Adobe is among the most AGI-vulnerable large-cap companies: its tools serve knowledge workers who are directly in AGI's crosshairs, and AI already generates the creative outputs those tools produce.
Adobe is a global software company that provides creative, marketing, and document management solutions. Its flagship products include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat, delivered primarily via cloud subscriptions through Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud. Adobe has transitioned from perpetual licenses to a SaaS model and is a dominant player in creative professional tools, digital marketing analytics, and PDF/e-signature workflows.
Adobe serves a broad range of customers including individual creative professionals (graphic designers, photographers, video editors), small and medium businesses, large enterprises, marketing teams, government agencies, and educational institutions. Its Experience Cloud targets enterprise marketing and IT departments at Fortune 500 companies. Document Cloud serves virtually all industries needing PDF and e-signature workflows.
Adobe's entire product suite serves knowledge workers and creatives. Generative AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, Sora, Runway, etc.) already directly competes with Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. AGI could generate production-ready graphics, videos, layouts, and documents from natural language prompts, making complex creative software suites unnecessary. Adobe Firefly is an attempt to stay relevant, but it commoditizes Adobe's own core value proposition. Adobe's customers are graphic designers, video editors, UI/UX designers, marketers, and content creators - quintessential knowledge workers. If AGI can produce marketing materials, website designs, video content, and documents autonomously, the demand for human creative professionals drops dramatically. Fewer designers means fewer Photoshop licenses. Fewer video editors means fewer Premiere Pro subscriptions.