Why Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is confident we'll all adapt to AI

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Neelai Patel

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan. Shantanu's been at the top of my list of people I've wanted to talk to on Decoder since we first started the show. He's led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he just doesn't do too many wide ranging interviews, and I've always thought Adobe was an underappreciated company.

Its tools sit at the center of nearly every major creative workflow you can think of. And with generative AI poised to change the very nature of creative software, it seemed particularly important to talk with Shantanu. Now Adobe's history in the space is enormously long and influential. The company started in the early 1980s developing something called PostScript that became the first industry standard for connecting computers to printers, which was a huge deal at the time. Then later in the 1980s and into the 1990s, it released the first versions of software that's so ubiquitous it's hard to imagine computing in design without them.

Adobe created the PDF that we have to take another quick break. We'll be right back. We're back talking about misinformation, the age old problem of the Photoshop job, and whether the entire Internet can be taught to look for proof of provenance, or from Adobe running somewhere close to you. All that influence puts Adobe right at the center of a whole web of tensions. We like to talk about on decoder, especially as the company has evolved its business and its business model over time.

Shantanu joined the company in 1998, when desktop Software was a thing you sold in boxed copies on a shelf. He was with a company when it started bundling Photoshop and illustrator and its other software into the creative suite, and he was the CEO who led the company's pivot to subscription software with Creative Cloud in 2012. Hes also led some big acquisitions that have turned into adobes large but under the radar marketing business. After all, so much of what gets made in tools like Photoshop is marketing and advertising collateral. So Adobe now has a growing business in helping other companies create, distribute, and track the performance of all that work around the web.

But AI really changes what it means to make and distribute creative work, even what it means to track advertising performance across the web. And you'll hear us talk about all the different things generative AI means for a company like Adobe. There are basic strategic problems like cost. You can dump a lot of money into AI, R and D, but there isn't really a business model on the other side of it to generate a return on that investment. So I asked Shantanu to explain how he's thinking about that investment and how it will pay off over time.

Then there are the fundamental philosophical challenges of adding AI to photo and video tools. How do you sustain human creativity when so much of it can now be outsourced to the tools themselves with AI? And I asked a question that I've been thinking about for a long time. As more and more of the Internet gets so deeply commercialized, what does it mean when a company like Adobe, which makes the tool so many people use to make art, starts to see the creative process is a step in a marketing chain instead of a goal in and of itself. This one got deep.

Like I said, Shantanu doesn't do too many interviews like this, so I took my chances. Okay, Adobe CEO Shantanu Naray. Here we go.

Shantani Narayan, you're the CEO of Adobe. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me, Nilay. I am very excited to talk to you. You are one of the first guests I ever put on a list of guests I wanted on the show, because I think Adobe is undercover.

And you as a CEO, you've been there for a long time. You don't give a lot of interviews. So I'm very excited you chose to join us on the show. Adobe is 40 plus years old. It has been a lot of different kinds of companies.

You have been there since 1998. You became CEO in 2007. You saw at least one paradigm shift in computing. You led the company through another shift in computing. How would you describe Adobe today?

Shantanu Narayan

Well, I think Adobe has always been about fundamental innovation, and I think we are guided by our mission to change the world through digital experiences. And so I think what motivates us is AVi leveraging technology to deliver great value to customers and staying true to this mission of digital experiences. What do you mean specifically by digital experiences? The way people create digital experiences, the way they consume digital experiences. The new media types that are emerging, the devices on which people are engaging with digital, and the data associated with it as well.

And so I think we started off way more with the creative process, and now we're also into the science and the data aspect. So, I mean, think about the content lifecycle. So how people create content, manage it, measure it, mobilize it, monetize it. We want to play a role across that entire content lifecycle. I love this.

Neelai Patel

You're already way into what I wanted to talk about. Most people think of Adobe as the Photoshop company, or increasingly the premier company. Wherever you are in the digital economy, Adobe is there. But what most people see is creative cloud. Talking about everything that happens after you make the asset, you make the picture in Photoshop, and then a whole bunch of stuff might happen to it.

You make the video in premiere, and then a lot of things might happen. And if you're a marketer, you might make a sale. If you're a content creator, you might run an ad. Something will happen there. You're describing that whole expansive set of things that happen after the asset is made.

Is that where your focus is, or is it still at the first step, which is someone has to double click on Photoshop and do a thing. I think it is across the entire chain. And Neela, I'd be remiss if I didn't also say we are also pretty well known for PDF and everything associated with PDF. In addition, don't worry, I have a lot of PDF questions coming for you. But I think as it relates to the content, which was your question?

Shantanu Narayan

It doesn't matter which platform you're using to create content, whether it's a desktop, whether it's a mobile device, whether it's a web. But that's just the first step. It's how people consume it, whether it's on a social media site, whether it's company that's engaging with customers and they're creating some sort of a personalized experience. So you're right very much. We changed our aspirations.

I mean, I think 20 years ago we were probably known just for desktop applications. And how we've expanded that to the web and the entire chain has certainly been one of the areas in which we've both innovated and grown. I want to come back to that because there's a lot of ideas embedded in that. One thing that's on my mind is I've been talking to people in this industry and all the CEO's on decoder, half of them telling me that AI is a paradigm shift on the order of mobile, on the order of desktop publishing, things that you have lived through. Do you buy it that AI is another one of these paradigm shifts?

