At His Final Adobe Summit Keynote, Shantanu Narayen Pins Hope on Human Creativity

In what marked a defining moment for Adobe, outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen took to the stage for his final Adobe Summit keynote alongside NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, offering a sweeping view of how agentic AI is set to reshape creativity, commerce, and enterprise workflows.

The keynote served as both a farewell address for Narayen and a forward-looking conversation on the future of AI-powered creation.

Framing the next phase of the creative economy, Huang said AI would increasingly transform how original ideas are adapted and delivered to audiences.

“In the future, you're going to come up with a seed of an original idea, and every time your customers enjoy it, your content is going to be processed by generative AI and presented, described and illustrated in a way that is contextually sensible,” Huang said during the session.

Addressing concerns around job displacement, Huang argued that AI would make creators more productive and ultimately increase the volume of work.

“I think that the fact that we're now so productive, we can experiment and iterate so fast, we're going to be busier than ever. In the final analysis, what you pay for is work done,” he said.

Narayen, meanwhile, underscored the continued centrality of human creativity in an AI-first world.

“Tools don’t create; people do. But winning isn’t just about producing the most content. It’s about producing the right content, on brand, at scale, and delivered in a way that feels personal,” he said.

The discussion also veered to industrial AI applications, with Huang highlighting the importance of digital twins and NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform for developing physical AI applications. He noted that sectors such as manufacturing and logistics would require “precision digital twins” for AI systems to effectively understand and operate in the physical world.

For creative professionals, Huang said agentic AI would “elevate your art,” adding that speed alone is no longer enough as expectations around quality and personalisation continue to rise.

In a post-keynote interview with CNBC, Huang further said Adobe’s market opportunity has expanded significantly with the rise of AI, estimating that its potential could grow “100 to 1,000 times” as Firefly increasingly runs on NVIDIA’s technology stack, including Omniverse, CUDA, Cosmos, and NeMo.

Adobe Summit 2026 is underway in Las Vegas.

[The writer is in Las Vegas attending Adobe Summit 2026 at the invitation of Adobe. Editorial coverage remains independent.]