Subscribers to Adobe’s multi-app subscription plan, Creative Cloud All Apps, will be charged more starting on June 17 to accommodate for new generative AI features.

Adobe’s announcement, spotted by MakeUseOf, says the change will affect North American subscribers to the Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which Adobe is renaming Creative Cloud Pro. Starting on June 17, Adobe will automatically renew Creative Cloud All Apps subscribers into the Creative Cloud Pro subscription, which will be $70 per month for individuals who commit to an annual plan, up from $60 for Creative Cloud All Apps. Annual plans for students and teachers plans are moving from $35/month to $40/month, and annual teams pricing will go from $90/month to $100/month. Monthly (non-annual) subscriptions are also increasing, from $90 to $105.

Further, in an apparent attempt to push generative AI users to more expensive subscriptions, as of June 17, Adobe will give new single-app subscribers just 25 generative AI credits instead of the current 500.

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Some of Adobe’s most expensive Creative Cloud subscriptions are about to get even pricier for users in North America. Starting from June 17th, the Creative Cloud All Apps plan will be renamed Creative Cloud Pro for users in the US, Canada, and Mexico, adding a bunch of generative AI perks in exchange for bumping up subscription costs.

The pre-tax monthly price for individual Creative Cloud All Apps subscribers on an annual contract will increase from $59.99 to $69.99, or from $659.88 to $779.99 annually. The monthly price for rolling, non-contracted subscribers will jump from $89.99 to $104.99. Contracted prices for teams start at $99.99 per month, up from $89.99, while student and teacher plans will jump from $34.99 to $39.99 monthly on renewal.

The new Creative Cloud Pro plan provides access to the same Adobe apps and features as the previous All Apps plan, alongside some new additions. Users will have unlimited credits for powering generative AI image tools like Photoshop’s Generate Fill, and 4,000 monthly credits for “premium” AI video and audio features like Generative Extend in Premiere Pro. The plan also includes the ability to select third-party generative AI models like OpenAI’s GPT and Google Imagen, and access to Adobe’s in-beta collaborative whiteboard app, Firefly Boards.

“We want to empower you with more time to explore ideas and create, so we’re focused on continually upgrading your apps’ performance, delivering innovations to your core workflows, and integrating generative AI-powered capabilities across Creative Cloud and through our new Firefly app that make you more productive,” Adobe said in its announcement. “Today, we’re sharing updates to our Creative Cloud offerings to reflect our continued innovation and commitment to providing you the best tools for bringing your visions to life.”

The previous All Apps plan will no longer be available following the switch, and existing subscribers will be charged the increased price on their next renewal date. These changes only apply in North America, and Adobe says it isn’t planning to make name or pricing changes in other regions “at this time.”

Adobe is also offering a stripped-back “Creative Cloud Standard” plan for users who don’t need its generative AI offerings. Starting at $54.99 per month for contracted subscribers or $82.49 for rolling users, the Creative Cloud Standard plan is nearly identical to the current All Apps plan, but reduces the previous 1,000 monthly generative credit allowance down to 25. Users also won’t have access to premium web and mobile app features that are unlocked for Creative Cloud Pro subscribers. 

Not only is Adobe defaulting current All Apps subscribers to the more expensive AI-laden plan, compared to the Standard offering that’s closer in price and features, but this new Creative Cloud Standard offering is only available to existing subscribers, forcing new customers to take the more expensive AI-focused plan.

Adobe’s All Apps plan was a poor investment for most individual users anyway, as it’s rare for one person to need more than 20 apps that target such a wide variety of creative industries. Still, some existing All Apps subscribers aren’t too pleased with the changes, if the reactions on Adobe subreddits are any indication. Canva attempted to make similar AI-driven price increases last year, which were later softened due to backlash from its users, so we will have to see if Adobe sticks to its guns.

• Curtis Ying applied to Adobe 12 times before landing a user experience designer role.
• He said a video cover letter helped him stand out among other applicants.
• He shared his tips for making a video cover letter.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Curtis Ying, a 30-year-old user experience designer at Adobe who lives in California. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Adobe did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

In January 2023, I was laid off from my product designer job. I had a few months of severance and some savings, so it didn't feel like the world was crashing down.

Rather than immediately applying to various employers, I decided to focus on landing a job at one company in particular: Adobe.

About a month before I was laid off, my friend who works at Adobe gave me a tour of the company's headquarters in San Jose, California. I fell in love with graphic design after my cousin taught me how to use Adobe Illustrator, and I was already using the company's products on a regular basis. Working at Adobe became a dream job of mine. After I was laid off, landing a job at Adobe became my top priority.

I figured the best way to make this happen was to do something unique in my application that would help me stand out: creating a video cover letter. For about a month, I only applied to one position — a role at Adobe that I didn't get — while I worked on the video.