Well, I think AI is something that we've actually been working on for a long time. Right? I mean, what do computers do really well, I mean, computers are great at pattern matching. Computers are great at automating inefficient tasks. I think all the buzz is around of AI, which is the starting point of whether you're having a conversational interface with your computer or you're trying to create something and it enables you to start that entire process.

So I do think it's going to be fairly fundamental because the amount of energy, the amount of capital, the amount of great talent that's focused on what does it mean to allow computers to have a conversation and reason and think that's unprecedented, even more so than I would say would happen in the move to mobile or the move to cloud, because those were happening at the same time. And perhaps the energy and investment was divided among both, whereas now it's all about generative AI and the implications if. You are Microsoft or Google or someone else. One of the reasons this paradigm shift excites you is because it lets you get past some gatekeepers in mobile, lets you create some new business models, it lets you invent some new kinds of products. Maybe that shifts some usage in another way.

Neelai Patel

I look at that for them and I say, okay, I kind of understand it. I don't quite see that kind of paradigm shift for Adobe. Do you see that kind of, we're going to have to invent a new business model for Adobe the way that some of the other companies see it. I think any technology shift has the same profound impact in terms of being a tailwind. And if you think about what Microsoft does with productivity and if you think about what Adobe does with creativity, one can argue that creativity is actually going to be more relevant to every skill moving forward.

Shantanu Narayan

So I do think it has the same amount of profound implication for Adobe, and we've innovated in a dramatic way. I mean, if you think about we like to break up what we are doing with AI in terms of what we do at the interface layer, which is what people use to accomplish something, what we're doing with foundation models and what models are we creating for ourselves that are the underlying brain of the things that we are attempting to do, and what's the data? I think Adobe has innovated across all three and in our different clouds, and we can touch on this later. Creative cloud, document cloud, and experience cloud. We're actually monetizing it different ways, too.

So I'm really proud of both the innovation on the product side, but the experimentation on the business model side. The reason I ask that question that way and right at the top is generative AI. So much of the excitement around it is letting people who maybe don't have an affinity for creative tools or an artistic ability make art. It further democratizes the ability to generate culture. However you wish to define culture for one set of companies, that's not their business.

Neelai Patel

And you can see, okay, that expands their market in some way. The tools can do more things, their users have more capabilities, the features get added. For Adobe, that first step has always been serving the creative professional. That set of customers actually feels under threat. They don't feel more empowered.

I'm just wondering how you see that. In the broadest possible sense. I am the world's foremost. What is a photo? Philosophical hand wringer?

And then I use AI denoise and lightroom without a second's hesitation. And I think it's magic. There's something there that it's very big. And I'm wondering if you see that as just a moment we're all going to go through or something that fundamentally changes your business. Every person, whether you're a student, whether you're a business professional, or whether you're a creative, we like to say it, Adobe, you have a story to tell.

Shantanu Narayan

And the reality is there are way more stories that people want to tell than the skills that exist to be able to tell that story with the soul that they want and the emotion that they want. And so I think Generative AI is going to attract a whole new set of people who previously perhaps didn't invest the time and energy into using the tools to be able to tell that story. So I think it's gonna be tremendously additive in terms of the number of people who now say, wow, it has further democratized the ability for us to tell that story. I think on the creative side, whether you're ideating, whether you're trying to take some picture and fix it, but you don't quite know how to do it. And when people have looked at things like generative field, their jaws dropped.

What's amazing to us is that despite decades of innovation in Photoshop, when something like generative fill captures the imagination of the community, and the adoption of that feature has been dramatically higher than any other feature that we've introduced in Photoshop. Maybe layers. When it first came out, people looked at that and their jaws dropped. Just speaks to how much more that we can do for our customers to be able to get them to tell their story. So I think it's going to be dramatically expansive.

Neelai Patel

I feel like Sunara Pichai likes to say AI is more profound than electricity, but I think as you still need. Electricity to run the AI, so I think they're both interrelated. No, but I honestly think used as much as layers is like the same statement, like it's at the same level of change. It's pretty good. Let me ask you some of the decoder questions and then I want to drill down into some of these ideas.

You have been the CEO since 2007. That's right. At the beginning of the mobile era, many things have changed. You've turned Adobe into a cloud business. You started, I think, as a product manager in 1998.

I'm assuming your framework for making decisions has evolved. How do you make decisions now? And what's your framework? I think there are a whole bunch of things that perhaps remain the same and a whole bunch of things that are different at your core when you make decisions and if you think about whether it's our transition to the cloud, whether it's what we did with getting into the digital marketing business, it's always been about are we expanding the horizons and the aspirations by which we look at how we can get more customers to the platform and deliver more value. So I think at our core, what's remained the same is this fundamental belief that investing in deep technology platforms and delivering fundamental value, you will be able to both deliver value and monetize it.

Shantanu Narayan

And growth as a company is something that excites us. And so that's remained consistent. I think what's different is the company has scaled. How you recognize the importance, which was always important, but becomes increasingly obvious, is how you create a structure in which people can innovate. And how do you scale that?

I mean, at 20 billion, how you scale that business and make decisions that are appropriate. I think that's changed. But at my core, I manage seven people then, I manage seven people now, and it's leveraging them to do amazing. Things that gets into the next decoder question almost perfectly. How is Adobe structured today?

