The man who might run Adobe
The head of Adobe's Digital Media business on AI, creators, and CEO succession. Also: OpenAI shifts the AI race, RIP Om Malik, and weekend links.
Happy Friday. I’m en route back to Los Angeles after a busy Cannes Lions week of meetings and interviews. Today, I’ve got an interview with one of Adobe’s top execs from Cannes, and a feed check on OpenAI’s big model release today, good links, and more.
On the punishingly hot final day of Cannes Lions, I sat down with David Wadhwani, who runs most of Adobe’s businesses, on the company’s stretch of sand behind the Palais. I wanted to hear his reaction to the argument that has gotten loud in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street: that AI is chipping away at Adobe at every layer of its business.
Mad Men to AI
This year was Adobe’s largest Cannes presence yet, with a creator-themed beach space, podcast studios, and a bunch of panels, including one with Wadhwani and podcaster Steven Bartlett.
Wadhwani has come three years in a row. This was my first time, and we traded notes on how the festival has changed over the years, from the Mad Men, agency-led advertising era, to when tech platforms like Google and Spotify became dominant, and how this year, AI and creators dominated the week.
“Demand for brands using creators has gone through the roof,” he told me. That much was evidenced this week at Cannes: UTA built its own beach space for the first time, OpenAI and Anthropic both sponsored creators who attended the festival, Substack and Beehiiv sent bigger delegations than ever, and there was, of course, my creator economy panel at Yahoo’s beach space on Monday. For its part, Adobe sponsored a new, official creator track that brought a bunch of creators to participate in panels and mingle with CMOs all week.
Token pricing
In Silicon Valley, the story on Adobe is death by a thousand startups, combined with competition from more nimble, younger rivals like Canva and Figma. Nearly every week, I see a new AI startup coming for part of the Adobe stack, each promising to one-shot what used to take a Creative Cloud subscription to get done.
