figma was the future, and Adobe was supposedly the cautionary tale. Fast forward to today, and the company is sitting on a $25 billion stock buyback authorization and a co-sign from the most influential person in AI hardware. That’s a pretty sharp plot twist.
The “Adobe Is Dead” Narrative Was Always a Little Lazy
Look, I get why people wrote Adobe off. When generative AI tools started producing usable images in seconds, the assumption was that Photoshop and Illustrator were toast. Why pay a monthly subscription for tools that take years to master when a free prompt box could get you 80% of the way there? It was a reasonable fear. But it was also a surface-level read of what Adobe actually is.
Adobe isn’t just a photo editor. It’s the infrastructure layer for creative professionals — the format standards, the export pipelines, the enterprise contracts, the deep workflow integrations that agencies and studios have built their entire operations around. You don’t rip that out because Midjourney dropped a new model. That’s not how creative production at scale works.
What Jensen Huang Agreeing Actually Means
When Nvidia’s CEO publicly backs a company’s AI positioning, that’s not a throwaway comment. Jensen Huang has a very specific track record of identifying which companies are using AI as a genuine product layer versus which ones are just stapling a chatbot to their homepage and calling it a strategy. His agreement that Adobe is not an AI loser carries weight precisely because Nvidia sits at the center of the AI supply chain. They see who’s buying compute, who’s building real pipelines, and who’s just doing PR.
Adobe’s Firefly model — its in-house generative AI system — is the key piece here. Unlike third-party AI tools that creative professionals use alongside Adobe products, Firefly is baked directly into the apps. It’s trained on licensed content, which matters enormously for commercial use cases. Enterprise clients can’t use AI-generated assets with murky copyright provenance. Adobe solved that problem early, and that’s a real competitive advantage that doesn’t get talked about enough.
The $25 Billion Buyback Is a Confidence Signal, Not a Distraction
Some analysts will frame the $25 billion stock buyback as Adobe trying to prop up a sagging share price. That’s one read. Another read is that the board looked at their cash position, their AI product roadmap, and their enterprise retention numbers, and decided the stock was undervalued relative to where the company is actually headed.
Buybacks at this scale don’t happen when leadership is nervous. They happen when a company believes the market hasn’t fully priced in what’s coming. Adobe’s board authorized this program through April 30, which means they’re putting serious capital behind the thesis that the “Adobe is losing to AI” story is wrong.
Where I’d Push Back
I’m not here to be an Adobe cheerleader. There are real questions worth asking.
- Firefly is solid, but it’s still catching up to the raw output quality of some dedicated image generation tools. For pure creative exploration, professionals are still bouncing between apps.
- Adobe’s pricing model remains a friction point. The subscription structure hasn’t gotten friendlier, and smaller studios and freelancers are still looking for exits.
- The Figma acquisition falling apart left a gap in Adobe’s design tool story that hasn’t been fully addressed. That’s a real miss they haven’t recovered from narratively.
None of that makes Adobe a loser. But it does mean the company still has execution work to do, not just positioning work.
My Take
Adobe is in a genuinely interesting position right now. It’s a legacy software company that built an AI strategy around its actual strengths — licensed training data, enterprise trust, and deep workflow integration — rather than chasing the hype cycle. That’s harder than it sounds, and most companies in Adobe’s position haven’t managed it.
Jensen Huang agreeing with Adobe’s self-assessment isn’t a marketing moment. It’s a signal worth paying attention to. The companies that survive the current AI wave won’t be the ones that panicked and pivoted. They’ll be the ones that figured out where AI made their existing product stronger and built from there.
Adobe, for all its flaws, seems to be doing exactly that.
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