Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 1: Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: All Right, everybody, you don't see this a lot these days,
Speaker 2: someone spending their entire career at a single company. But
Speaker 2: that's exactly what our next guest did. After thirty three
Speaker 2: years at Dow Howard and Ungerlider, he retired back in November.
Speaker 2: He oversaw Dow DuPont split into three separate public companies.
Speaker 2: We're talking about Dow DuPont, DuPont and then Corteva. I
Speaker 2: hope I'm saying that correctly.
Speaker 3: Fair to say, Carol, he's seen quite a few cycles
Speaker 3: and quite a few changes through his career at the
Speaker 3: chemicals giant. Howard Ungerlighter joins us on a zoom in
Speaker 3: New York City. Howard, good to have you with us. Look,
Speaker 3: why did you retire?
Speaker 4: Hey, Tim, Good afternoon, Carol. Thank you. Somewhere in the
Speaker 4: suburbs of Philadelphia. My mother is smiling if she's listening
Speaker 4: to nice introduction. Look, Look, thirty three years is a
Speaker 4: long time to be doing anything, and I just felt
Speaker 4: like it was the right time to continue with my
Speaker 4: leadership journey. You know, I just arrived in New York.
Speaker 4: You know, my grand my, well, all of my ancestors
Speaker 4: actually immigrated from Eastern Europe. My grandfather worked at a
Speaker 4: dry cleaner's for more than fifty years in Brooklyn, and
Speaker 4: you know, he just he instilled in me a work
Speaker 4: ethic around pressing pants. And I still remember early days.
Speaker 4: He's long since passed away, but when I was first
Speaker 4: at Dow more than thirty three years ago. Now, he
Speaker 4: used to call me and ask me at the end
Speaker 4: of the day how many pants that I pressed, because
Speaker 4: that was his view of hard work. And that's what
Speaker 4: he instilled in me. And I did that for thirty
Speaker 4: three years, and it was time to look where my
Speaker 4: leadership journey is going to take me next.
Speaker 2: Do you have a favorite moment though, within that thirty
Speaker 2: three year journey at Dow specifically.
Speaker 4: Oh, my goodness, you know, thirty three years. It seemed
Speaker 4: like every year was something special. Certainly the investor relations
Speaker 4: role that I did in a financial crisis. You know,
Speaker 4: I took that role in April of two thousand and eight,
Speaker 4: we announced the acquisition at Romanhaus in the summer. Lehman
Speaker 4: collapsed in September, and we all know what happened after that, So,
Speaker 4: you know the old adage of what doesn't kill you
Speaker 4: makes you stronger. I learned a lot about myself. I
Speaker 4: learned a lot about our great company called Dow through
Speaker 4: that period of the financial crisis.
Speaker 2: I still love that you went there because I always
Speaker 2: think that that is a time when the CFO that
Speaker 2: position was no longer about the earnings call or quarterly
Speaker 2: earnings report, only just that. But it became the CFOs
Speaker 2: kept companies alive and figured out the balance sheet and
Speaker 2: what they needed to do. And I just feel like
Speaker 2: from that day forward, CFOs meant something very different.
Speaker 4: Carol, I couldn't agree more. Actually, my joke at the
Speaker 4: time was there were no equity investors. Everybody was a
Speaker 4: fixed income investor. They all wanted to ask about credit
Speaker 4: and risk and mitigation and trying to find where the
Speaker 4: bottom was. Now, that's fifteen plus years ago now, But
Speaker 4: I actually think you bring up a great point. You know,
Speaker 4: the role of CFO, I really think has evolved dramatically
Speaker 4: over the last twenty five thirty years. If you go
Speaker 4: back into the nineties, the best path to the CFO
Speaker 4: steat was most likely treasurer, a deal maker, a lot
Speaker 4: of m and A experience through the early part of
Speaker 4: the two thousands, after Enron and Sarbanes Oxley, it really
Speaker 4: became an accounting driven, compliance driven, controlled driven role. And
Speaker 4: I would say, really the financial crisis was the beginning
Speaker 4: of I think the evolution as a CFO as co pilot.
