Adobe’s AI business is growing fast enough to make one thing clear: the next AI battle is about getting employees to use copilots and also getting AI to the customer.
Adobe crossed $650 million in AI-first annual recurring revenue in its latest quarter, growing more than 150% year-over-year. The company also said customers for its Brand Visibility product doubled sequentially as businesses increasingly worry about how they appear inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI systems.
But that growth doesn’t tell the full story. Consumers are getting accustomed to an AI-first internet much faster than enterprises.
“The biggest challenge today is not AI adoption. It is AI readiness,” Venu Juvvala, Senior Director and India Sales leader, Adobe, tells AIM.
Adobe’s India AI and Digital Trends research shows just how quickly the customer is moving. Around 65% of Indian consumers already use AI for personalised product recommendations, 62% are open to shopping through a virtual AI concierge, and 74% say AI-powered personalisation saves them time.
What Does That Mean?
The implication goes beyond just adding another chatbot. Customers are beginning to delegate discovery and decision-making to LLMs.
Instead of searching 10 websites, a customer can ask an AI agent what to buy. Instead of comparing products themselves, they can ask an agent to compare them. Instead of navigating an airline website, they can tell an agent where they want to go and let it figure out the rest.
The enterprise, meanwhile, still has to figure out where its product information is stored. That is the gap Adobe sees in India.
Juvvala says companies are still dealing with fragmented data, disconnected content, weak governance, and a lack of skills. Those were already enterprise technology problems. AI agents simply make the consequences much bigger.
SEO is No Longer Enough
For two decades, companies fought to get ranked by Google on top of its search results. Billions were spent on SEO.
That logic is now being disrupted. “We are moving from a world where discoverability was driven largely by rankings to one where it is increasingly determined by recommendations,” Juvvala says.
The emerging concern is an existential one: when someone asks an AI what to buy, will the AI recommend your brand?
Adobe is already building around that question.
Its Brand Visibility product, previewed at the Adobe Summit in April, tracks how brands appear across AI-powered environments and helps companies understand how they are represented in AI responses. Adobe expects generative engine optimisation, or GEO, to become a major capability as traditional search gives way to AI-mediated discovery.
The shift is already visible in traffic data. Adobe has reported that AI-driven traffic to US retail websites increased 1,200% year-over-year during the 2025 holiday period, while AI traffic to travel sites also surged.
That changes what “digital experience” means. A website is no longer just something only a human visits. It is increasingly something an agent reads.
According to Cloudflare, automated agents now drive 57.4% of global web requests. That means enterprises have to design their website for a different audience altogether.
“Most digital experiences today are designed primarily for humans. Increasingly, they must be designed for both humans and machines,” Juvvala notes.
The business implication is straightforward. If an agent cannot reliably understand a company’s products, pricing, policies, availability, and customer context, it cannot reliably act on the customer’s behalf.
The next generation of digital experiences therefore cannot depend on beautifully designed pages alone. They need structured content, connected data, business rules, and clear permissions.
Juvvala calls this the “Agentic Web”. It requires enterprises to expose their information in a way machines can actually use. Most companies are not there yet.
Moving From Cost Cutting to Revenue
AI conversations inside enterprises are moving from productivity to productisation. Adobe’s research points in that direction.
The company says Air India used its unified customer data and real-time insights to deliver more relevant experiences, contributing to a 55% increase in booking-related orders and a 30% increase in revenue within six months.
Adobe’s latest earnings show why the company is betting on this shift. Its Digital Experience business continues to grow while AI-first ARR has become a significant new revenue stream. Adobe’s leadership has also been positioning agentic software as the next major phase of enterprise software, where AI systems can act across workflows instead of simply generating content inside them.
That puts Adobe in a different arena from the model companies.
The AI Content Flood
There is another problem. Generative AI has made producing content almost free. That does not mean it’ll attract the same attention.
“The future will not be won by the brands that generate the most content. It will be won by the brands that generate the most relevant content,” Juvvala affirms.
That distinction matters when every company can generate thousands of product descriptions, advertisements, and personalised campaigns. More content can just mean more noise.
Adobe says IBM used Firefly to create personalised variations of its “Let’s Create” campaign, resulting in 26 times higher engagement than its campaign average.
The lesson is not that companies need to generate more. It is that they need to know what to generate, for whom, and when. That brings the entire AI conversation back to the same uncomfortable problem: the foundation.
Indian enterprises do not appear to have an AI adoption problem. They have a readiness problem.
Consumers are already experimenting with AI to discover and shop. AI systems are increasingly becoming gateways to information. Adobe’s AI business is growing rapidly because enterprises are beginning to spend on this transition.
But companies trying to participate in that future still have to clean up their data, connect their content, and set rules around what machines can do.
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