Back
Shantanu Narayen
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Adobe Inc.

LIVE:Q2 FY2026 Adobe Earnings Conference Call

🎥 Jun 11, 2026 📺 Wealth,Finance & Investment Center ⏱ 35m 👁 423 views
Good day and welcome to the Q2 FY2026 Adobe earnings conference call today's conference is being recorded at this time I'd ...
Watch on YouTube

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.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Shantanu Narayen's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (6 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
O
Operator6:34
Good day and welcome to the Q2 FY 2026 Adobe earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Doug Clark, vice president of investor relations. Please go ahead.
D
Doug Clark6:53
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. With me on the call today are Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's chair and CEO, David Wadhwani, president of creativity and productivity, Anil Chakravarthy, president of customer experience orchestration, and Steve Day, senior vice president, corporate finance, and CFO of customer experience orchestration. On this call, which is being recorded, we will discuss Adobe's second quarter fiscal year 2026 financial results. You can find our press release, as well as PDFs of our prepared remarks and financial results, on Adobe's investor relations website. The information discussed on this call, including our financial targets and product plans, is as of today, June 11, and contains forward-looking statements that involve risk, uncertainty, and assumptions. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in these statements. For more information on those risks, please review today's earnings release and Adobe's SEC filings. On this call, we will discuss GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Our reported results include GAAP growth rates and non-GAAP growth rates, including constant currency rates. During this presentation, Adobe's executives will refer to revenue growth in constant currency rates unless otherwise stated. Non-GAAP reconciliations are available in our earnings release and on Adobe's investor relations website. I will now turn the call over to Shantanu.
S
Shantanu Narayen8:17
Thanks, Doug. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We achieved $6.62 billion in revenue in Q2, representing 11% year-over-year growth. GAAP earnings per share for the quarter was $4.25, representing 8% year-over-year growth, and non-GAAP earnings per share was $5.96, representing 18% year-over-year growth. Strong revenue growth was driven by subscription bookings to revenue conversion. We drove EPS growth through record top-line revenue and disciplined investments across the company. At Adobe, we continue to be driven by our mission to empower everyone to create and deliver innovative products to delight users based on our customer strategy. We're focused on business professionals and consumers, creators and creative professionals, and marketing professionals. For business professionals and consumers, we're delivering AI-powered quick and easy apps to stand out through creativity and productivity. For creators and creative professionals, we're delivering power and precision to bring creative visions to life across any media type and surface. For marketing professionals, we're delivering customer experience orchestration to create, deliver, and optimize personalized digital experiences. As we reflect on the market context and our first-half performance, it is clear that relative even to the beginning of fiscal 2026, AI is accelerating customer behavior at an unprecedented speed, and we need to evolve our strategy and execution to address these changing expectations. Much like how developers have embraced and expanded the AI coding market, there's a transformation underway for how consumers are discovering, experiencing, onboarding, and purchasing products across all categories, including creativity, productivity, gaming, and entertainment. As it relates to creativity and productivity, there's an unprecedented demand across additional surfaces for the combination of content consumption and content creation. Conversational interfaces and agents now orchestrate across tools to achieve outcomes faster. The proliferation of media generation models is reshaping and democratizing content workflows from ideation through delivery. AI-first applications that will serve broader audiences need to provide free, intuitive onboarding that drive usage and monetization through paywalls. Big picture, the immediate opportunity for Adobe is to accelerate new user acquisition and lifetime value through a freemium offering. As it relates to business professionals and consumers, we have dramatically increased Acrobat and Express MAU from greater than 700 million to greater than 850 million year over year. The opportunity is to serve billions of business professionals and consumers through a comprehensive premium funnel building on the success of the Adobe Reader model. Over the last year, we've delivered tremendous innovation across AI assistant, PDF spaces, Express, and conversational interfaces and made these innovations available across surfaces including AI mode in Reader, Edge, Chrome, and WhatsApp. Business professional and consumer traffic on adobe.com seeking Adobe P capabilities is growing 35% year over year. We believe this traffic is better served through a customized friction-free onboarding experience without immediate paywalls and will