The future of software is what Adobe is doing
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
The last thing we thought we’d ever say: Adobe is the future of software.
The most oldschool behemoth. The Microsoft of the creative industry. The Big Contradiction of selling creative tools while building the least intuitive, least creative UX in the category. And yet, Adobe just did something genuinely innovative.
Adobe is now available on Claude as a connector, which means you can use Adobe products directly in Claude. It’s called Adobe Creativity and is available today. This means 50 different Adobe tools that you can use through AI. The implications are insane.
The workflow cannot be simpler. You prompt Claude. Claude decides which Adobe tool to use. Adobe runs in the background. And since this is AI, it all happens in about a minute.
The following will never happen again:
Open Adobe. Wait five minutes for it to boot.
Hunt for your files in Creative Cloud.
Open the project in the specific tool. Wait again.
Resize one image. Save. Export. Wait. Repeat 149 times.
That’s the simple stuff. The bigger projects take days and weeks. None of it had to.
Note: Stock prices took a nosedive, and their leaders said on the earnings call that the classic stock-image era is over and they have to adapt. So we’re genuinely not sure whether Adobe just made a bold strategic bet or quietly handed the keys to a competitor and called it innovation. In other words: we are not sure if they are brave first-movers, or just outright idiots to be honest.
The future of software is backend
Adobe’s tooling just became a backend for AI workflows. It’s an API call for Claude. No specific UX. No app icon to open. No update prompts. It sits there, quiet, called when needed.
It’s literally called a connector. The future of software is plug-and-play AI capabilities. You hook it up once, the AI knows how to use it, and you’ve upgraded your assistant with a new skill.
You’ve basically hired a junior designer. With a click of a button, for free.
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We’ve run an experiment
Peter here. My wife, Sophie, is a designer. We live and breathe Photoshop and InDesign at home, so if you are a designer or work with designers, I feel your pain. I’ve watched Sophie yell at her screen to Photoshop. I’ve seen her face when a client asked her to resize 150 banner images. Adobe is a curse word in our home. Adobe is also borderline robbery on SaaS pricing, but that’s another story.
Sophie is skeptical of AI. She thinks creativity should stay human, forever, fair. But she also hopes the boring side of her job, the part she calls “pushing pixels on a screen,” gets handled by AI. The 150-banner resize jobs. They paid hundreds of euros. She’s on an hourly rate. Every minute felt like the dentist.
Last week, one of her clients sent her a brief. They make natural cereal bars and run a print catalog for wholesale buyers. The template never changes. Only the copy and product photos change with each new lineup. New lineup, new job: 30 image swaps and copy updates inside the existing template.
This is not creative work. This is pushing pixels. I’d argue this is 80% of any designer’s job, and it bills at a creative hourly rate. Sophie works fast and precisely. The client was happy. She shipped it the normal way.
Then I asked her to do it again. This time with Claude and the Adobe Creativity connector. The output was identical to the version she’d already shipped. Instead of hours, it took minutes.
Sophie is now wondering whether to schedule her client emails so the work looks like it took the usual time, or not send the file over too early. That arbitrage won’t last long. Everyone will figure this out fast. Until they do, it’s productivity heaven.
What it means
If 80% of a designer's time is pushing pixels, the same is true across your marketing stack. 80% of a copywriter's time is spent on reformatting. 80% of video editor time is spent on trimming. 80% of analyst time is spent reshaping data. That layer is now backend. The vendors that survive this become great APIs. The ones that don’t keep optimizing a UI nobody opens.
And the marketing leaders who survive it stop measuring their teams by output volume, and start measuring them by what only humans can still do.
— Torsten and Peter
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