Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Wadhwani: Kash, I think there was about three or four questions, but all related. So, happy to take those really quickly. Nicely played. First of all, this is really about increasing the total number of users, we believe, very strongly. As we talked about at MAX, this is about enhancing human creativity, not replacing it. And ultimately, whether you are an individual solo printer SMB or enterprise, we are hearing the same thing, which is that you need to create more content than you are able to create today. And so this really plays well into our core strengths. As you know, we have got a decades-long focus on AI, things like neural filters and object selection. And hundreds of other features have been based on AI for us, and they have increased creativity, and they have increased productivity, and they have helped people keep up with the demand for content.

They have also made it easier for people to onboard into the experiences, and so we have been able to broaden the opportunity for people to start leveraging and using our core products. We have now been able to leverage the hundreds of people that are in our research organization and really target them towards generative technology, which we believe is a huge step forward, leveraging all of the work we have done, but a huge step forward going forward. And we and everyone else in the industry are still in the early innings. So, to give you a sense of where we are going at MAX, we talked about our vision for effectively not just creating content, but really engaging and embedding it in the existing workflows to create a creative copilot we refer to it as.

And since then, we have been very hard at work at creating our own model, and the model that we are focused on is around output quality. So, it’s about best-of-breed generative AI. But combining that with the Adobe magic that we have talked about over the years and all of the technology we have that takes images and makes them better, and so the output quality, we think is going to be differentiated. The second thing is around commercial reuse. There is a lot of complex questions here around copyrights, around diversity and inclusion, about harmful content that’s being created. That’s something we take very seriously, and we are embedding that into everything we do. And the third thing is really about workflow integration. Creating an image is just the start.

It’s not the end. And Adobe is the only player that has a full end-to-end workflow, not just within the products and the tools that we have in the digital media business, but also everything that Anil is doing around the content workflow and the content supply chain out to the point of distribution. And in fact, because of this, we are seeing other gentech companies wanting to partner with us more and more, and so we feel like we are in a really advantaged position where we are going to come out with our own model and we are going to be partnering with others to make sure that because of our distribution and the place we play in the market, we can bring a lot of this value to actual fruition. And stay tuned, next week at Summit, where we have a lot of exciting announcements and progress to make there.

And then last to your, I think fourth or fifth question.

Kash Rangan: Monetization, yes, correct.

David Wadhwani: Monetization, we are very excited about what this means for the business. New user onboarding. We think that, again, if you can start to imagine yourself as creative by using a text prompt, we can take you through that full journey and onboard you into other Adobe offerings. It’s also great for retention. We have always seen the more value that gets used in our core offerings, the better the retention rates and the better the LTV. And we think there is up-sell opportunity. We do think these are distinct new packages that we can bring to market and up-sell people to.

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