After finishing the video in February, I kept a close eye on Adobe's job postings. Over a six-month period, I applied to 10 Adobe jobs — including some I was probably underqualified for — and was rejected from all of them. Then, in December 2023, I applied for my 12th Adobe role of the year — a user experience designer position — and landed an interview. After going through the process, I accepted an offer for a full-time contract role with a six-figure salary. Thirteen months after my layoff, I'd accomplished my goal.

Video cover letters can "humanize your application"

I first became intrigued by video cover letters after seeing a YouTube video in which someone sang about why they wanted to work at a particular company. They ended up getting the job, and the video left a strong impression on me. I decided to create my own video cover letter to include with my Adobe applications.

In the video, which ran about a minute and a half, I talked about how I got interested in graphic and UX design, my education and work experience, the design tools and techniques I knew well, a few fun facts about myself, and why I wanted to work at Adobe. While I didn't have a professional microphone, I recorded myself using a Canon DSLR camera set up on a tripod. I edited the footage with Adobe Premiere Pro.

I used two different methods to include my video cover letter in my application. First, I uploaded the video to YouTube as an unlisted video and hyperlinked it at the top of my résumé with the text "watch my video cover letter." I also embedded a snapshot of the video in a PDF titled "video cover letter," added the same hyperlink, and attached that document as well.

Some people told me not to focus exclusively on Adobe — that I shouldn't put all my eggs in one basket. But I was hesitant to change my approach. Applying to other jobs felt a little like admitting that landing a job at Adobe might not be possible.

Several months into my job search, I started applying to some companies other than Adobe using a second video cover letter I made that was more generic. But Adobe remained my target employer.

In addition to creating a customized video cover letter, I pursued a second strategy: networking with Adobe employees. In June 2023, I posted my Adobe video cover letter on LinkedIn. I wasn't sure how it would be received, but it proved to be a good decision, as it helped me grow my Adobe network. Even as the rejections came in, I felt I'd built so many connections at Adobe that it was probably easier to land a job there than anywhere else — and that kept me motivated.

I think my video cover letter definitely helped me land a job at Adobe. The hiring manager I interviewed with told me it gave them a sense of my personality and helped me stand out among other applicants. Posting the video on LinkedIn also led to some connections that I believe boosted my application.

I don't think a video cover letter has to be as highly produced as mine to be helpful for job seekers. It doesn't have to have a beautiful background or the perfect lighting, but if you can be concise and speak naturally, I think it can work.

One of the reasons I highly advocate for video cover letters is that they humanize your application, which is typically just lines of text in a résumé and cover letter. When you're competing with sometimes thousands of applicants in a challenging job market, I think having a video cover letter can help you stand out. I see absolutely no downsides to it.

• Tech giants are known for their challenging interviews.
• Google, Meta, and Nvidia top the list of rigorous interviews with multiple rounds and assessments.
• But tough questions show up across industries, according to employee reports on Glassdoor.

It's tough to break into high-paying companies.

Google is notorious for having a demanding interview process. Aside from putting job candidates through assessments, preliminary phone calls, and asking them to complete projects, the company also screens candidates through multiple rounds of interviews.

Typical interview questions range from open-ended behavioral ones like "tell me about a time that you went against the status quo" or "what does being 'Googley' mean to you?" to more technical ones.

At Nvidia, the chipmaking darling of the AI boom, candidates must also pass through rigorous rounds of assessments and interviews. "How would you describe __ technology to a non-technical person?" was a question a candidate interviewing for a job as a senior solutions architect shared on the career site Glassdoor last month. The candidate noted that they didn't receive an offer.

Tech giants top Glassdoor's list of the hardest companies to interview with. But tough questions show up across industries — from luxury carmakers like Rolls-Royce, where a candidate said they were asked to define "a single crystal," to Bacardi, where a market manager who cited a difficult interview, and no offer, recalled being asked, "If you were a cocktail what would you be and why?"

The digital PR agency Reboot Online analyzed Glassdoor data to determine which companies have the most challenging job interviews. They focused on "reputable companies" listed in the top 100 of Forbes' World's Best Employers list and examined 313,000 employee reviews on Glassdoor. For each company, they looked at the average interview difficulty rating as reported on Glassdoor.

Here's a list of the top 90 companies that put candidates through the ringer for a job, according to self-reported reviews on Glassdoor.

Adobe has a new tool that makes it easier for creatives to be reliably credited for their work, even if somebody takes a screenshot of it and reposts it across the web. The Content Authenticity web app launching in public beta today allows invisible, tamper-resistant metadata to be embedded into images and photographs to help identify who owns them.

The new web app was initially announced in October and builds on Adobe’s Content Credentials attribution system. Artists and creators can attach information directly into their work, including links to their social media accounts, websites, and other attributes that can be used to identify them online. The app can also track the editing history of images, and helps creatives to prevent AI from training on them.

