Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is stepping down after 18 years—as pressure on the company mounts to deliver on AI

https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/adobe-ceo-shantanu-narayen-stepping-down-after-18-years-pressure-deliver-ai/

29 Comments

  1. Adobe took one of the most widely used content creation software pipelines – Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat, After Effects – and enshitified it and raised the price until nobody wants to use it.

  2. I can’t blame someone for not wanting to take part in this AI fuckfest. If I was CEO for 18 years, assuming I had some financial sense, I’d be set for life. Now seems like a great time to retire.

  3. desxentrising on

    it’s ALMOST like people don’t like a bunch of shitty pop ups pushing their 100 new half assed AI integrations and deceitful methods to push subscriptions . almost.

  4. TrumpisaRussianCuck on

    The woes of the creative cloud side of the business are well known but the digital experience side of the business that makes up like 25% of their revenue is also a joke. They went out on an acquisition spree to build it and then never properly integrated it all together so it’s a hodge podge of shit that they sold to enterprise clients with a good sales team. Most enterprises have now woken up to that.

  5. Is this why I get “AI suggestions” to summarize a 2-page pdf because it is “too long”?

  6. Thanks to Adobe for pioneering the idea if you cancel early you have to pay out the remaining year as a “cancellation fee” 

  7. I’ll tell you what Adobe is delivering. They’re auto-turning on their AI bullshit in Adobe Acrobat and sending the documents you open to their cloud without telling you. Just like Microsoft did with their Onedrive scam.

    All of these mother fuckers are actively stealing our documents.

  8. I feel like it’s insane how they avoid the screaming. WE DOn’T WANT AI IF IT COSTS SO MUCH AND YOU ACTIVELY HATE YOUR CUSTOMERS.

  9. darren_meier on

    Adobe has been really struggling for a while to figure out how to implement AI into their subscription services in a way people actually desire. I remember searching the forums for how to solve a random issue in illustrator and one of the comments was an answer from an Adobe support person *soliciting people to offer feedback about new ways they’d like to see Adobe use AI in Illustrator.* The response was… very predictable, very direct, and *painfully* unkind.

    TLDR: Adobe is slowly discovering abandoning their core competencies to shoehorn AI into every nook and cranny is an excellent way to lose their userbase.

  10. Candid_Cat_5921 on

    A lot of the stuff “normal consumers” used Photoshop for can now be done with annotations and prompts in <choose your favorite LLM>. Adobe has a very tough road ahead.

  11. mrwaterhouse on

    They tried so hard to catch AI and saw it coming so clearly but without a foundation model there’s no chance

  12. Why are shareholders so damn gung-ho about ai, this is the worst way for a technological advancement to happen, shareholders en masse know nothing about tech

  13. Old-Bat-7384 on

    How about less AI, less bloat, better optimization, and lower non-enterprise license fees?

    They’re doing Microsoft level shit and coasting real hard on smart decisions made decades ago and finding new ways to fuck that up.

  14. luffydkenshin on

    Shareholders mounting pressure to deliver AI.

    Consumers mounting pressure *not* to deliver AI.

  15. aubergineshinobi on

    Used to be Inkscape was the cheaper and slightly clunkier Illustrator. Reading these comments has me wondering if it’s now just strictly better.

    Inkscape forever 🫶

  16. yeahnoyeahsure on

    Photoshop is sooooo expensive. When I was a kid you bought the cd rom and were set. You only upgraded when the new software got cool enough or your old software would run on your new OS. Bring back flat rate software purchases

  17. Arnold_Shortzweather on

    I feel like Adobe has driven so many people away to different software through too many different ways – price hikes, mandatory subscriptions, AI slop software, that it might be too late for them to regain their market share.

  18. Who wants to pay for photoshop if it’s going to do everything for you? The point is to enable us to create. If they push AI they’re just another AI image generator.

  19. Ok-Region6452 on

    Every adobe software has turned into a pile of Ai bloatware. I stopped using acrobat for pdf due to their unsolicited bloatware

  20. Gloriathewitch on

    what pressure? basically noone asked for AI and theres virtually no evidence that it would boost productivity or profits, the whole industry is a giant scam and we need to let it die just like nfts

  21. We dumped Acrobat at our office because of the AI nonsense. Couldn’t turn it off. So now Adobe gets $0 from us.

  22. all these big mouthed ceos are failures in the long run, all of them. The ceo job is the most useless one of a company and should and can be replaced with AI asap. Good for shareholders as they dont have to pay somebody millions to then lie to them.

  23. There’s no company I have more conflicting feeling towards than Adobe.

    I actually don’t have any conflict. They’re the worst company! I do like their software. Yar Har Fiddle-Dee-Dee! Though I do hate the AI shit they’ve been pushing as of late.

  24. Agreeable_Deer9163 on

    New idea: stop wasting money on updating the tools to appease shareholders. AI is not desired by most people. Why create something without a solid business case? Do what you’re good at, fix the problems with those tools, then enhance the tools with features that people actually want. 

    Not a single one of these tech bros actually gives a shit about the consumer anymore. It’s all about how to exploit the consumer for short-term gains, whether it be public or private, real or manufactured. 

    Everything around us is turning into dog shit that we don’t even get to own.