Neelai Patel

How did you arrive at that structure? Structures are pendulums, and you change the pendulum based on what's really important. We have three businesses, what we call the creative business that you touched so much about, the vision there is how we enable creativity for all. We have the document business, and in the document business, it's really thinking about, you know, how we accelerate document productivity. And powering digital businesses is the marketing business, I would say.

Shantanu Narayan

We have product units. We call the first two creative cloud and document cloud as our digital media business. And we call the marketing Business the digital experience business. So we have two core product units run by two presidents, Neil and David. The rest of the company, we have somebody focused on strategy and corporate development.

Partnerships is an important part. And then you have finance, legal, marketing, and HR as functional areas of expertise. Where do you spend your time? I always think about CEO's as having timelines. There's a problem today, some customers having solved that in five minutes.

Neelai Patel

There's an acquisition that takes a year more, maybe even more than that. Where do you spend your time? What timeline do you operate on? Well, time is our most valuable commodity. Prioritization is something that we've been increasingly trying to say.

Shantanu Narayan

What moves the needle? One of the things I like to do both for myself as well as at the end of the year with my senior executives, is say, how do we move the needle and have an impact for the company? And that might change over time. I think what's constant is product. I mean, I love products.

I love building products. I love using our products. But the initiatives might change. A few years ago, it was all about building this product that we call the Adobe experience platform, a real time customer data platform, because we had this vision that if you had to deliver personal, personalized, engaging experiences, you needed a next generation infrastructure where this was not about the old generation of where was your customer data stored. It was more about what's a real time platform that enables you to activate that data in real time.

And that business has now exploded. We have tens of billions of profiles. The businesses crossed $750 million in the book of business. And so spending a lot of time because incubating new businesses is hard. The power structure tends to be with businesses that are making money.

Today, incubating businesses requires sponsorship. Adobe Express is another product that we talk about. We just released a phenomenal new version of Adobe Express on both mobile and web, which is all about this creativity for all. And so I think what are the needle moving initiatives? Sometimes it might be about partnerships.

And as we think about llms and what's happening in generative AI, where do we partner versus where do we build while it changes? I would say there are three parts of where I spend my time, this strategy, because at the end of the day, our jobs are planting the flag for where the company has to go and the vision for the company. I think it's a cadence of execution. If you don't execute against the things that are important for you, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is. And the third set of things that you focus on are people, are you creating a culture where people want to come in and work, they can do their best work?

Is the structure optimized to accomplish what is most important, and are you investing in the right places? So I would say those are the three buckets, but it ebbs and flows based on the critical part. And you're right. I think you started off by saying a lot of it is you do get interrupted, and having to deal with whatever is the interruption of the day is also an important part of what you do. You said you had three core divisions.

Neelai Patel

Basically, there's the creative cloud, the digital media side of the business. There's the experience cloud versus the marketing side of the business. And then there's, I think you have a small advertising line of revenue. That report, is that the right structure for the AI moment? Do you think you're going to have to change that?

Because you've been in that structure for quite some time now. What's been really amazing and gratifying to us is at the end of the day, while you have a portfolio of businesses, if you can integrate them, where you deliver value to somebody, that is incredible that no other company can do by themselves. That's the magic that a company can do. While we call these the digital media and the digital experience business, we just had a recent summit at Max in London. We had our summit here in Las Vegas.

Shantanu Narayan

These are our big customer events. And the story, even at the financial analyst meetings, is all about how these are coming together, how the integration of the clouds is where we're delivering value. And when you talk about generative AI, we do creation and we do production. We have to do these asset management. If you're a marketer and you're creating all this content, whether it's for social whether it's for email campaigns, whether it's for media placement or just tv, where is all that content stored and how do you localize it, and how do you distribute it?

How do you activate it? How do you create these campaigns? What do you do with workflow and collaboration? And then what is the analysis and insight and reporting? So this entire framework is called the Gen studio, and it's actually the bringing together of the cloud businesses.

The challenge in a company is you want people who are ruthlessly focused on driving innovation in a competitive way and leading the market and what they are responsible for. But you also want them to take a step back and realize that it's actually putting these together in a way that only Adobe can uniquely do. That differentiates us from everybody else. So why we have these businesses. I think we really run the company as one Adobe, and we recognize the power of one Adobe.

And that's a big part of my job, too. Right? We have to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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Neelai Patel

Welcome back. I'm talking with Adobe CEO Shantanu Ryan about one of the big challenges for a company like Adobe, trying to figure out which research gambles are worth betting on. How do you think about investing at the cutting edge of technology? I'm sure you made AI investments years ago, before anyone knew what they could become. I'm sure you have some next gen graphics capabilities right now that are just in the research phase.

That's pure cost, and I think Adobe has to have that R and D function in order to remain adobe. At the same time, even the cost of deploying AI is going up as more and more people use firefly or generative fill or anything else. And then you have a partnership with OpenAI to use Sora and premier, and that might be cheaper than developing on your own. How do you think about making those kinds of bets? Again, we are in the business of investing in technology.

Shantanu Narayan

A couple of things have really influenced, influenced how we think about it at the company. I mean, software has an s curve, right? I mean, you have things that are incubation and have a horizon that's not immediate, and you have other things that are mature. I mean, I would say our postscript business is a mature business, right? I mean, it changed the world as we know it right now, but it's a more mature business.