For additional security, Adobe’s Content Authenticity app and Behance portfolio platform — which can also be embedded within Content Credentials — allow creators to authenticate their identity via LinkedIn verification. That should make it harder for people to link Content Credentials to fake online profiles, but given LinkedIn isn’t exactly known for its creative community (yet), it’s also a likely dig at X. Then known as Twitter, X was previously one of the founding members behind Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative in 2019, before withdrawing from the partnership and transforming its verification system into a paid subscription reward under Elon Musk’s ownership.

The Content Authenticity web app is “currently free” while in beta, according to Adobe, though the company hasn’t mentioned if this will change when it becomes generally available. All you need is an Adobe account (which doesn’t require you to have an active Creative Cloud subscription).

Any images you want to apply Content Credentials to don’t need to have been edited or created using one of Adobe’s other apps. While Adobe apps like Photoshop can already embed Content Credentials into images, the Content Authenticity web app not only gives users more control over what information to attach, but also enables up to 50 images to be tagged in bulk rather than individually. Only JPEG and PNG files are supported for now, but Adobe says that support for larger files and additional media, including video and audio, is “coming soon.”

Creators can also use the app to apply tags to their work that signal to AI developers that they don’t have permission to use it for AI training. This is far more efficient than opting out with each AI provider directly — which usually requires protections to be applied to each image individually — but there’s no guarantee that these tags will be acknowledged or honored by every AI company.

Adobe says it’s working with policymakers and industry partners to “establish effective, creator-friendly opt-out mechanisms powered by Content Credentials.” For now, it’s one protection of many that users can apply to their work to prevent AI models from training on it, alongside systems like Glaze and Nightshade. Andy Parsons, Senior Director of Content Authenticity at Adobe, told The Verge that third-party AI protections are unlikely to interfere with Content Credentials, allowing creatives to apply them to their work harmoniously.

The Content Authenticity app isn’t just for creative professionals, however, as it allows anyone to see if images they find online have Content Credentials applied, just like the Content Authenticity extension for Google Chrome that launched last year. The web app’s inspect tool will recover and display Content Credentials even if image hosting platforms have wiped it, alongside editing history where available which can reveal whether generative AI tools were used to make or manipulate the image.

The bonus is that the Chrome extension and inspection tool don’t rely on third-party support, making content easy to authenticate on platforms where images are routinely shared without attribution. With increasingly accessible AI editing apps also making manipulations harder to detect, Adobe’s Content Authenticity tools may also help to prevent some people from being misled by convincing online deepfakes.

Adobe has launched two new versions of its text-to-image generative AI model alongside a host of new Firefly features and Creative Cloud app updates coming to Photoshop and Illustrator. 

The fourth-generation Firefly Image models follow a similar precedent that OpenAI and Google have set for their chatbot releases, providing users with a choice between one model that’s suited for speed and efficiency, and another for more demanding tasks.

Adobe says that Firefly Image Model 4 is its “fastest, most controllable, and most realistic Firefly image model yet,” allowing users to generate images in up to 2K resolution with more control over style, format sizes, and camera angles. The updates from its predecessor are designed to improve the quality of image outputs while allowing them to be generated “quickly and efficiently.” For image prompts that require more “detail and realism,” Adobe is also launching Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra, which is more capable of rendering “complex scenes with small structures.”

The new Firefly image models are generally available now via the Firefly web app alongside Adobe’s text-to-video and text-to-vector models, which previously launched in public beta. A brand new Firefly web platform tool that’s also launching in public beta today is Firefly Boards — a FigJam-like collaborative generative AI moodboarding app that was introduced during Adobe’s Max event in October as “Project Concept.” Adobe also says that a Firefly mobile app is “coming soon” for  iOS and Android devices. 

The Firefly web app now also gives users access to third-party AI models when generating images or video. Users can select between OpenAI’s new GPT image model or Google’s Imagen 3 for images, or Google’s Veo 2 model for video alongside Adobe’s own AI models, with support for Luma, Pika, Runway, fal.ai, and Ideogram “coming soon,” according to Adobe.

The company describes these third-party offerings as being available for “experimentation” rather than publishable work, however, and clearly marks its own models as being “commercially safe.” That’s not terribly surprising given Adobe trains its AI models on public or licenced content, while OpenAI, Google, and Runway can’t claim the same.

Adobe is also rolling out a smattering of updates for its popular Creative Cloud apps. Illustrator’s generative shape fill and text to pattern tools are now generally available after being introduced in beta last year, while Photoshop is making it easier for users to make color adjustments, and automatically select details like hair, clothing, and specific facial features. The Actions panel in Photoshop is also being updated to make improved editing suggestions “based on a creator’s unique style,” and will form the foundation of the creative AI agent that Adobe is planning to build into the photo editing platform.

