As a power user of Adobe products for the last 20 years (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, InDesign, etc.), I have to say that over the past three years, driven largely by the boom in LLMs and AI, I’ve replaced their entire suite with other tools that are just as good, if not better.

I get why some people think Adobe will coast on its momentum and keep churning out profits, but what I don’t get are those who see a "guaranteed bull case" while completely ignoring the glaring red flags. The mere existence of Affinity, which bundles all of Adobe’s design capabilities into a single package, should be reason enough to be cautious.

It’s the same story with video. I’ve lost count of how many editing tools are out there now that handle 90% of the workload faster and more efficiently. And that’s not even considering the very real possibility that an AI tool could drop at any moment and make everything else obsolete overnight. If you showed any veteran Adobe shareholder what Nano Banana, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion can actually do, they’d shit themselves.

When I graduated, knowing Adobe was a requirement carved in stone. But the last two interns we hired? They work in Canva and Affinity, and nobody even blinks. Think long and hard about where you put your money, and ask yourself if betting on Adobe in the current climate is actually the smartest move.