And so I think being thoughtful about where something is in its stage of evolution, and therefore you're making investments, certainly ahead of the quote unquote monetization part. But you have other metrics and you say, am I making progress against metrics? But we're thoughtful about having this portfolio approach. Some people call it a horizon approach and which phase you're in. But in each one of them, are we impatient for success in some way?

It may be impatient for usage. It may be impatient for making technology advancements it may be impatience for revenue and monetization. It may be impatient for geographic distribution. I think you still have to create a culture where the expectations of why you're investing are clear and you measure the success against that criteria. What are some of the longer term bets you're making right now that you don't know when they're going to pay off?

Well, we're always investing AI, building our own foundation models. I think we're all fairly early in this phase. We decided very early on that with Firefly, we're going to be investing in our models. We are doing the same. On the PDF side, we've released, we had liquid mode, which allowed you to make all your PDF's responsive on a mobile device.

In the experience cloud, how do you think about customers and what's a model for customers and profiles and recommendations? So I think across the spectrum we're doing it. I would say the area where we probably make the most fundamental research isn't creative. You know, what's happening with compression models or resolution or, you know, image enhancement techniques or mathematical models for that. We've always had advanced technology in that, and they, you actually want the team to experiment with things that are further from the tree, because if you're too close to the tree and your only metric is what part of that ships, you are perhaps going to miss some fundamental moves.

So again, you have to be thoughtful about what you are. But I would say core imaging science, core video science, 3d, immersive, that's where we are probably making the most fundamental research investments. You mentioned AI and where you are in the monetization curve. Most companies, as near as I can tell, investing a lot in AI, rolling a lot of AI features, and the best idea anyone really has is we'll charge you $20 a month to ask this chatbot a question, and maybe it will confidently hallucinate at you. We'll see if that's the right business, but that's where we are right now for monetization.

Neelai Patel

Adobe's in a different spot. You already have a huge SaaS business. People are already using the features. Is the use of Firefly creating any margin pressure on creative cloud subscribers? You're not charging extra for it, really, but you could in the future.

How are you thinking about that increased cost? We have been thoughtful about different models for the different products that we have. You're right. In creative. Think about express versus creative cloud and creative cloud.

Shantanu Narayan

We want low friction. We want people to experiment with it. And I think the conventional way in which most people look at it and say is, hey, are you acquiring new customers? And that's certainly an important part. What's also equally important is if that helps with retention and usage, that also has, for a subscription business, that has a material impact on how you engage value with customers.

Whereas express is very different. I mean, Express is a AI first new product that's designed to really be this paradigm change where instead of knowing exactly what you want to do, you have a conversation with the computer. I want to create this flyer, or I want to remove background or an image, or I want to do something even more exciting, and I want to post something on a social media site. And there it's again about, you know, acquisition and successful exports. And so you're right in that there's a cost associated with it.

I would say for the most part, most companies, the training cost is probably higher right now than the inference costs, both because we can start to offload the inferencing as well on computers as that becomes a reality. But it's what we do for a living. And if you're uncomfortable investing in fundamental technology, you're in the wrong business. We're not a company that has actually focused on being a fast follower. Let somebody else invent it.

We like creating markets. And so you have to recognize who you are as a company, and that comes with the consequences of how you have to operate. I think it remains to be seen how consumer AI we monetized. Even, I think generative AI in Photoshop, right at the sort of individual creative level I think remains to be seen. Maybe it will just help you with retention, but I feel like retention in Photoshop is already pretty high.

Neelai Patel

Maybe it will bring you new customers, but you already have a pretty high penetration of people who need to use Photoshop. It's never enough. It's never enough. We're always trying to attract more customers. But that's one part of the business.

And I think there's just a lot of question marks there. There's another part of your business that to me is the most fascinating. When I say Adobe is undercover, it's the part of the business that I think just fully undercover. You mentioned it. It's gen studio.

It's the marketing side of the business, the experience side of the business. That's the part where I look at Adobe's own marketing materials from your own summits, and it's, we're going to have creatives at an ad agency make some assets for a store. The store is going to pump its analytics into Adobe's software. The software is going to optimize the assets and then maybe at some turn the AI is going to make new assets for you and target those directly to customers. That seems like a very big vision and it's already pre monetized in its way, just selling marketing services to e commerce sites.

Is that the whole of the vision or is it bigger than that? Well, it's a big part of the Vision nilay. And if you think about it, I mean when people want to create these campaigns, I mean we've been talking about this vision of personalization at scale and how do you allow somebody, whether you're running a promotion, you're running a campaign, you're making a recommendation on what to watch next. We're at in our infancy in terms of, you know, what that happens. When I looked and really focused on how we create our own content and we partner with great agencies, but the brief, and when the brief has to be delivered and the amount of content that's created and the way to personalize that and run variations and experiment and run this across 180 countries where we might do business.

Shantanu Narayan

That entire process, from a campaign brief to where an individual in some countries experiencing that content, it's a long laborious process and we think that we can bring a tremendous amount of technology to bear in making that way more seamless. I think that is an explosive opportunity and every consumer is now demanding it, right? And they're demanding it on their mobile device. So people talk about the content supply chain and the amount of content that's being created and the efficacy of that piece of content. So it is a big part of our vision.