LinkedIn is expanding its free verification system to the wider web, allowing external sites and platforms to integrate LinkedIn verification rather than building their own tool. Adobe is among the first companies to sign up.

Adobe is integrating LinkedIn verification into its new Content Authenticity app and existing Behance portfolio platform, allowing creators who’ve gone through LinkedIn’s verification to display a “Verified on LinkedIn” badge on their profiles. If verified creators use Adobe’s digital Content Credentials tools, their identity will also appear alongside their work whenever it’s shared on LinkedIn.

“It’s getting progressively cheaper and easier to pretend you’re someone you’re not online,” Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s vice president of trust, told The Verge. “You’re also able to do so in a way that looks more credible than ever before. Obviously authenticity is super important for LinkedIn, the platform is founded on this premise of trust.”

“Online platforms across the board are facing the same issues around inauthenticity, so we believe that this collaboration with Adobe will be critical in the sense of empowering LinkedIn members and partners to be able to understand specific attributes of someone’s identity that have been verified.”

LinkedIn introduced verification in 2023, allowing users to confirm specific details such as their identity, workplace, or education history using government-issued ID or company emails. The company says that over 80 million people have verified themselves using the tools since then. Alongside Adobe, other early adopters of the expanded verification system include enterprise platforms TrustRadius, G2, and UserTesting.

This week social media network Bluesky introduced its own verification system for “authentic and notable” accounts, aping its rival Twitter with a blue checkmark design. Twitter verification was once the de facto standard online — the company even partnered with Adobe on a Content Authenticity Initiative to attach attribution to images — before its verification program was wound down following Elon Musk’s purchase and the checkmark instead became exclusive to paying X Premium subscribers.

Logitech is releasing a major software update for the MX Creative Console it launched last fall, expanding the control panel’s compatibility to several new apps. Now available for download in the Logi Marketplace, the update adds “powerful new integrations and expanded functionality for Final Cut Pro,” while new plugins bring support for popular apps like Adobe Lightroom and Figma.

Created in collaboration with Adobe, the new Lightroom plugin allows the MX Creative Console’s large dial controller to be used to straighten images with just a twist, while the keypad’s LCD buttons can be customized with shortcuts for quickly rating and flagging images.

The Figma plugin uses the keypad to speed up tasks like aligning text and adjusting spacing and layouts, while the console’s dial can be used to change the size and weight of text.

The MX Creative Console shipped last October with a collection of plugins supporting several Adobe apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, After Effects, and Lightroom Classic. Today’s update adds plugins for the cloud-based Adobe Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Figma, and the Photoshop alternative, Affinity Photo.

“We have heard from the community that the MX Creative Console not only speeds up their workflow, but has increased their productivity and made work easier. Adding these highly requested plugins will unlock the MX Creative Console’s potential for a broader range of creative professionals,” says the general manager of Logitech’s MX Business Unit, Anatoliy Polyanker.

The $199.99 MX Creative Console launched over a year after Logitech acquired the Stream Deck rival Loupedeck which offered several different customizable control panels for streamers and creative professionals.

• Surabhi Bhargava went from an entry-level role to a machine learning lead at Adobe in five years.
• She said that translating ideas into real products goes much further than just talking about them.
• Being vulnerable also helped Surabhi build connections and receive valuable support for her career.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Surabhi Bhargava, a machine tech lead at Adobe's San Jose office. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her employment.

In just five years, I went from an entry-level machine learning engineering role to a machine learning tech lead at Adobe. It's been quite the journey.

What's been key for me is that I always had the chance to work on Adobe's most relevant AI projects.

AI has advanced rapidly over the last five years. I started with computer vision, moved to natural language processing, and now I'm focused on generative AI.

The key to my advancement has been consistently finding the right opportunities, being in the right place at the right time, and sometimes starting projects from scratch.

Share tangible ideas

A key aspect of working in this industry is translating ideas into real products.

You've probably heard the phrase "show, don't tell." People often share ideas but don't usually have proof of concept or something tangible people can interact with.

Having something real that others can test goes much further than just talking about ideas.

I've always made it a point to translate my ideas into something people can try. I'd create initial prototypes and give them to product managers or senior folks. If they liked it, we'd move forward with developing the product.

If not, I'd get feedback and useful information to iterate it further.

It doesn't need to be an entire product or have a shiny user interface — just something tangible they can engage with. A simple front-end that lets them test the backend tech works just fine.

This approach helps me build faster, get feedback faster, and share ideas more broadly, which builds credibility.

When people work on similar projects and need collaborators, you want to be the first person they think of. Having visible work behind you makes that much more likely.

