It feels almost inevitable that a model built on locking creativity behind recurring fees would eventually collide with a wave of tools that cost less, update faster, and feel more collaborative, intuitive, and — honestly — fun. Adobe thrived in the era where creative workflows were heavy, specialized, and software had steep learning curves. People accepted paying for Photoshop or Premiere because *there simply wasn’t anything else*. Then subscriptions came, and Adobe became the Microsoft Office of creativity: indispensable, sometimes annoying, but too entrenched to replace.
AI changed that dynamic faster than Adobe was culturally ready for. Suddenly, someone who never touched graphic design can generate logos, portraits, layouts, vector conversions, motion graphics, or video edits with a prompt. You don’t install anything. You don’t learn layers, masks, LUTs, blending modes, keyframes, fonts. You don’t necessarily even understand what those words mean. And the price? Often free, or low enough to feel disposable.
The threat isn’t just competition — it’s abstraction. Adobe built a business assuming the creator is a person who must spend years mastering tools; AI assumes the creator is anyone with intent.
Adobe’s defensive strategy — weaving AI into existing products instead of reinventing the workflow itself — looks a bit like Kodak sticking better film into a world that was already moving to memory cards. Firefly and AI masking tools are impressive, sure, but they still live inside a workflow philosophy built for 2005: assets, menus, panels, and export pipelines. Meanwhile, disruptive rivals like Runway, Midjourney, Canva, and OpenAI’s ecosystem are building new creative metaphors: generate, iterate, remix, share — not “file → save → export.”
And there’s another uncomfortable angle: younger creators don’t have nostalgia for Photoshop. They have TikTok, CapCut, Procreate, LumaFusion, Figma, and whatever AI-native app drops next week. Adobe’s moat isn’t emotional — it’s procedural and corporate.
AI is dissolving moats.
Adobe is still powerful, still profitable, still deeply embedded — especially in enterprise and Hollywood pipelines — but defensibility now depends on whether it can pivot from being a software provider to being a creative intelligence platform. So far, the shift feels cautious, almost hesitant, like they’re afraid to cannibalize the very product lines the market is already quietly abandoning.
And markets hate hesitation.
The story isn’t over, but the sentiment shift is real: Adobe is no longer seen as the future — just the default until the future finishes loading.