Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Adobe Inc.
Adobe CEO: Digital Customer Engagement | Mad Money | CNBC
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen tells Jim Cramer how its software products help organizations engage customers, from students to ...
About Shantanu Narayen
Shantanu Narayen, chairman and CEO of Adobe, said on the company’s Q2 FY2026 earnings call on June 11 that Adobe reported record revenue of $6.62 billion and raised its full-year revenue and non-GAAP EPS targets. He described AI as “accelerating customer behavior at an unprecedented speed” and said the company is shifting its strategy to prioritize freemium offerings through products like Adobe Firefly, Express, and Acrobat AI Assistant to accelerate user acquisition, even if it lowers short-term ARR growth. Narayen stated that Adobe is “continuously looking” at technology companies for potential tuck-in acquisitions, noting that many lack sustainable business models. He also said the board’s CEO search is “progressing well” following his announced plan to transition to board chair. At the Adobe Summit in April 2026, Narayen said the company is “living at a true inflection point” where AI is reshaping creativity and marketing, and argued that “creative control is more important than ever before.” He described Adobe’s opportunity as becoming “the AI platform for all creativity across every single surface,” comparing the potential to the disruption seen in AI coding markets. Narayen expressed confidence that the creative business is “extremely stable” and that Adobe is “uniquely qualified” to capture the AI opportunity, adding that the company intends to maintain a “singular focus” rather than diffuse its efforts.
Transcript (14 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Jim Cramer0:06
After spending some time lost in the wilderness, the cloud stocks have finally started making a comeback in recent days, including today. But isn't the rebound sustainable? Consider the case of Cramer's favorite, Adobe, the digital media titan. It's one of our cloud kings. And to close, Adobe reported a terrific, solid top and bottom line beat. Unfortunately, the guidance was viewed as a little weak, and the stock ended up getting slammed in after-hours trading. So is it a viable pullback, or do we need to be more cautious? Let's check in with Shantanu Narayen. He's the chair, president, and CEO of Adobe to get a better sense of the future and his company's prospects. Shantanu, welcome back to Mad Money.
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Shantanu Narayen0:41
Thanks for having me. Jim, always great to be on your show.
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Jim Cramer0:44
Thank you, Shantanu. Once again, fantastic quarter. I look at it as marketing and commerce are on fire, much better than expected. Are these the kind of customers that are the $33 or $0.99 customers, the $79.95 customers? Are these big customers or small and medium? What's doing it?
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Shantanu Narayen1:02
Well, Jim, we actually experienced growth across all three of our segments. When we looked at Creative Cloud and the net new ARR that we got in that segment of the business, that was a record for a Q3 many years after the introduction of the product. Document Cloud had an exceedingly strong quarter, and we're seeing tremendous adoption of our paper-to-digital initiatives. And on the Experience Cloud, again, 34% revenue growth. Every single enterprise needs to understand how you can engage digitally with customers. And I think what's unique about Adobe is this is every customer, from a K-12 student to an individual freelancer, all the way to the largest enterprises in the world. The breadth of our offerings and our customers is truly fueling this success.
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Jim Cramer1:53
I'm now getting a feeling that if you're involved in anything creative at any university or even any high school, you have become the standard. That's in America. Is that also becoming worldwide?
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Shantanu Narayen2:07
Well, we will restore, Jim, about the fact that instead of just a focus on STEM, we love STEAM because the world without arts would be an exceedingly boring place. One of the things we actually did this quarter was we have a new ambassador network in educational institutions. To your point, we're targeting over a hundred colleges where these students are actually being the evangelists for explaining why creative needs to be part of the curricula. So getting that younger generation excited about expressing themselves, we certainly believe that's going to fuel our growth. But in addition to that, as we come up on MAX, which is the largest creativity conference in the world in November, I think what you're going to see from our innovation roadmap across new areas like immersive content, what's happening with gaming, what's happening across devices that now have styluses, we announced a new product called Fresco for art and illustration. So the breadth of our products is amazing, but you're absolutely right, it's about getting these customers young and enabling them to tell their story.
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Jim Cramer3:13
I don't know if people realize when you talk about a mid-30% growth, the average growth for a lot of the retailers I use, because you guys are in every bit of part of commerce, is not as strong as your growth, which means that you're both, I believe, taking share and also expanding the market.
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Shantanu Narayen3:33
You're right, Jim. I mean, what is really unique right now about our digital experience solutions is that we have the first mile and the first mile is content management, it's the web infrastructure, it's mobile applications that people use to engage with enterprises. And we have the last mile in commerce, that's the Magento acquisition that we did a while ago, which enables you to make every experience shoppable. Magento had a great quarter, we grew that bookings 40% year-over-year in Q3. And so I know you talk a lot about your rule of 40, Jim, we're blowing that away when you think about our growth rates as well as our margin.
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Jim Cramer4:12
Now let's show the other that we said you were the least expensive high cap growth stock. Now I want people to understand how important the Adobe MAX conference is in November. That has often been where you lay out the guidance for your coming fiscal year. There are a lot of people after the close today who are selling your stock because they're looking at the guidance you're giving us. I have always felt that the guidance I care about is the November guidance, and if you're trading off this guidance, you may be missing an opportunity. I'm not saying you're doing anything that isn't being too conservative, but it has been this quarter that you and I have been together where there are people who trade the stock instead of own it. That has been an unwise way to own Adobe. Correct?
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Shantanu Narayen4:57
Well, we do look forward to the analyst meeting, as you point out, Jim. That's when we lay out the growth opportunities ahead of us. We talked last year about how we had a greater than $100 billion addressable market opportunity. We're growing the top line 20%, our Q4 targets show that revenue growth will be north of 20% with EPS growth accelerating even above that. So we're in rarefied atmosphere. We're focused on delivering an incredible innovation roadmap across all three of our clouds, and we look forward to sharing more about our forward-looking strategy at the analyst meeting that you allude to at MAX.
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Jim Cramer5:38
The one thing we have to do is our last question, but the artificial intelligence component you showed us blew our minds away. How ingrained is it now into your commerce package?
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Shantanu Narayen5:50
Well, our artificial intelligence framework is called Adobe Sensei, Jim, and it's embedded across every one of our products. It's when you look at a piece of content and say, 'How did they do that?' There's probably an aspect of Adobe Sensei in that. The fact that we have hundreds of trillions of transactions we're processing on behalf of our enterprise customers, and we can predict in real time, you've talked about the Adobe Digital Index which talks about shopping patterns globally, that coming from Adobe Sensei. And so it's a part and it's a fabric of all of our innovation, and we're excited to unveil new innovation soon.
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Jim Cramer6:31
Well, congratulations. I think the people who trade the stock and not own it have been gravely mistaken. They will do so once again. Shantanu Narayen, thank you so much, chairman, president, CEO of Adobe. Good to see you, sir.
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Shantanu Narayen6:44
Great to be on your show, Jim.