Embracing vulnerability

Building connections at work is valuable, but it wasn't natural for me to go up and talk to someone randomly.

I had to push myself out of my comfort zone. What I found was that the more vulnerable I was — whether talking about the challenges I was facing or the opportunities I was seeking — the more others opened up, too. This wasn't just with my manager — it was across the company.

As a minority in tech, having a strong support system, like fellow women engineers, was also important.

Being open about my struggles and ambitions encouraged others to share their experiences and offer valuable help. The key was always bringing that advice back to my work and growth.

People don't do that enough. You won't always get what you ask for, but you definitely won't get it unless you ask. This applies not only to career progression but also to life advice.

Vulnerability helps create those connections — people are more likely to support you when you let them in. Be open, reach out without hesitation, and help will come in unexpected ways.

Do you have a story to share about working in AI? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

Adobe is building AI agents for Photoshop and Premiere Pro that can suggest ways to edit your photos or videos and then carry out the tasks for you, according to a blog written today by Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s CTO of digital media.

Adobe Photoshop’s agentic AI, or what the company calls its “creative agent,” will be presented in a new floating Actions panel that will recommend context-aware edits after analyzing your photo. For instance, it will be able to suggest removing people standing in the background or creating a greater depth of field by blurring everything behind the subject. All you need to do is click the suggestion and it will be carried out automatically.

Long-time Photoshop users are used to manually manipulating photos by tediously masking people and objects and then creating layers so changes can be made to only certain parts of the image. Adobe has already added AI features that let you extend and fill photos across a larger canvas, or delete unwanted objects or people from the background using Distraction Removal.

Adobe’s vision is that Photoshop users will be able to prompt agents with natural language, making it easier to learn the steps needed to perform a task (although the agent will still be able to do it for you). And you can continue prompting the agent to make more changes, or manually make adjustments in the layers. In one example video, someone asks the agent to clean up an image and add a text box behind a person, and the agent then lists out steps including: remove background people, auto brighten, remove distracting objects, create “subject” layer, create text layer, and organize layers.

For Premiere Pro, Adobe will build on the new Media Intelligence feature introduced last week, which analyzes videos for objects and composition so you can find the footage you need. A future agent will let you direct the agent to make a rough video cut.

“While AI can’t replace human creative inspiration, with your input it can make some educated guesses to help you get your project off the ground,” Greenfield wrote in the blog. “It can also help you learn how to perform complex tasks with a few simple keystrokes, helping you grow as an editor.” Premiere Pro’s creative agent will eventually help editors refine shot choices, adjust color, mix audio, and more. Adobe also just launched Generative Extend, which uses AI to add seconds to your clips to help fit a transition.

Adobe will introduce the technology behind the first AI agent, which will be for Photoshop, at its Max event in London on April 24th.

Adobe has launched its largest typeface expansion in five years, giving Creative Cloud subscribers access to 1,500 new fonts that can be used on websites and apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. More than 750 of these fonts have been provided via a collaboration with Monotype, which owns the licenses for Helvetica, Gotham, and Avenir. 

Older versions of some of these fonts were previously available in Adobe’s Font library, but were removed in January 2023 when the creative software giant ended support for Type 1 fonts, a system that uses the outdated PostScript file format. Now, Adobe says the new fonts are integrated into Creative Cloud at no extra cost — meaning that designers won’t need to pay Monotype to license them or download them locally onto their devices.

This update should result in “fewer frustrating missing font pop-ups” according to Adobe, which users may have previously encountered when trying to use fonts that were removed, or otherwise unavailable on Adobe Fonts or Creative Cloud apps. The font expansion also includes Times New Roman, Arial, and Proxima Nova, alongside options that support alphabets used by languages like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Hindi.

When you set up a new camera, or even go to take a picture on some smartphones, you’re presented with a key choice: JPG or RAW?

JPGs are ready to post just about anywhere, while RAWs yield an unfinished file filled with extra data that allows for much richer post-processing. That option for a RAW file (and even the generic name, RAW) has been standardized across the camera industry — but despite that, the camera world has never actually settled on one standardized RAW format.

Most cameras capture RAW files in proprietary formats, like Canon’s CR3, Nikon’s NEF, and Sony’s ARW. The result is a world of compatibility issues. Photo editing software needs to specifically support not just each manufacturer’s file type but also make changes for each new camera that shoots it. That creates pain for app developers and early camera adopters who want to know that their preferred software will just work.

Adobe tried to solve this problem years ago with a universal RAW format, DNG (Digital Negative), which it open-sourced for anyone to use. A handful of camera manufacturers have since adopted DNG as their RAW format. But the largest names in the space still use their own proprie …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Adobe is updating Premiere Pro with AI-powered features that aim to provide creatives with faster and better video editing results. Version 25.2 of Premiere Pro is launching today, bringing tools for locating, translating, and extending video footage out of beta and into general availability for every user.

