The Market’s Blind Spot on Adobe: AI Isn’t Just Accelerating Existing Users — It’s Exploding the Entire Funnel The prevailing bear thesis on Adobe $ADBE — that generative AI threatens its creative software empire — gets the story exactly backwards. AI isn’t cannibalizing Adobe. It’s amplifying it. The single most overlooked dynamic in the market right now is this: Generative AI is dramatically expanding Adobe’s top of funnel by onboarding tens of millions of people who never previously considered themselves “creators.” These are not the traditional $60/month Creative Cloud power users. They are: Small-business owners Social-media creators Marketing teams at non-creative companies Students, hobbyists, and side hustlers Gen Z freelancers raised on Canva and mobile-first tools And crucially: they’re entering through AI-first, frictionless products — Firefly’s web app, the new AI-native Adobe Express, and Photoshop for web’s free tier — then graduating into paid ecosystems as their skills, projects, and ambitions grow. The Numbers Make the Story Unmistakable Adobe Express added 15 million monthly active users in the last year — with 70% of new users citing generative AI as the reason they signed up. Firefly’s standalone web app has already produced 18 billion images, overwhelmingly from users outside the Creative Cloud base. On Adobe’s Q4 call, management emphasized that “a meaningful portion of Firefly users are net-new to Adobe,” and that the fastest-growing paid conversion cohort is coming from these AI-native users. ...