But documents also, I mean, you know, the world's information is in documents and we're equally excited about what we're doing with PDF and the fact that now in reader you can have a conversational interface and you can say, hey, summarize for me. And then over time, how does this document, if I'm doing medical research, correlate with the other research that's in there and then go find things that might be on my computer or might be out there on the Internet? And so you have to pose these interesting problems for your product teams of how can we add value in this particular use case or scenario? And then they unleash their magic on it. So our job is posing these hard things, which is like, why am I starting the process for Black Friday or Cyber Monday five months in advance?

Why can't I decide a week before what campaign I want to run and what promotion I want to run enabling that I think we'll deliver tremendous value. I promised you I would ask you a lot of questions about PDF, and I'm not going to let go of that promise, but not yet. I want to stay focused on the marketing side. There's an idea embedded in this, in two phrases you just said that I find myself wrestling with. I think it is the story of the Internet.

Neelai Patel

It is how commercialized the Internet has become. You said content supply chain and content lifecycle. And then the point of the content is to lead a transaction that is an advertising and marketing driven view of the Internet. Someone for money is going to make content and that content will help someone else down the purchase funnel, and then they're going to buy a pair of shoes or a toothbrush or whatever it is. And that I think is in tension with creativity in a real way.

That's intention with creativity and art and culture. Adobe sits at the center of this. Everybody uses your software. How do you think about that tension? Because it's the thing that I worry about the most.

Shantanu Narayan

Specifically, the tension is as a result of what, I mean, the fact that we're using it for commerce. Yeah, I think if the tools are sort of designed and organized and optimized for commerce, then they will pull everybody towards commerce. I look at young creators on social platforms and they are just slowly becoming ad agencies. One person ad agencies is where a creator ends if they are at the top of their game. MrBeast is such a successful ad agency that his rates are too high, and it is better for him to sell energy bars and make ads for his own energy bars than it is for him to sell ads to someone else.

Neelai Patel

That is a success story in one particular way. And I don't deny that it's a success story, but it's also where the tools and the platforms pull the creatives, because that's the money, because the tools, particularly Adobe's tools, are used by everybody for everything. I wonder if you at the very top think about that tension and the pull, the optimization that occurs and what influence that has on the work. You know, we view our job as enablement. Right?

Shantanu Narayan

You're right. In that a significant portion of the people with the creator economy, and if everybody has, you know, you're a solopreneur or you want to run a business, you want to be a one person shop in terms of being able to do whatever your passion is and create it. And the Internet has turned out to be this massively positive influence for a lot of people because it allows them distribution. It allows them reach. Just to point out, there are some people who would make at this point a very different argument about the effect of the Internet on people.

But I was going to go to the other side where whether it's just communication and expressing themselves, one shouldn't minimize the number of people for whom this is a creative outlet and it's an expression, and it has nothing to do with commerce. And they're not looking to monetize it, but they're looking to express themselves. And so our tools, I think, do both phenomenally well. And I think that is our job. Our job is not doing value judgment on what people are using this for.

Our job is saying, how do we enable people to pursue their passion? And I think we do a great job at that. I mean, if you're a k through twelve student today, and a k through twelve student, when you write a project, you're just using text. I mean, how archaic is that? Why not put in some images?

Why not create a video? Why not point to other links? And I mean, the whole learning process is going to be dramatically expanded visually for billions of people on the Internet. And we enable that to happen. So I think they're different users and different motivations.

And again, as I said, we're very comfortable with that. One of the other tensions I think about right now, when it comes to AI, that whole business, the marketing business experience business you have, requires a feedback loop of analytics. You're going to put some content, ideally on the web. You're going to put some Adobe software on the website. You own a big analytics suite that you acquired with omniture back in the day.

Neelai Patel

Then that's going to result in some conversions. You'll do some more tracking, you'll sell some stuff. That all depends on a vibrant web. I'm guessing when people make videos in premiere and upload them to YouTube, you don't get to see what happens on YouTube. You don't have great analytics from there.

I'm guessing you have even worse analytics from TikTok and Instagram reels. More and more people are going to those closed platforms and the web is getting choked by AI. You can feel it that it's being overrun by low quality SEO spam or AI content, or it's mostly ecommerce sites because you can avoid some transaction fees if you can get people to go to a website, do you worry about the pressure that AI is putting on the web itself in how people are going to the more closed platforms? Because that feels like it directly hits this business but it also directly impacts just the future of how people use Photoshop. I think your point really brings to the forefront the fact that the more people who use your products really differentiating yourself with your content is more of a challenge that comes with the democratization of access to tools and information.

Shantanu Narayan

It's no different from if you're a software engineer and you have all these access to GitHub and everything that you can do with software, how do you differentiate yourself as a great engineer, or if you're a business, how do you differentiate yourself with a business? But as it relates to the content creation parts? Well, no, actually, can I just interrupt? Talk about the distribution side. This is the part that I think is under the most pressure.

Neelai Patel

Content creation is getting easier and more democratic. And however you feel about AI, it is more easier to make a picture or a video than it's ever been before. The distribution side, the web is being choked by a flood of AI content. The social platforms which are closed distribution, are also being flooded with AI content. How do you think about Adobe living in that world?