The most notable is Generative Extend, which Adobe announced in October as one of the first tools powered by its Firefly generative AI video model. The feature allows users to extend clips by up to two seconds, providing more options for transitions or correcting unexpected movements without having to reshoot footage. Generative Extend can now generate clips in 4K quality and will extend ambient background audio — up to ten seconds for audio alone, or two when paired with video extension — though this won’t extend speech or music.

Generative Extend is completely free to use for a “limited time,” according to Adobe, after which the feature will require users to spend Firefly generative credits. Creative Cloud subscriptions provide a monthly allocation of credits ranging between 25 to 1,000 credits depending on the plan. An additional Firefly credit subscription is also available starting from $10, which grants 2,000 credits per month. Adobe has not specified how many credits the Generative Extend feature will eventually consume, but says that “price will vary based on the format, frame rate, and resolution of your video.”

The latest version of Premiere Pro also includes the new AI-powered Search panel that automatically recognizes the content of clips within your video library. This enables users to search for footage using text descriptions that include objects, locations, camera angles, and effects, such as looking for “close-ups of hands working in a kitchen.” Another feature, Premiere Color Management, automatically transforms log and raw files directly to SDR or HDR without lookup tables to make it easier to jump right into editing, alongside a new wide-gamut color pipeline.

Premiere Pro can now also use AI to automatically translate video captions into 27 different languages, with users able to display multiple caption tracks simultaneously during editing. Adobe also says that the Premiere Pro update provides better speed and performance across both Apple silicon and Windows devices.

The latest version of Premiere Pro is launching alongside After Effects 25.2, which provides new HDR monitoring capabilities, animation controls, support for 3D FBX models, and animated environmental light effects. A new High Performance Preview Playback feature also makes it easier to preview longer compositions thanks to a new caching system that utilizes both RAM and local disks, rather than RAM alone.

• Adobe is moving away from its diversity hiring targets.
• It had set goals in 2020 to increase minority representation in leadership positions.
• Adobe joins firms like Google and Meta in reducing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Another tech giant — Adobe — is scaling back its diversity hiring goals.

At an internal all-hands meeting on Monday, Adobe's chief people officer, Gloria Chen, said Adobe would no longer have diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring targets, internally dubbed "Aspirational Goals," according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.

These goals were set in 2020 to "increase global diversity and inclusion" at leadership levels, Adobe's company blog said. The goals included increasing female leadership representation to 30% globally, doubling underrepresented minorities in leadership roles, and doubling Black representation as a percentage of US employees by 2025.

"We will discontinue the practice of setting aspirational representation goals while continuing our focus on fair and consistent hiring practices," Chen said, adding Adobe had never actually hired based on such quotas.

Adobe is the latest in a long list of companies, including Google, Meta, McDonald's, and Deloitte, to reduce its DEI initiatives. The change follows executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in January aimed at ending DEI programs within the federal government and its contractors.

In an email to BI, Adobe's spokesperson said, "We've always believed in and remain committed to Adobe for All, which is our belief in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. While some programs and policies are changing, our values are not."

'Need more transparency'

During Monday's meeting, Chen said executive orders could be "complex" to interpret and Adobe was "evaluating" many internal programs, activities, and practices to ensure the company complied with them.

Chen added that Adobe didn't believe the DEI pullback applied to countries outside the US for now. As of November, Adobe had a little over 30,000 employees worldwide, 50% of which were in the US, according to a company filing.

Adobe also removed all diversity mentions in its latest proxy statement, a change first spotted by Michelle Leder, the founder of Footnoted, a site that analyzes Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Adobe mentioned diversity 22 times in the previous year's proxy. This year's proxy also deleted a chart on director diversity.

Some Adobe employees shared their frustration in an internal Slack channel, according to screenshots seen by BI. One employee said Adobe's unique culture of embracing different perspectives, called Adobe for All, now seems "lost." Another said it was "heartbreaking" and asked for additional guidance from the leadership team.

"I think we all need more transparency around this issue," one of the people said.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• One number stood out in Adobe's earnings report: AI's annual recurring revenue.
• Investors are eyeing Adobe's ARR from AI as the company bets big on the technology.
• CEO Shantanu Narayen says Adobe plans to double its AI ARR by year-end.

One number from Adobe's quarterly earnings on Wednesday caught investors' attention: annual recurring revenue from AI.

At $125 million from the first quarter this year, it's a small slice of Adobe's $5.71 billion in total quarterly revenue. But analysts were quick to talk about the breakout number on Wednesday's earnings call.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's CEO, said on the call that the company expects to double its AI ARR by the end of the financial year.

