Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Adobe Inc.
Adobe CEO: Revolutionizing Creativity | Mad Money | CNBC
Jim Cramer logged in with CEO Shantanu Narayen on how the company has designed a 75 percent move higher so far in 2017.
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 (22 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Jim Cramer0:05
When the stock of a fantastic company sells off hard, if you're seemingly good quarter, maybe you gotta use that as a buying opportunity. Just consider the case of the stock of Adobe Systems, ADBE, the world's leading maker of digital media and marketing software that's been taking the cloud by storm for years now. If you want your business to put its best foot forward on the web, I don't know, you got to go to Adobe. Their design platform is indeed second to none. That's why the stock has been so red-hot. But when Adobe reported mid-September, the stock got slammed. I'm not kidding, went from 155 down to 145, even though it's a classic beat and raise quarter. That was your moment to buy, because the weakness barely lasted a month. Mid-October, Adobe is just some very strong gains. The stock took off. It is now up 75% for the year. This is why I'm often talking about buying the stocks of great American companies when nothing's going wrong except the sellers taking profits or mistakenly panicking out. That's your chance. Adobe stock is living proof. Earlier today I got a chance to sit down with Shantanu Narayen. Here's the chairman and CEO of Adobe, an incredibly exciting company that's doing so much to democratize business around the world. Take a look.
We're here at this unbelievable Adobe facility in San Francisco. I just saw a product that will revolutionize the way people think of things. The drawing turns into 3D. $50 a month is what it costs for me to get that.
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Shantanu Narayen1:30
Well, the Creative Cloud, as you know Jim, is all about revolutionizing creativity for all of us. And the more power we can put in the hands of everybody who has a story to tell, the better off I think the world is in terms of design and aesthetics. And it's great to welcome you here.
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Jim Cramer1:47
Thank you. And I keep thinking, if I were a small business person, I can compete against a big business person, which by the way is about democracy. I mean, there is a level of economic democracy here that is far more than any government can give.
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Shantanu Narayen1:59
Digital is the key touchpoint in terms of building a new business and disrupting existing businesses. And the more Adobe can do to enable digital to be an enabler for everybody's business, that's when we are putting the power of digital experiences in everybody's hands. To your point, whether it's travel and hospitality, whether it's airlines, whether it's retail, whether it's education, digital is going to transform these businesses. This is no longer just the chief marketing officer. Digital content companies must be digitized to compete with others, and I don't know another way to be able to do it better than Adobe.
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Jim Cramer2:37
I also know people can figure it out. I mean, because it's so explosive that sometimes you're our own minds are the gating factor.
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Shantanu Narayen2:44
The trick is really gonna be when somebody has this incredible creative idea, how artificial intelligence and what we are doing with Adobe Sensei can really transform it. We had a MAX conference and we introduced five new products. But one of the things we actually showed, Jim, was that people could talk and say, 'Find me an image that has a mountain in it, change the orientation, add color to it.' And so I think everybody can speak to computers. And if we can harness that idea, then I think we will put it in the hands of every single creative. I'm not hearing the need to learn how to be a coder from Stanford with a degree in computer science. We've always changed STEM to be STEAM because the world without arts would be a very boring place. But clearly the magic that's happening is from our product people who are the computer science geniuses who are making this available.
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Jim Cramer3:37
Well, what's interesting to me is that you raised at the most recent conference, you raised the total addressable market for all the clouds. One of them is $2083 billion, and people reacted with applause. But to me, could it be a trillion dollars? We're in rarefied atmosphere as it relates to a company that's growing our top line, growing the bottom line 30% in terms of our targets for next year, and with the operating margin that we have. You're not a small company, you're one of the largest companies on earth, and you're growing at that rate.
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Shantanu Narayen4:09
The two strategic imperatives that we have, Jim, empowering people to create and helping businesses transform, has never been more relevant. And the fact that we've combined those two opportunities where digital is front and center, we're absolutely in a unique place, and we continue to innovate at a pace that I think is unparalleled.
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Jim Cramer4:29
I've noticed throughout a theme: Microsoft Azure combination with you makes it so that very quickly people on the cloud again. That tells me that the democracies were what we really were.