How do you think about the distribution problem? Because it seems like the problem we all have to solve. You're absolutely right in that as the Internet has evolved, right? I mean, there's what you might consider open platforms and closed platforms, but we produce content for all of that. I mean, whether you pointed out whether it's YouTube or whether it's TikTok or whether it's just the open Internet, we can help you create content for all of that.

Shantanu Narayan

I don't know that I use the word choked. I use the word explosion of content, certainly. And flooded you also is a word that you used. It's a consequence. It's a consequence of the access.

And I do think that for all the companies that are in that business, even for companies that are doing commerce, I think there are a couple of key hypotheses that when they do, they become lasting platforms. The first is transparency of optics of what they are doing with that data and how they're using that data. What's the monetization model and how are they sharing in whatever content is being distributed through their sites with the people who are making those platforms incredibly successful. And so I don't know that I worry about that a lot, honestly. And you know, maybe if the creators worry, but I think most of the creators I've spoken to like a proliferation of channels because they fundamentally believe that their content will be differentiated on those channels.

And getting exposure to the broadest set of eyeballs is what they aspire to. So I haven't had a lot of conversations with creatives where they are telling us as adobe that they don't like the fact that they're more platforms on which they have the ability to create content. They do recognize that it's harder then for them to differentiate themselves and stand out. And ironically, that's an opportunity for Adobe because the question is, for that piece of content, how do you differentiate yourself in the era of AI if there's going to be more and more lookalikes? And how do you have that piece of content have sold?

That's the challenge for a creative. How do you think about the other tension embedded in that, which is you can go to a number of image generators and if someone is distinctive enough, you can say, make me an image in the style of x, and that can be trained upon and immediately lifted. And that distinction goes to zero pretty fast. Is that attention that you're thinking about. Given the role that Adobe plays in the content creation business?

We take both the innovation angle very seriously. We also take the responsibility angle very seriously. And I know you've had conversations with Dana and others about what we are doing with content credentials, what we're doing with the fair act. I mean, if you look at Photoshop also, and some of this magical innovation that we've done, like style match and structure match, how we're also taking a very thoughtful approach about saying when you upload a picture for which you want to do a structure match or style match, you bear the responsibility of saying you have access to that IP and license to that IP in order to do that. So I can interpret your questions in one of two ways.

One is how do we look at all of the different image generators that have happened? And, you know, in that case, we are both creating our own image generator. But at the NAB show, we showed how we can support other third parties. It was really critical for us to sequence this by first creating our own image model, both because we had one that was designed to be commercially safe, it respected the rights, you know, of the creative community because we have to champion it. But if others have decided that they are going to use a different model, but they want to use our interfaces, they want to use Photoshop or premiere or express to use in that, then, you know, with the appropriate permissions and policies, we will support that as well.

And so I interpret your questions in those two ways, which is we're taking responsibility in terms of when we provide something ourselves, how are we making sure that we recognize IP? Because it is important and it's people's ip. I think at some point the courts will opine on this, but we've taken a very designed to be commercially safe and an approach where we recognize the creator's iPad, others have not. And the question might be, well, why are you supporting them in some of our products? And a lot of our customers are saying, well, we will take the responsibility, but please integrate this in our interfaces.

And that's something that we are pushing as third party models. It bears mentioning that literally today, as we're speaking, an additional set of newspapers has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. And that seems like the thing that is burbling along underneath this entire revolution is, yeah, the courts are gonna have to help us figure this out. That seems like the very real. I did have a long conversation with Dana about that.

Neelai Patel

I don't want to sit in the weeds of that. I'm just wondering for you, as the CEO of Adobe, where is your level of risk? How risky do you think this is right now for your company? I think the approach that we've taken has showed just tremendous leadership by saying, I mean, look at our own content. We have a stock business where we have rights to train the models based on our stock business.

Shantanu Narayan

We have behance. And behance is the creative, professional, social site for people sharing their images. While that's owned by Adobe, we did not train our Firefly image models based on that because that was not the agreement that we had with people who do it. So I think we've taken a very responsive, responsible way. And so I feel really good about what we are doing.

I feel really good about how we are indemnifying customers. I feel really good about how we're doing custom models, where we allow a person in the media business or the CPG business to say, we will upload our content to you, Adobe, and we will create a custom model for us that only we can use, that we have rights for. We have done a great job. I think other companies, to your point, are not completely transparent yet about what data they use and did they scrape the Internet? And that will play out in the industry.

But I like the approach that we've taken, and I like the way in which we've engaged with our community on this. We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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Neelai Patel

We're back talking about misinformation, the age old problem of the Photoshop job, and whether the entire Internet can be taught to look for proof of provenance.

It's an election year. There's a lot of concerns about misinformation, disinformation with AI. The AI systems hallucinate a lot. It's just real. It's the reality of the products that exist today as the CEO of Adobe, is there a red line of capability that you won't let your AI tools cross?

Shantanu Narayan

Right now, to your point, I think it's something like 50% of the world's population over a twelve month period is going to the polls, including the US and other major democracies in the world. And so we've been actively working with all these governments. I think you're familiar, but for your audience, what we've done with content credentials, and this is about for any piece of content that's being created, how does somebody put their digital signature on what the provenance of that content was? Where did it get created? Where did it get consumed?

