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

Today, I’m talking with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Shantanu’s been at the top of my list of people I’ve wanted to talk to for the show since we first launched — he’s led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he doesn’t do too many wide-ranging interviews. 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 has an enormously long and influential history when it comes to creative software. It began in the early 1980s, developing something called PostScript that became the first industry-standard language for connecting computers to printers — a huge deal at the time. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, it released the first versions of software that’s now so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine the computing and design industries without them. Adobe created the PDF, the document standard everyone now kind of loves to hate, as well as programs like Illustrator, Premiere, and — of course — Photoshop. If you work in a creative field, it’s a near certainty that there’s Adobe software running somewhere close to you.

All that influence puts Adobe right at the center of the whole web of tensions we like to talk about on Decoder — especially as the company has evolved its business and business model over time. Shantanu joined the company in 1998, back when desktop software was a thing you sold on a shelf. He was with the company when it started bundling a whole bunch of its flagship products into the Creative Suite, and he was the CEO who led the company’s pivot to subscription software with Creative Cloud in 2012. He also led some big acquisitions that turned into Adobe’s large but under-the-radar marketing business — so much of what gets made in tools like Photoshop is marketing and advertising collateral, after all, and the company is a growing business in helping businesses create, distribute, and track the performance of all that work around the web.

Leave a Comment