I know there have already been plenty of posts about ADBE, but I think the main question is still being framed the wrong way.
Adobe has been getting crushed - AI costs money, margins are getting worse, and Adobe is giving away a lot of usage without showing clearly who is actually going to pay later.
I don’t buy the idea that Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and Acrobat just disappear because newer AI tools are getting attention. I’ve used enough Adobe products to know how annoying switching can be, all the random stuff you forget about until you try to leave. Professionals don't change all of that in one weekend.
The free users are harder. ADBE pays for the generation now, then hopes some of them become real customers later. A lot probably won’t. They’ll make some images, play around for a few days and move on.
The closest comparison for me is Autodesk. Its numbers looked ugly during the subscription transition several years ago, but the actual product was still buried inside customer workflows. The difference is Autodesk already had paying customers. Adobe is trying to get people who started free to care enough to pay. I have no idea what that conversion really looks like yet.
Creative Cloud is still growing, so I don’t think the core business is falling apart. I also haven’t seen much evidence that professionals are leaving in large numbers. Adobe still has distribution most AI startups would kill for. The problem is management need to prove the economics, not just the usage. Free users have to convert, stay, and spend enough to cover the compute bill. I just think the stock may already be pricing in a worse outcome than what actually happen.