We've done an amazing job of partnering with so many companies in the camera space, in the distribution of content space, in the pc space, to all say we need to do it. We've also now, I think, made the switch associated with how do you visually identify that there is this watermark or this digital signature about where the content came from? I think the unsolved problem to some degree is how do you as a society get consumers to say, I'm not going to trust any piece of content until I see that content credential. We've had nutrition labels on food for a long time and so this is the nutrition label on a piece of content. Not everybody reads the nutrition label before they eat whatever they're eating.

So I think it's a similar thing, but I think we've done a good job of acting responsibly. We've done a great job of partnering with other people. The infrastructure is there now. It's the change management with society and people saying, if I'm going to go see a piece of video, I want to know the provenance of that. The technology exists.

Will people want to do that? And I think that's. Do you think that's. You've been at this for a long time. The thing everyone says about this idea is, well, Photoshop exists, right?

Neelai Patel

You could, you could have done this in Photoshop. Like, what's the difference? That's you, you've been here through all these debates. I'm going to tell you, what you are describing to me sounds a little bit naive, right? No one's going to look at the picture of Mark Zuckerberg with the beard and say, where's the nutrition label on that?

They're going to say, look at this cool picture. And then Zucker is going to lean into the meme and post a picture of his racer. Right? Like that's what's happening and that's innocence. A bunch of extremely polarized voters in a super heated election cycle is not going to look at a nutrition label.

It just doesn't seem realistic. Are you saying that out of, because it's convenient to say hope that we can get there? I actually acknowledge that the last step in this process is getting the consumer to care and getting the consumer to care on pieces of information that are important. Right. To your point, again, you had a couple of examples where some of them are in fun and in jest and everybody knows they're in fun and jest and it doesn't matter, whereas others are pieces of information.

Shantanu Narayan

But there is precedence to this, right? I mean, when we all transacted business on the Internet, we said we want to see that HTTPs. So we want to know that, you know, my credit card information is being kept securely. And I agree with you. I think it's an unsolved problem in terms of when consumers will care and what percentage of consumers will care.

So I think our job is the infrastructure, which we've done. Our job is educating, which we are doing. There is a missing step in all of this. So we're going into this with our eyes open. And if there are ideas that you have on what else we can do, we're all ears.

Neelai Patel

Is there a red line for you where you said, we are not going to cross this line and enable this kind of feature? Photoshop has actually done a couple of things in the past with creating currency. If you remember, that was a place. Pornography is another place. There are some things in terms of content that we have drawn the line.

Shantanu Narayan

That's a judgment call, and we'll keep iterating on that and we'll keep refining what we do. All right, let's talk about PDF. PDF is an open standard. You can make a PDF pretty much anywhere, all the time. You've built a huge business around managing these documents.

Neelai Patel

And the next turn of it is as you described. Let an AI summarize. A bunch of documents, have an archive of documents that you can treat almost like a wiki and pull a bunch of intelligence out of it. But the challenge is that the AI's hallucinate the future of the PDF seems like training data for an AI. And the thing that makes that really happen is the AI's have to be rock solid, reliable.

Do you think we're there yet? It's getting better. But no, I mean, to your answer, even the fact that we use the word hallucinate I mean, the incredible thing about technology right now is we use these really creative words that become part of the lexicon, right, in terms of what it happens. But I think we've been thoughtful in acrobat both about how we get customer value. And it's different because when you're doing a summary of it and you can point back to the links in that document from which that information was gleaned, I think there are ways in which you provide the right checks and balances.

Shantanu Narayan

And so this is not about creation. When you're summarizing and you're trying to provide insight and you're correlating it with other documents, I think much like you did with references and providing how we came up with that information, you're putting that information, but it will get better. It'll get better through customer usage. But it's a subset of the problem of all hallucination that we have in images. And so I think in PDF, while we're doing research fundamentally in all of that, I think the problems that we're trying to solve immediately are summarization, being able to use that content and then create a presentation or use it in an email or use it in a campaign.

And so I think for those use cases, the technology is fairly advanced. There's a thing I think about all the time, when an AI researcher told me this a few years ago, that most documents, if you just pull the average document off the average website, the document is useless. It's machine generated. It's a status update for an Iot sensor on top of a light pole. That is the vast majority, statistically, of all the documents on the Internet.

Neelai Patel

When you think about how much machine generated documentation any business makes, the AI problem amps it up. Now I'm having an AI write an email to you, you're having an AI summarize the email for you. We might need to do a transaction or get a signature. My lawyer will auto generate some AI written form contract. Your AI will read it and say it's fine.

Is there a part where the PDF just sort of drops out of that? Because it really is just machines talking to each other to complete a transaction and the document isn't important anymore. Well, I think this is so nascent that we'll have a different kind of experiences. I mean, I'll push back first a little on the world's information is in PDF. And so if we think about knowledge management of the universe as we know it today, I think the job that Adobe and our partners did to capture the world's information and archive it.

Shantanu Narayan

I think that's been a huge societal benefit that exists. So you're right in that there are a lot of documents that are transient that perhaps don't have that fundamental value. But I did want to say that societies and cultures are also represented in PDF documents. And that part is important, I think, to your other question associated with where do you eliminate people even being part of a process and let your computer talk to my computer to figure out this deal. I think you are going to see that for things that don't matter, judgment will always be about which ones of those matter.

