There’s growing worry that Photoshop—Adobe’s crown jewel—is losing relevance as GenAI image tools explode. Headlines about new image-editing models from Gemini don’t help. Pair that with Adobe’s share price—down roughly 40% from a year ago—and it’s easy to jump to “moat is gone.”
But that conclusion is lazy. The simple take—“if AI can generate and edit faster and cheaper, why use Photoshop?”—misses how creative work is bought, delivered, and defended in the real world.
Blue-chip campaigns don’t pay for the ‘Generate’ button. They pay for concept, art direction, color science, and compliance. GenAI accelerates ideation (more mockups, more variants, faster). The human still selects, refines, composites, and signs off. No CMO is cutting a seven-figure cheque for a 10-second prompt with no proof of origin.