"Whether it is innovation, having our own models, integrating it across all of our products, brand new revenue streams like GenStudio in the enterprise and then usage and monetization, I feel really good about it," Narayen said on the call.

The company said it expects revenue to increase to between $5.77 billion and $5.82 billion in the second quarter.

Adobe's stock dipped 4.5% in after-hours trading, extending a rough year that has seen shares slide 23%, even as the S&P 500 climbed 8%.

As AI spending surges, investors are watching closely to see if tech companies can turn big bets into real returns.

Narayen said on the earnings call that future info on AI's ARR would be released "periodically" — not quarterly.

In a research note ahead of earnings, Gregg Moskowitz, a managing director at Mizuho, wrote, "Adobe is unquestionably a frustrating stock in 2024."

He wrote that analysts remain optimistic that Adobe would successfully monetize its generative AI offerings and see strong growth in ARR and revenue guidance for the financial year.

Equity analysts from Jefferies said in a report published on Sunday that chief information officers they surveyed expect their companies' spend on Adobe's creative software to accelerate in 2025.

The surveys included 15 chief information officers and 40 end users. The report said that Adobe's AI offerings are "competitive" and that "fears of AI reducing the need for Adobe may be overblown."

Of end users surveyed, 65% told Jefferies their use of Adobe's creative software would increase within the next three years, while 50% evaluated Adobe's AI offerings "as better than competitors."

Adobe did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside business hours.

• Tech companies seek to hire thousands of skilled foreign workers through H-1B visas each year.
• President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown is raising questions about the future of such visas.
• See which tech companies file for the most H-1B visas, according to publicly available data.

Tech industry giants are hiring thousands of foreign workers through H-1B visas each year, even as the program faces renewed scrutiny under President Donald Trump's second term and growing skepticism from Silicon Valley leaders who once championed it.

The H-1B program allows US companies to hire up to 85,000 foreign workers with specialized skills annually. Workers are chosen through an annual lottery, which kicked off last week and will run through March 24. While Trump expressed support in December, calling it "a great program" that he has "used many times," key figures in his political base have voiced opposition.

Things escalated late last year when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, a first-generation Indian American who immigrated to the US from India in 2007, to serve as a senior White House advisor for AI. The appointment drew backlash from some MAGA supporters, including former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who called the program "a total and complete scam to destroy the American worker."

In late January, Republican Senators John Kennedy and Rick Scott introduced a joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse a Biden-era rule that extended the automatic renewal period for employment authorization documents from 180 days to 540 days. Kennedy said the extension "hampers the Trump administration's efforts to enforce our immigration laws," signaling there would be additional scrutiny of work permits for foreign nationals.

Even tech leaders have softened their stance. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, once unequivocal supporters, have recently acknowledged the need for improvement.

Andreessen said on Lex Fridman's podcast last month that the US has been conducting "a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into."

Musk has called for raising the minimum salary requirements for people on H-1B visas and adding a "yearly cost" to make it more expensive for companies to hire from overseas. "I've been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform," he posted on X.

While the program's future remains uncertain, any significant changes or restrictions to H-1B visas would profoundly impact America's largest technology companies, which have built their workforces around access to global talent.

Business Insider used publicly available data from the Department of Labor and US Citizenship and Immigration Services to analyze which tech companies filed the most H-1B requests during the 2024 government fiscal year. The data comes from applications submitted by businesses seeking to sponsor skilled workers' visas.

Our analysis shows that tech giants collectively file for thousands of these visas annually, using them to fill critical roles that they claim cannot be adequately staffed domestically.

Notably, not every visa filing results in an actual hire, and occasionally multiple filings might be associated with a single position. Companies sometimes submit new applications to accommodate amendments or extend existing visas. Nevertheless, the data available to the public offers a reliable glimpse into the H-1B visa requirements of major corporations.

We have excluded IT consulting firms from this analysis to focus specifically on tech product companies, despite consulting giants like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services traditionally being among the program's largest users.

The analysis reveals that tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Apple are among the program's heaviest users, with thousands of filings each.

While most positions are for software engineers and other technical roles, companies also use the program to fill specialized positions in research, product management, and data science. The employee head count for each firm comes from the latest publicly available data such as the company's latest annual report, their corporate website, or according to sources BI spoke with.

The firms listed either did not respond to a request for comment or declined to comment on the record.

Here are the top 40 tech companies sponsoring H-1B visas, ranked by their number of filings:

1. Amazon

Total certified H-1B filings: 14,783 (including 23 for Whole Foods).

Total employees worldwide: 1,556,000 as of the end of 2024.

2. Microsoft

Total certified H-1B filings: 5,695 flings (including 970 from LinkedIn).

Total employees worldwide: 228,000 as of the second quarter of 2024.

3. Alphabet

Total certified H-1B filings: 5,537 (including 115 from Waymo and Verily).

