Hey

Liam here…

I just got back from Adobe Summit 2026, and I want to try something a little different today.

Instead of our usual daily run of stories and tools, I'm going to walk you through what it was actually like on the ground…. The keynote that had everyone talking, the four Adobe executives I sat down with, and most importantly, the big macro shifts you need to know. 

The 4 Adobe execs I sat down with (more on this below):

1. Ian Wang, VP & Head of Product, Adobe Express

2. Vivek Pandya, Director @ Adobe Digital Insights

3. Aaron Mitchell Finegold, Enterprise AI @ Adobe

4. Sahil Gupta, Sr Director of Partnerships @ Adobe

📰 The Jensen Huang Keynote

Forgive my blurry camera

Jensen's message was simple and sharp. Agentic AI is already here, and if you’re a business owner, you can’t afford to be behind on this one. Agents last year were exciting and new. Today, they’re fundamental to your future success.

He backed it up with a data point from inside NVIDIA that I keep coming back to: 100% of their software engineers are now paired with agents, and they're busier than ever, not displaced. If you’re not already working with agents, then it might be time to reconsider your decisions.

That was Jensen's half. The rest of the keynote, and every announcement that followed, told me where Adobe itself is placing its chips.

Adobe is leaning all the way into being the connective tissue: the layer that stitches models, teams, and brand rules into a single repeatable system. The old unit was a tool you handed a designer or a marketer; the new unit is an end-to-end agentic workflow that runs the work alongside them, with governance and brand intelligence baked in so the enterprise legal team will actually sign off.

Genius move in my opinion, and pretty affirming to my general thesis that the big gains over the next decade are to be found in platform + audience.

P.S. If you want to see the full keynote, you can watch it here.

📰 My Conversations with 4 Adobe Executives

During my time at the Adobe Summit 2026, I sat down with various executives for 20-30 minutes each. I brought my Sony FX30, and Adobe also let me record a full 30 with Vivek Pandya in their on-site studio (yes, get excited about the crispy 8k quality). I’ll likely release these interviews in the next 4-8 weeks, so we’ll let you know when they go live!

Here’s the 4 macro shifts I picked up on through my conversations with the Adobe execs:

Shift #1: The bottleneck in your business just moved (Ian Wang, Adobe Express)

Ian Wang runs product for Adobe Express, which is the Adobe tool built for everyone who isn't a designer. Social posts, decks, quick edits, the everyday stuff the 400 million people who'll never open Photoshop still need to produce every week. Talking to him about where Express is heading, one idea kept sticking with me. When you give a non-designer an agent that actually does the work, not just suggests options, something quietly shifts in a business that most leaders haven't noticed yet. For twenty years, the scarce resource was output: how many campaigns, decks, or assets a team could ship. That problem is almost solved. The new scarce resource is judgment, the taste to know what to ask for and what to kill.

Shift #2: Search, as you know it, is being quietly absorbed (Vivek Pandya, Adobe Digital Insights)

Vivek Pandya runs Adobe Digital Insights, and his data on AI search is the most urgent research I've read this year. The questions people used to Google are now getting asked to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Customers are learning about your category without ever visiting your site, and if your brand doesn't show up inside those answers, you're losing awareness long before the traffic drops.

Shift #3: The agentic content supply chain is here (Aaron Finegold, Firefly Enterprise)

Aaron Finegold leads product marketing for Firefly Enterprise, and most of our conversation was about one idea: the agentic content supply chain. Content creation used to be a series of handoffs… brief to strategist, to designer, to editor, to reviewer, to publisher. His thesis: AI agents can now orchestrate that entire pipeline end-to-end. So instead of having a human in the loop at every single step, we can just have one operator directing a chain of specialized agents from idea to live campaign. Taste is everything.

Shift #4: Your partnership stack is now as strategic as your product roadmap (Sahil Gupta, Strategic Partnerships)

Sahil Gupta runs strategic partnerships at Adobe, and what I took from our conversation wasn't a product lesson; it was a lens on how Adobe is playing the AI era. Instead of trying to build every model in-house, Adobe is stitching together the best of the ecosystem: NVIDIA, IBM, Google Cloud, Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Accenture… the list goes on. The meta point: in an AI-native company, who you're building with matters as much as what you're building.

🚀 Special Thanks

Throughout my time at the Adobe conference, there were more people than I can possibly count who helped arrange everything I needed. I’ll never do the teams full justice, but I want to give a special thanks to:

1. Tia Bagha

2. Nisa Chavez Taylor

3. Patrick Heffernan 

4. April Osburn

5. Bella Aguila

6. Jacob Pineda

7. Patrick Gevas

8. Norma Garcia

9. All of the other incredible staff whom I’ve failed to mention here