result in greater customer acquisition and deeper engagement over time. Based on the early success and mild adoption of premium journeys for Acrobat and Express, we're ready to expand this experience more aggressively. For next-generation creators, the opportunity is to deliver an AI production studio across web and mobile that seamlessly integrates with the power and precision capabilities of Creative Cloud. We have increased our creative premium MAU from 50 million to 90 million year over year. The opportunity is to attract hundreds of millions of additional creators through a premium funnel based on the early success of Firefly. Over the last year, we have delivered tremendous innovation across ideation through boards, generation with support for multiple media models, semantic image and video editing, and conversational interfaces that are available across surfaces including mobile, web, and flagship Creative Cloud applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. The new personalized journeys for creators drove approximately 50% increase in Firefly ARR quarter over quarter through Firefly apps and credit packs. Based on this early success, we are confident that we should expand the Firefly premium experience to acquire and delight the next generation of creatives. Creative Cloud continues to perform well as the best-of-breed offering for creative and marketing professionals globally. While we focus on accelerating creator acquisition through the premium Firefly funnel, we have made the decision to defer previously planned Creative Cloud second-half lineup optimizations. As it relates to the customer experience orchestration, a genetic opportunity in the enterprise, marketing professionals are looking to automate and rapidly create, deliver, and personalize content at scale across every channel in a way that drives customer engagement and elevates their brand. Content creation design specifically for marketing use cases is exploding. New AI co-workers and agents offer organizations the ability to deliver automation and outcomes powered by context, data, MCPs, and skills. These address the dual needs of enterprises to expand consumer centricity and cost savings in the era of AI. Business models are expanding to include consumption and outcome-based pricing along with subscriptions. The total marketing opportunity across people, software, agency, and channel spend is enormous. AI is changing enterprise behavior as they're increasingly bringing more marketing capabilities in-house through their adoption of software platforms and the creation of custom models that uniquely capture their brand intelligence. IT organizations are looking to Adobe to accelerate their provisioning, deployment, and customization to serve their consumers through the availability of headless and genetic capabilities with pricing models that address outcomes as well as AI usage. Customer experience orchestration AI first ARR grew 4x year-over-year, reflecting how Adobe is the leader in both the traditional marketing category and the emerging customer experience orchestration category. The introduction of Adobe CX Enterprise and CX Enterprise Co-worker at Adobe Summit expands the vision and delivery of our category-defining CX cell solutions. The successful acquisition of Semrush unifies our search engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and EEM solutions to further extend our CXO offering. We will deliver this integrated offering that addresses brand visibility at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity later this month. This combination of creativity and marketing uniquely differentiates Adobe. No other company brings together what creatives and marketers can do across our applications and delivery platforms. Adobe Gen Studio ARR grew over 25% year-over-year, reflecting enterprise demand for an end-to-end solution that spans workflow and planning, creation and production, asset management, activation and delivery, and reporting and insights. Adobe's AI innovation has driven an impressive 3x year-over-year increase in AI first ARR to greater than 500 million. We believe now is the time to aggressively acquire the next generation of Adobe loyalists. The strategic shift to acquire more premium customers through Adobe and Firefly lowers our second half ARR growth expectations from individual subscribers. We believe these changes do make Adobe even stronger. We continue to target double-digit total ARR growth for Adobe, which now includes the Semrush acquisition. Based on our strong first half revenue performance and the inclusion of Semrush, we are pleased to raise our fiscal year revenue and non-GAAP EPS targets. As we announced, Dan Durn has decided to pursue a new opportunity outside the software industry. I'd like to thank Dan for his contributions to Adobe and wish him well. I'm pleased that Steve Durn, who has been at Adobe for 20 years, serving in numerous financial leadership roles, will serve as interim CFO upon Dan's departure. I continue to be incredibly energized by Adobe's long-term AI opportunity and the innovative products we are delivering to a broader set of customers. Given my decision to transition to board chair, I wanted to provide an update on the CEO search, which is progressing well. The board has been actively engaged in a comprehensive process. While we all continue to be ruthlessly focused on driving execution, our goal is to have Adobe's next CEO in place to put their stamp on planning for fiscal 27 and beyond. I'll now turn it over to David.