Total employees worldwide: 183,323 as of the end of 2024.

4. Meta

Total certified H-1B filings: 4,844.

Total employees worldwide: 74,067 as of the end of 2024.

5. Apple

Total certified H-1B filings: 3,880.

Total employees worldwide: 164,000 as of the third quarter of 2024.

6. IBM

Total certified H-1B filings: 2,907.

Total employees worldwide: More than 293,400 as of the end of 2024.

7. Intel

Total certified H-1B filings: 2,558.

Total employees worldwide: 108,900 as of the end of 2024.

8. Oracle

Total certified H-1B filings: 2,141.

Total employees worldwide: 159,000 as of the end of May 2024.

9. Tesla

Total certified H-1B filings: 1,677.

Total employees worldwide: 125,665 as of the end of 2024.

10. Bytedance

Total certified H-1B filings: 1,611.

Total employees worldwide: More than 150,000, according to the company's website.

11. Salesforce

Total certified H-1B filings: 1,525 (A Salesforce spokesperson said that the company filed 1,808 H-1B petitions in fiscal year 2024 including new hires, amendments, and extensions).

Total employees worldwide: 76,453 as of the end of January 2025.

12. Nvidia

Total certified H-1B filings: 1,519.

Total employees worldwide: 36,000 as of the end of fiscal year 2025.

13. Cisco

Total certified H-1B filings: 1,330.

Total employees worldwide: 90,400 as of the end of fiscal year 2024.

14. Qualcomm

Total certified H-1B filings: 1,291.

Total employees worldwide: 49,000 employees as of the end of the third quarter of 2024.

15. Adobe

Total certified H-1B filings: 787.

Total employees worldwide: More than 30,708 of as November 2024.

16. Intuit

Total certified H-1B filings: 770.

Total employees worldwide: 18,200 at the end of fiscal year 2024.

17. Uber

Total certified H-1B filings: 703.

Total employees worldwide: 31,100 as of the end of 2024.

18. Paypal

Total certified H-1B filings: 623.

Total employees worldwide: 24,400 as of the end of 2024.

19. eBay

Total certified H-1B filings: 548 (An eBay spokesperson said eBay filed 494 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2024, noting that the publicly available information doesn't disclose the exact number of roles hired for.)

Total employees worldwide: 11,500 as of the end of 2024.

20. Rivian

Total certified H-1B filings: 584.

Total employees worldwide: 14,861 as of the end of 2024.

21. ServiceNow

Total certified H-1B filings: 578.

Total employees worldwide: 26,293 as of the end of 2024.

22. HP

Total certified H-1B filings: 533.

Total employees worldwide: 58,000 as of the end of 2024.

23. Dell

Total certified H-1B filings: 489.

Total employees worldwide: 120,000 as of February 2, 2024.

24. Lucid Motors

Total certified H-1B filings: 488.

Total employees worldwide: 6,800 as of the end of 2024.

25. DoorDash

Total certified H-1B filings: 427.

Total employees worldwide: 23,700 as of the end of 2024.

26. Fiserv

Total certified H-1B filings: 403.

Total employees worldwide: 38,000 as of the end of 2024.

27. Micron Technology

Total certified H-1B filings: 369.

Total employees worldwide: 48,000 as of August 29, 2024.

28. VMWare

Total certified H-1B filings: 359.

Total employees worldwide: 16,000 according to Business Insider's sources.

29. ADP

Total certified H-1B filings: 350.

Total employees worldwide: 64,000 as of June 2024.

30. Workday

Total certified H-1B filings: 347.

Total employees worldwide: 20,400 as of January 31, 2025.

31. Expedia

Total certified H-1B filings: 331.

Total employees worldwide: 16,500 as of the end of 2024.

32. MathWorks

Total certified H-1B filings: 295.

Total employees worldwide: 6,500, according to the corporate website.

33. Snowflake

Total certified H-1B filings: 285.

Total employees worldwide: 7,004 as of January 31, 2024.

34. Databricks

Total certified H-1B filings: 283.

Total employees worldwide: More than 7,000, according to the company's website.

35. Synopsys

Total certified H-1B filings: 267.

Total employees worldwide: 20,000 as of November 2024.

36. Stripe

Total certified H-1B filings: 265.

Total employees worldwide: Approximately 8,200 according to BI's reporting.

37. Snap

Total certified H-1B filings: 258

Total employees worldwide: 4,911 as of December 2024.

38. Netflix

Total certified H-1B filings: 256.

Total employees worldwide: 14,000 as of the end of 2024.

39. Block

Total certified H-1B filings: 231.

Total employees worldwide: 11,372 as of the end of 2024.

40. Pinterest

Total certified H-1B filings: 225.

Total employees worldwide: 4,666 as of the end of 2024.