And if I'm making a big financial investment, does that matter? And if I'm just getting an NDA signed, does that matter? But you are going to see more automation. I think in that particular respect, I think you're right. The PDF to me represents a classic paradigm of computing.

Neelai Patel

We're generating documents, we're signing documents, there are documents, there are files and folders. You move into the mobile era, the entire concept of a file system gets abstracted. Maybe kids don't even know what file systems are, but they still know what PDF's are. You make the next turn just to bring things back to where we started. You say AI is a paradigm shift and now you're just going to talk to a chatbot.

And that is the interface for your computer. And we've abstracted one whole other set of things away. You don't even know how the computer is getting the task done. It's just happening. The computer might be using other computers on your behalf.

Does that represent a new application model for you? I'll give you the example. I think most desktop applications have moved to the web, right? That's how we distribute many new applications now. Photoshop and Premiere are sort of the big stalwarts of big heavy desktop applications.

At this point in time, does the chat box represent, okay, we need yet another new application model. I think you are going to see some fundamental innovation. And the way I would answer that question is first, abstracting the entire world's information. So it doesn't matter whether it was in a file on your machine, whether it was somewhere on the Internet and being able to have access to it, search, find the information that you want. You're absolutely right that the power of AI will allow all of this world's information to come together in one massive repository that you can get insight from.

Shantanu Narayan

I think there's always going to be a role, though, for permanence in that. And I think the role of PDF in that permanence aspect of what you're trying to share or store or do some action with, or conduct business with. I think that role of permanence will also play an important role. And so I think we're going to innovate in both those spaces, which is how do you allow the world's information to appear as one big blob on which you can perform queries or do something interesting? But then how do you make it permanent?

And what does that permanence look like, and what's the application of that permanence, whether it's for me alone or for a conversation that you and I had, which records that for posterity? So I think both of these will evolve, and it's areas that how does that document become intelligent? And so instead of just having data, it has process and workflow associated with it. And I think there's a power associated with that as well. I mean, you talked about that a little bit when you said computers talking to each other.

So I think we'll push in both these areas right now. Do you think that happens on people's desktops? Do you think it happens in cloud computing centers? Where does that happen? Both and on mobile devices?

Right. I mean, I think the power, I mean, you look at a product like Lightroom, you talked about denoising and Lightroom earlier, when lightroom works exactly the same across all these surfaces, you know, that power in terms of people saying, oh, my God, it's exactly the same. So I think the boundaries of what's on your personal computer and what's on a mobile device and what's in the cloud will certainly blur because you don't want to be tethered to a device or a computer together, access to whatever you want. And that power we've already started to see, and I think it'll increase because you can just describe it. It may not have that permanent structure that we talked about, but it'll get created for you on the fly, which is, I think, really powerful.

Neelai Patel

Do you see any limits to desktop chip architectures where you're saying, okay, this has to move like we want to do inference at scale. We're going to end up relying on the cloud more because inference at scale on a mobile device will make people's phones explode? Do you see any technical limitations? It's actually just the opposite. I mean, we had a great meeting with Qualcomm the other day, and certainly we talked to Nvidia and AMD and Qualcomm.

Shantanu Narayan

I think a lot of the training, that's the focus that's happening on the cloud, that's the infrastructure. I think the inference is going to increasingly get offloaded if you want a model for yourself based on your information, I think even today, with a billion parameters, there's no reason why that just doesn't get downloaded to your phone or downloaded to your pc, because otherwise all that compute power that we have in our hands or on our desktop is really not being used. So the models are more nascent in terms of how you can download it and offload that processing. But that's definitely going to happen without a doubt. In fact, it's already happening, and we are partnering with the companies that I talked about to figure out how that power of Photoshop can actually then be on your mobile device and on your desktop.

But we're a little early in that because we're still trying to learn and the model's getting on the server. I can't think of a company that is more tied to the general valence of the GPU market than Adobe. Literally, the capabilities you ship have always been at the boundary of GPU capabilities. Now that market is constrained in different ways. Different people want to buy GPU's for vastly different reasons.

Neelai Patel

Is that something you're thinking about? How will the GPU market shape is? The overwhelming financial pressure to optimize for training begins to alter the products themselves. For the most part, the product people look at it. I don't know anybody who says I've got enough processing power, or I've got enough network bandwidth, or I've got enough storage space.

Shantanu Narayan

I think all those will explode your rights. We tend to be a company that wants to exploit all of the above to deliver great value. But I think here's where the relationships over decades where you can have a conversation with Jensen and you talk about, hey, what are you guys doing? And how they want to partner with us. I think that partnership is so valuable in times like this because they want this to happen.

Neelai Patel

Yeah, well, Shantan, I think we are out of time. Thank you so much for being on decoder. Like I said, one of the first names I ever wrote down. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me.

Shantanu Narayan

Really enjoyed the conversation.

Neelai Patel

I'd like to thank Shantanu Ryan for taking the time to join Decoder. Like I said, I've been wanting to talk to him on the show since we started, so this was great. I'd also like to thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about the show, or really anything else.

You can email us@decoderge.com. Dot. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at reckless 1280 and we have a TikTok for as long as that lasts.

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Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox Nikstadt. It was edited by Cali Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is by breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

Why Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is confident we'll all adapt to AI

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1: Introduction

2: Adobe’s Evolution

3: Ethical Considerations of AI

4: Future of Adobe with AI

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