Adobe says it hit 1B MAUs, with freemium MAUs surpassing 100M in Q3, up 70%+ YoY, as it increasingly focuses on expanding its freemium AI offerings (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal)

Adobe’s scale and momentum in freemium AI are accelerating, with 1 billion monthly active users and freemium MAUs topping 100 million, up more than 70% year over year, while the company also raised guidance on stronger profit and revenue. For CIOs, this signals that AI-enabled creative and document workflows are moving into the mainstream at a faster pace, increasing the strategic importance of vendor consolidation, user adoption, and governance across enterprise content operations. IT organizations should expect rising demand for embedded AI capabilities, but also need to balance productivity gains against security, data handling, licensing, and change-management considerations.