Adobe, the dominant force in the creative software market, has made a decisive alliance with the AI chatbots it once viewed as competitors. As artificial intelligence enters the “agent” phase—moving beyond simple Q&A to autonomously executing tasks that were once the exclusive domain of software—the company has chosen to “sleep with the enemy” amid spreading fears of a “SaaS-pocalypse,” a term signaling the potential end for traditional Software-as-a-Service firms.
On the 6th (local time), Adobe globally launched the “Adobe Plug-in in ChatGPT,” enabling users to directly access over 70 core features of its products within ChatGPT. Users simply type “@Adobe” into the ChatGPT prompt and describe their desired outcome in natural language. The plugin then analyzes the user’s intent and selects the appropriate tool—such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, or Firefly—to execute the task.
Adobe had previously introduced three applications for ChatGPT—Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat—in December of last year. This new plugin not only consolidates those three apps into one but also incorporates advanced professional-grade features, including video editing and image generation. However, Adobe has stopped short of making all workflows fully executable within the chatbot. For tasks requiring advanced editing, users are directed to Adobe’s native software to continue their work, drawing a clear line between the “entry-level features” opened to AI chatbots and its premium professional tools.
The decision reflects a judgment that AI has become an essential tool for content creation. According to an internal Adobe survey conducted in June, among approximately 12 million U.S. adults preparing to enter the content creation field, 56% had no formal design training, and 77% said using AI was essential. With AI platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT leveraging their own image and video generation models to attract non-professionals, Adobe has opted to lower barriers to entry through collaboration rather than competition.
Adobe’s chatbot integration strategy is expanding rapidly. The company has already integrated its services with Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot, and plans to extend support to Google’s Gemini and the workplace messaging platform Slack within this month.
The movement to reshape survival strategies in the age of AI agents is spreading across the global software industry. Salesforce, the global customer relationship management (CRM) giant, has launched “Agentforce,” an enterprise AI agent platform, and is transitioning its billing model from a per-employee-account basis to one based on the actual workload performed by agents. This is a direct response to market criticism that the traditional SaaS revenue model, built on seat counts, will become obsolete in an era where AI agents replace human workers.
South Korea’s software industry is also accelerating its transformation. Hancom (030520), a document editing software company, has gone beyond integrating AI-based drafting, summarization, and data analysis into its Hancom Office suite, declaring in May its intention to transform into an “agentic operating system (OS)” company. Douzone Bizon (012510), an enterprise resource planning (ERP) specialist, voluntarily delisted and went private last month after welcoming global private equity firm EQT as its new owner, stating it would escape short-term earnings pressure to focus on AI investment.
However, these structural transformations have yet to translate directly into market confidence. Shares of Adobe and Salesforce, the companies most exposed to SaaS-pocalypse fears, have fallen 20% and 24% respectively this year. “No matter how capable AI agents become, the years of accumulated company-specific data and industry-specialized systems built by software firms will be difficult to replace,” said a software industry insider. “But concerns will only be alleviated once the market sees a ‘sorting of winners and losers,’ with meaningful revenue emerging from new AI-related businesses.”