D
David Wadhwani18:33
Thanks, Shantanu. Hello, everyone. AI is rewriting how the world creates and gets work done, and the audiences for creativity and productivity tools is bigger now than at any point in our history. From social creators and students to business professionals and large enterprises, the opportunity for Adobe is massive. These customers are looking for a range of products from easy-to-use creative tools to professional levels of power and precision, and are increasingly turning to conversational experiences to accelerate their work. Adobe is the only company that has the portfolio breadth to meet this broad range of creativity and productivity needs. We see this interest manifest in traffic growth, signaling demand for existing products, and accelerating demand for new AI-first experiences. The demand for these new AI experiences begins with LLM conversations and intent-based searches, and requires immediate gratification, so is best served with friction-free experiences. This shift in user behavior is playing out across business professionals and consumers, and creators and creative professionals. While we continue to attract strong traffic to adobe.com, which grew over 40% year-over-year, our traditional direct-to-paid journeys may not always fulfill visitor intent, as a growing number of new users are first looking to quickly complete their intended task as they begin their relationship with Adobe. Given products like Adobe Firefly, Express, and Acrobat AI Assistant have friction-free onboarding and significant adoption, we can now rebalance our journeys to better serve this new generation of users, rather than send them predominantly to direct-to-paid journeys. This shift will come at the cost of short-term ARR, but will accelerate user acquisition and MAU, while building the foundation for long-term growth by removing friction from user onboarding, enabling deeper user engagement, and driving stronger lifetime value. In Q2, subscription revenue for business professionals and consumers was 1.85 billion, growing 15% year-over-year. BP&C traffic grew 35% year-over-year, with MAU growing from greater than 700 million to greater than 850 million in Q2 year-over-year, with significant contributions from AI Assistant, Express creation, and PDF spaces sharing. This quarter, we introduced the Adobe productivity agent, shifting Acrobat from a static document tool to an interactive experience. The productivity agent is an AI experience built into Acrobat that draws on Adobe Acrobat's document intelligence and Adobe Express's AI first creation capabilities to help business professionals understand, create, and share information. It can turn documents into rich outputs like presentations, podcasts, and social content, support conversational PDF editing, and power the new sharing capabilities in PDF spaces. Customers get the agent through Acrobat AI plans. Users can also now share branded PDF spaces with customizable AI assistance tailored to a specific audience, whether for sales prospecting, content marketing, or research delivery. Early adopters of PDF spaces, including Vice Media, Kid Cudi, Jessica Yellin, and Mindy Weiss are using PDF spaces to move audiences from passive reading creative and marketing professionals was 4.3 creative and marketing professionals was 4.54 billion and growing 11% year-over-year. Demand for AI content creation is exploding across ideation, generation, and semantic editing, and generative creative consumption continues to show strong growth. Our strategy is to empower everyone to create from first-time creators to seasoned professionals to large enterprises seeking to scale content production. In Q2, CNCP traffic to adobe.com grew over 50% year-over-year with creative premium MAU growing from greater than 50 million to greater than 90 million. This immense volume of traffic drawn to the Adobe brand includes users seeking to purchase Creative Cloud, Photoshop, and other CC apps, and an increasing number of new users who are looking for Adobe magic to complete a creative task with a friction-free experience. Firefly premium users who convert to our paid plans are highly engaged with early indications of significant credit consumption. Firefly ARR grew approximately 50% quarter-over-quarter through Firefly apps and credit packs. We were excited to launch the Adobe Creative Agent beta in Q2. The agent is available as part of Creative Cloud and Firefly subscriptions and provides a conversation experience to achieve complex and repetitive creative tasks. Agent usage will be monetized through our