Las Vegas: On Tuesday, Shantanu Narayen, the chief govt of California-based tech agency Adobe, led the corporate’s two-hour-long pitch to persuade companies and analysts that within the race amongst Massive Tech corporations to promote their improvements in synthetic intelligence (AI), it warrants a seat on the high. Whereas a brand new full-stack agentic AI platform would see Adobe rival the likes of Salesforce, its key executives are clear about one factor: promoting AI to companies nonetheless received’t be a simple job.

In the long term, Adobe needs to change into the one-stop software program vendor to companies for all functions—together with letting them entry third-party foundational AI fashions equivalent to Google’s Gemini for reasoning duties, and Runway’s Gen-3 and past for generative videography duties.

Wall Avenue, nevertheless, didn’t react kindly to Adobe’s bulletins. On Tuesday, after opening at $395.96 per share on the Nasdaq change, Adobe’s shares fell 2.6% after the bulletins at one level, however recovered mildly to shut at $391.37 per share.

Adobe shouldn’t be the one tech agency going through scepticism on AI choices. On 26 February, Amazon unveiled Alexa ‘Plus’—a generative AI expertise with the corporate’s Echo vary of sensible audio system—that the tech agency is seeking to monetize by making it obtainable solely to subscribers. The catch: if customers purchase a brand new Echo system with Alexa Plus enabled, there can be no choice to opt-out of sending varied samples of recorded voice inputs to Amazon, all for ‘enhancing’ its AI choices.

Very similar to Adobe, Amazon’s AI pitch was largely ignored by buyers. Since its AI unveiling final month, Amazon’s share value on Nasdaq has declined by greater than 10% to $192.82 as of Tuesday’s closing bell.

Unsure returns

The scepticism could also be coming largely from the unsure returns on funding from AI. As an example, Adobe’s numbers don’t fairly present quite a lot of pleasure in regards to the uptake of its deepest enterprise play to date.

“We’ve already generated $125 million in our first quarter of this fiscal from pure-play AI subscriptions and gross sales and, by the tip of this fiscal, we count on the AI income to double to $250 million,” Eliot ‘Ely’ Greenfield, international chief technical officer of Adobe’s digital media enterprise, informed Mint.

The numbers pale when taken within the bigger context: in its first quarter of reporting between December 2024 and February 2025, Adobe reported web income of $5.71 billion. AI, thus, accounted for a meagre 2.2% of its total income.

Analysts Mint spoke with mentioned Adobe’s predicament is a blueprint for all Massive Tech corporations—whereas generative AI is transformative, its enterprise influence is but to translate into actuality.

The tech leaders, in truth, are accepting that there is a problem. “Innovating to construct AI with out utilizing third-party, open-source datasets is like constructing with our handcuffs on,” Greenfield mentioned. “It positively does prohibit the extent to which the efficiency of our AI fashions might have improved to date, in addition to the range and high quality of outcomes that it might have produced in the present day.”

He added that Adobe continues to be doing it in the present day to make sure that extra companies notice there are “tangible returns by way of saved manpower hours, extra window for creativity and higher focused advertising and marketing through the use of our AI brokers”.

In the long term, Greenfield expects buyer billing from Adobe’s generative AI providing to select up tempo. “It’s not going to be instantaneous, however to guarantee that it’s a easy upward climb, we’re bundling collectively help for third-party AI fashions as effectively to offer clients as a lot of a alternative as we will—all of the whereas providing authorized indemnification from AI lawsuits when Adobe’s personal fashions are used,” he mentioned.

The copyright conundrum

The sluggish tempo of development, analysts mentioned, is a transparent signal that with out infringements and pitfalls, Massive Tech could battle to promote its AI innovation to purchasers. “Adobe has gone the protected manner and performed it conservatively in its generative AI push—and its technique is but to be confirmed. It has to date failed to supply an thrilling AI income roadmap to Wall Avenue—Tuesday’s occasion is all about attempting to vary that notion,” mentioned Kashyap Kompella, AI analyst and founding father of tech consultancy, RPA2AI.

To make certain, each OpenAI and Google are embroiled in copyright infringement lawsuits, the place events together with The New York Occasions Firm Restricted are pushing fees, claiming that the tech corporations used copyrighted materials to coach industrial AI fashions. The 2 tech majors—one the face of generative AI and different the founding sponsor—are lobbying the US authorities to qualify using any public data to coach AI fashions as “honest utilization”. The US authorities, on 25 February, opened filings for public feedback—and far of AI’s industrial success hinges upon this verdict.

“The uptake of AI is unquestionably there in advertising and marketing initiatives, however for probably the most half, many entrepreneurs are conservative in regards to the uptake of generative AI purely from the copyright infringement perspective,” Billy Seabrook, international chief design officer at tech integrator IBM Consulting, informed Mint. “Whereas Adobe’s Firefly mannequin does assist in producing copyright-free video and artistic illustration content material, its effectiveness in efficiency is probably going restricted to being background fillers. Others equivalent to Midjourney and Google’s Imagen are superior, however can’t be taken up by industrial content material creators.”

Others, too, are satisfied that for now, Massive Tech’s largest problem is their very own pitfall—that of failing to persuade companies in promoting AI with out lawsuits.

“Finally, all tech corporations will begin pushing tougher. Every firm has spent billions of {dollars} in AI analysis and growth, so none will let go of generative AI so simply. However, the challenges will stay a minimum of till there may be regulatory readability, or the fashions change into adequate with self-contained re-training upon a finite dataset,” mentioned Jayanth Kolla, co-founder and companion of AI and expertise consulting agency, Convergence Catalyst.

“The thought is straightforward—ultimately, all layers of enterprise automation can be bundled into tech platforms that can promote generative AI integrators to distributors. However, till insurance policies are tightened and lawsuits get a particular route and precedent a minimum of in some main geography, AI gross sales can be sluggish—and Massive Tech’s returns on their generative AI bets will maintain getting pushed into the long run. It’s taking place proper now—and it’s affecting not simply Massive Tech, however India’s largest tech outsourcing corporations as their AI income ought to have already change into a sizeable phase to report,” Kolla added.

The author is in Las Vegas, US, on Adobe’s invitation.