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Shantanu Narayen4:43
We were early with Microsoft in saying we have a shared vision associated with as people are moving to the cloud, how can you do everything from the infrastructure that they provide to the marketing services and creative services? We signed a partnership with them on signatures, so now our signatures are gonna be embedded in Office as well as in SharePoint. And I think when two companies have a shared vision of how to put customers front and center and are executing against it, magic can happen.
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Jim Cramer5:09
Well, okay, so we've got the big holiday season. I'm a retailer, I've got to be able to convey what my goods are, and I recognize that these Millennials don't want to go to the store. Can I compete with bricks and mortar just with this?
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Shantanu Narayen5:22
Well, we have, as you know, the Adobe Digital Index report. We just announced some really interesting statistics yesterday. We think it'll be the first $100 billion online digital season ever. We announced that mobile will actually cross the PC in terms of where all of these transactions are happening. And we actually gave a glimpse of some of the key things that are top of mind for all consumers. So if we can democratize that information, then somebody who's producing great goods always has an opportunity.
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Jim Cramer5:53
Well, a person who's in the room with ideas for a pillow, with ideas for a blanket, with ideas for a convenience, they can create it by just doing a sketch, put it online, and then they may look like they're the largest department store in the world.
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Shantanu Narayen6:12
We're bringing the whole world together, right? In terms of if somebody has a creative idea and they want to correspond or collaborate with somebody halfway around the world who can actually do the manufacturing, instead of that process going from electronic to paper to digital to paper, it can just be completely transformed. And as you know, velocity in business is perhaps the thing that everybody is aspiring towards.
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Jim Cramer6:35
Well, I saw I know retailers, and you know, you'll get on the council and say we have to cut the time from nine months from the designer to when it's in the store because it's already out of date. I mean, it's just nine hours it could potentially be nine hours, it could potentially be nine minutes if you are ordering it.
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Shantanu Narayen6:54
And you know, I think again, as we spoke to democratizing the whole aspect of what is creativity for me, and putting that in the hands of people, and then helping those businesses transform. What is happening on the business side is when you're McDonald's, you're moving all of the screens to now be digital so you can order online and with a mobile device. If you're Mastercard, you're completely transforming how you look at all the information that you've got and making that power and harnessing that power with Adobe Sensei and the data that we possess, I think is going to be a unique advantage for us.
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Jim Cramer7:27
How does Adobe help underprivileged kids in tough school districts where they otherwise would be left behind?
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Shantanu Narayen7:35
Well, John and Chuck, who co-founded the company, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, they decided to give back, Jim, well before it became sort of popular. And we have been giving away one percent of net profits to underprivileged kids. Our belief is that today, if you grow up and you don't have access to digital literacy, it used to be reading, writing, and arithmetic when I grew up, and now it's digital. And so through Adobe Youth Voices and a project called Project 1324, we're like, how do we enable everybody in high school or in K through 12 who has a story to tell to have access to digital literacy and to be able to further their cause? It's a very meaningful story for every Adobe employee, and we're proud to be part of that.
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Jim Cramer8:17
Oh, one last thing. A lot of people think of Adobe as PDF. Remarkably, 200 billion PDFs are being used in digital now. PDF has become the lingua franca of all documentation in the world. And the old Tower of Babel that existed, PDF has solved that problem.
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Shantanu Narayen8:37
We have great technology with PDF. Electronic signatures allows you to automate business processes. And when you have a technology that's that deep, you know it for decades, it continues to make great progress.
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Jim Cramer8:48
Well, I gotta tell you, Shantanu, today you've revolutionized the world. And you've also made it so the poor can be equal to the rich, which is an amazing thing that governments have tried for years and failed. But Adobe succeeds at something in a riot. He's the president and CEO of Adobe, ADBE, a stock that is absolutely one of my favorites. Stay with Cramer! Booyah! Jim Cramer here from TheStreet. Thanks for watching. See me, see you on YouTube. Click here to subscribe and get the jump on my exclusives with CEOs, plus market news, investing advice, and a whole lot more.