existing credit consumption model. The Adobe Creative Agent is also available in Claude, ChatGPT, and soon Copilot and Gemini. Additional creators and creative professionals highlights include in Premiere, we launched a brand new color mode, a first-of-its-kind color grading experience built specifically for video editors. We continue to deepen AI capabilities across our flagship Creative Cloud applications. Photoshop added rotate object and Illustrator released turntable, both enabling subscribers to turn 2D photos and illustrations into 3D renditions they can rotate and harmonize into their work. Capabilities like these drove record AI usage within our flagship applications. Firefly continues to support third-party models, now with Claude 3.0 and Claude 3.0 Omni. Firefly ending ARR across Firefly app, Firefly credit packs, and Firefly enterprise is approaching 300 million exiting Q2. Firefly enterprise, spanning Firefly services, Adobe Firefly Foundry, and brand intelligence, is helping the world's largest brands industrialize content production with brand-safe custom models. The number of generated assets grew more than four times year-over-year, making it an AI content engine for marketing at scale. Our announced NVIDIA partnership will bring accelerated computing to Adobe Firefly Foundry for faster, higher-performing custom models across image, video, audio, vector, and 3D, plus a cloud-native 3D digital twin built on Omniverse and OpenUSD. In enterprise wins this quarter include Merck, SAP, ServiceNow, Tesco, The Coca-Cola Company, Workday, and Xfinity. In summary, demand for creativity and productivity in the AI era is dramatically increasing as evidenced by our record traffic on adobe.com. While we continue to fulfill demand for Acrobat and Creative Cloud, the early success of Firefly, Express, and Acrobat AI Assistant gives us conviction that this is the time to aggressively serve new users with a friction-free freemium journey. We're confident that driving MAU, which has an impact on ARR, is the right trade-off and will drive future business growth. I'll now turn it over to Anil.
A
Anil Chakravarthy25:52
Thanks, David. Hello, everyone. In Q2, AI continued to be a tailwind for our enterprise business, enabling us to deliver creative and marketing professional subscription revenue of $4.54 billion, growing 11% year-over-year. These results underscore the continued explosion in content and the imperative to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. The opportunity for AI-powered marketing automation and customer experience orchestration is large and growing, and we are continuing to gain market share and expand our leadership. We are focused on three critical AI for solutions. Adobe Experience Platform and native apps for customer engagement, Adobe Gen Studio for content supply chain, and Adobe Experience Manager and AEM web apps for brand visibility. Q2 highlights included Gen Studio ending ARR grew over 25% year-over-year as leading brands and agencies continue to standardize on Adobe to power their content supply chain. Subscription revenue for AEP and native apps grew over 30% year-over-year. AEP delivers over 70 billion profile activations and 35 trillion segment evaluations per day, as well as more than 1 trillion experiences per year. Over 80% of AEP and AEM customers are now using agentic capabilities built into our products. Over 1,500 customer trials are underway for our agentic web offerings, Adobe LLM Optimizer, Sites Optimizer, and Brand Concierge. 60% quarter-over-quarter growth for forward-deployed engineering and integrated services offerings designed to co-innovate and deliver customized AI-powered $60 million ARR to our book of business and expands our ability to serve marketers of every scale. We are rapidly integrating Semrush into Adobe, uniting Semrush's discoverability intelligence with Adobe's agentic web apps. We look forward to unveiling a comprehensive brand visibility solution combining Semrush with Adobe at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity later this month. At Adobe Summit in April, where we hosted over 14,000 in-person attendees, we launched Adobe CX Enterprise, a new end-to-end agentic AI system that simplifies how enterprises manage their entire customer life cycle, from acquiring and engaging prospects to driving conversion and lasting loyalty. Adobe CX Enterprise brings together AI agents, agent skills, and model context protocol endpoints with an intelligence and governance layer to deliver reliable and auditable agentic workflows that enable highly