Really smart framing of how Adobe's segment structure fundamentally changes the selling motion compared to Salesforce. You captured something critical about their AI challenge: it's not just aboutproving ROI, it's about translating scattered AI adoption signals into a unified economic story the CFO can actualy defend to investors. The gap between what Adobe needs to measure (AI-influenced ARR, margin accretion, portfolio complxity) and what most FP&A systems can model is exactly where the real value story lives for something like Pigment.
When reading through their financials, it took me a bit to wrap my head around how everything ties together so being Adobe CFO is not an enviable position that's for sure. Also thought how that translated back to sales, if CFO has hard time explaining the value story - reps prob do too.
Picked the FP&A software as an example since the value articulation on the overall financials seemed to be an area it'd be clear to see why Adobe would get value out of it given the breakdown.
The point about AI needing to be an economic engine rather than just a feature is spot on. A lot of companies are treating AI adoption as a binary metric when the real question is whether each AI dollar generates more margin and ARR than the alternative. Adobe's challenge with proving that equation is probably why they're so aggressive on the enterprise wallet share play right now.
AI is definitely putting pressure on the all BU's - being aggressive on total share of enterprise wallet is being driven by AI but also the cost of services for those clients.
When you say binary metric, what do you mean? Like for example, just tracking overall adoption vs understanding how it feeds into ARR or outputs like Adobe?
Really smart framing of how Adobe's segment structure fundamentally changes the selling motion compared to Salesforce. You captured something critical about their AI challenge: it's not just aboutproving ROI, it's about translating scattered AI adoption signals into a unified economic story the CFO can actualy defend to investors. The gap between what Adobe needs to measure (AI-influenced ARR, margin accretion, portfolio complxity) and what most FP&A systems can model is exactly where the real value story lives for something like Pigment.
When reading through their financials, it took me a bit to wrap my head around how everything ties together so being Adobe CFO is not an enviable position that's for sure. Also thought how that translated back to sales, if CFO has hard time explaining the value story - reps prob do too.
Picked the FP&A software as an example since the value articulation on the overall financials seemed to be an area it'd be clear to see why Adobe would get value out of it given the breakdown.
Thanks again for the observation and comment
The point about AI needing to be an economic engine rather than just a feature is spot on. A lot of companies are treating AI adoption as a binary metric when the real question is whether each AI dollar generates more margin and ARR than the alternative. Adobe's challenge with proving that equation is probably why they're so aggressive on the enterprise wallet share play right now.
AI is definitely putting pressure on the all BU's - being aggressive on total share of enterprise wallet is being driven by AI but also the cost of services for those clients.
When you say binary metric, what do you mean? Like for example, just tracking overall adoption vs understanding how it feeds into ARR or outputs like Adobe?