Artificial intelligence will change many things – and the American software provider Adobe already has a plan on how to take advantage of these changes: It will rent out its AI tools. Just as he was the first major software company to put the entire range of his creative programs into the data cloud, from Photoshop to Lightroom and Illustrator, and brought them to market as a subscription service. That was almost exactly ten years ago.

Stephan Finsterbusch

Editor in business.

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Since then, the Group's sales and profits have increased almost fivefold. The share price has increased tenfold, and the number of employees has almost tripled to 30,000. Technology is a job engine, says Scott Belsky, the company's chief strategist. This will remain the case in the age of AI. With the new technologies come new possibilities. According to him, Adobe is clearly on a growth trajectory.

"We saw the development around generative AI systems coming years ago," he explains. "So we can keep pushing the pace and roll out our own generative AI over the coming weeks and months." Software vendors of all classes and categories are currently in the process of equipping their programs, products and services with artificial intelligence. "We have been active in this field for a long time," he says. "This is our moment."

Huge range of possibilities

The trend that companies such as Open AI, Microsoft and Google are following are so-called Large Language Models (LLM), i.e. language models based on a specific type of AI, says Belsky: "What we do is not language-based, but image-based." An AI image generator is trained to create realistic or artistic images. "The entire digital world is personified by such systems," says Belsky. "This not only gives creative professions an almost infinite range of new possibilities."

Adobe has been developing its own artificial intelligence systems for almost ten years. The company feeds these systems with data from its in-house image databases, built its first AI platform with Sensei seven years ago and has just released an image generator with Firefly. The company now has a thousand cooperation partners in the field of AI and works with Alphabet, among others. Firefly will also be deployed in Bard, Google's experimental AI service. In addition, the company has developed the so-called "Content Credentials", a system for authentication, which can be used to expose counterfeits and uncover copyright infringements.

Tailor-made AI

Firefly has been available in a trial version via a website on the Internet since March. The system covers a wide range of options, from text to image creation, photo editing and editing to alienation effects. It can also be used not only with creative software, but also with marketing and analysis programs. Adobe has experience in this area.

In 2016, for example, the board of directors introduced Adobe Sensei – an AI platform that runs various of the company's products. The advantage: Instead of an external AI, an in-house AI is provided. Sensei is in fact tailor-made; and that gives Adobe a head start in the AI boom.

With Firefly, the next step is now being taken. A hype has developed around the system on social media. No wonder: the use of the Firefly trial version is still free of charge. But that is about to change. In the foreseeable future, according to Adobe's head of strategy Belsky, there will be a price tag attached to AI. The addressable market is then $200 billion.

This is already allowing investors to access the stock market today. Many of them already seem to be convinced of the success of Firefly. Adobe's share price rose 30 percent over the month. At the end of this week, it gained a further 7 percent – to just under 420 euros. That gives the company, with annual revenue of $20 billion, a market value of nearly $190 billion.