personalized, differentiated customer experiences. Over 20,000 global brands have built their business on Adobe, and CX Enterprise will help usher them into the era of agentic AI. As part of CX Enterprise, we announced CX Enterprise Co-worker helps enterprises create and validate on-brand content faster and with less effort. Adobe Brand Intelligence learns from creative and marketing team feedback, approvals, and rejections in real time. It is a headless platform exposed through APIs, so it can integrate with existing first and third-party apps rather than running as a separate app. Customer experience is one of the first areas of AI-powered transformation for enterprises. Around the world, our conversations with C-level executives reflect how they view Adobe as a trusted partner for this transformation in the era of agentic AI. In Q2, we announced native integrations with major enterprise AI platforms, including Microsoft Co-pilot, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini. Our partnership with Nvidia brings CX Enterprise Co-worker capabilities into the NeMo Cloud enterprise agent platform, enabling brands to deploy Adobe's customer experience intelligence within Nvidia's secure, policy-governed open shell runtime. Leading global agencies, including Dentsu, Havas, Omnicom, Publicis, Stagwell, and WPP are standardizing on Adobe, combining our AI-powered capabilities with their unique IP and industry expertise to co-develop innovative, differentiated solutions for joint clients. Our vision, deep expertise and creativity in marketing, track record of innovation, and broad partner ecosystem uniquely position Adobe as the partner of choice for AI-powered customer experience orchestration. Our extensive customer base, innovative CXO products, and robust pipeline give us confidence for a seasonally strong second half. I'll now pass it to Steve.
S
Steve Day31:16
Thanks, Anil. Today, I will start by summarizing Adobe's performance in Q2 FY26, highlighting growth drivers across our customer groups, and I'll finish with our financial targets. In Q2, Adobe achieved record revenue of $6.62 billion, growing 13% year-over-year as reported, and 11% in constant currency. Diluted earnings per share was $4.25 on a GAAP basis, and $5.96 on a non-GAAP basis. Our GAAP results reflected a $70 million, or $0.17 per share, of a non-cash goodwill impairment charge related to our publishing and advertising reporting unit. Q2 financial highlights included total Adobe ending ARR of $27.1 billion, growing 12.5% year-over-year, including approximately 400 new was $5.63 billion. was $5.63 billion. And repurchasing approximately 8.5 million shares of our stock during the quarter. Exiting Q2, we have approximately $27 billion remaining under our authorizations, including the new $25 billion dollar announced in April. Customer group results and insights, business professionals and consumers subscription revenue was 1.85 billion, increasing 16% year-over-year as reported or 15% in constant currency. Q2 growth drivers for business professionals and consumers included sustained double-digit ending ARR year-over-year growth across all geographies. Acrobat and Express mail surpassed 850 million, growing approximately 20% year-over-year. Acrobat AI Assistant ARR growing approximately 3x year-over-year. And strong performance in the enterprise across both commercial and government. Creative and marketing professionals subscription revenue was 4.54 billion, increasing 13% year-over-year or 11% in constant currency. Q2 growth drivers for creative and marketing professionals included growth in Creative Cloud driven by the CC Pro offering. Creative premium mail, which includes web and mobile versions of Firefly, Express, Premiere, Photoshop, and Lightroom crossed 90 million, growing over 70% year-over-year. Continued strong generative credit consumption driven by video and audio. Firefly ending ARR, including Firefly apps and credit plans and enterprise Firefly offerings approaching 300 million with the intent to drive more traffic to Firefly premium in H2. Ending ARR across Gen Studio, AEP and apps, and AEM and Agility web growing over 20% year-over-year. Enterprise customers with over 10 million additional subscription revenue additional subscription revenue of 18.21 to 18.27 billion dollars, which now includes approximately 280 million from Semrush. Total Adobe ending ARR book of business growth of 10.2% year-over-year compared to our FY26 beginning book of business of 25.66 billion dollars. GAAP EPS of $17.90 to $18 and non-GAAP EPS of $24 and $0.35 to $0.45. Our FY