Speaker 4: You know, I am not a pilot by training, but
Speaker 4: I use that analogy because I think it's really apropos
Speaker 4: The CFO really has to be the co pilot of
Speaker 4: the enterprise today. And you think about what a co
Speaker 4: pilot does is they have to do everything that the
Speaker 4: pilot does. They may not have they have one fewer
Speaker 4: stripe on their on their shirt sleeve, but they have
Speaker 4: to be able to land, take off, talk to the
Speaker 4: talk to the crew, work with the work with air
Speaker 4: traffic control, navigate the plane, uh, you know, engage with
Speaker 4: the clients or the customers or the passengers. They have
Speaker 4: to be able to do everything the pilot does. So
Speaker 4: really CFO is co pilot, I think is is what
Speaker 4: this generation of CFOs really needs.
Speaker 3: I'm going to break a rule that I should not break,
Speaker 3: but I just can't help myself. Okay, now I'm still
Speaker 3: stuck on this idea that you know, your grandfather would
Speaker 3: call you early in your career and I just out
Speaker 3: of curiosity, is there any chemical that you worked on
Speaker 3: or anything you oversaw while you were at dow, Like,
Speaker 3: does this story comefort full circle that he would have
Speaker 3: used or that dry cleaners end up using in their process.
Speaker 4: Yeah. One one one is the perchlor ethylene. It's a
Speaker 4: product that now no longer makes and it's not really
Speaker 4: a product that drag cleaners use today for obviously for
Speaker 4: environmental reasons, but back thirty forty fifty years ago that
Speaker 4: was the molecule of choice for most drig cleaners. So
Speaker 4: he definitely used that at the time. That's a lot.
Speaker 4: That's a long time.
Speaker 3: Ago, tim, But you said they're no longer using it.
Speaker 4: Right, correct?
Speaker 3: Is that?
Speaker 1: How come?
Speaker 4: Just? I mean, in terms of environmental footprint, there's molecules
Speaker 4: that are safer today, that are better for the environment
Speaker 4: and better for the clothes well and safer well.
Speaker 2: Can we go there for a little bit, because we
Speaker 2: thought about this when we were kind of planning. You know,
Speaker 2: it feels like one of the next industries already or
Speaker 2: will be on many people's radar is plastics and really
Speaker 2: the chemical industry is rolling this, and you know the
Speaker 2: report that came out earlier this month. I think Columbia
Speaker 2: and Rutgers about the detectable plastic fragments and a typical
Speaker 2: leader of bottled water some two hundred and forty thousand,
Speaker 2: and we've been talking a lot about microplastics and nanoplastics
Speaker 2: and how they're so much more dangerous. You know. I
Speaker 2: think about the graduate the movie and there he is
Speaker 2: in the pool and they're like, what are you gonna
Speaker 2: do with your life? And they're like plastics? So how
Speaker 2: are you thinking about? Having spent so much time in
Speaker 2: that industry? But what's the constructive conversation to have as
Speaker 2: we maybe move forward to and probably should move forward
Speaker 2: to you a continually cleaner world that doesn't impact our
Speaker 2: environment so much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I certainly I'm not here speaking on behalf
Speaker 4: of Dow because I'm no longer with a company, But
Speaker 4: what I would say is I think where the industry
Speaker 4: is heading, and Dow is certainly right there front and
Speaker 4: center is decarbonizing the value chains and driving for circularity.
Speaker 4: Plastics actually is the most sustainable alternative. It's more sustainable
Speaker 4: when you look at it on a total carbon life
Speaker 4: cycle perspective, than paper, than metal, than glass or other
Speaker 4: packaging substrates. The challenge is a lot of it, most
Speaker 4: of it today, unfortunately, is not recycled and it goes
Speaker 4: into the landfill. And so by driving decarbonization, meaning reducing
Speaker 4: or eliminating the use of hydrocarbons to make plastics using
Speaker 4: other materials as raw materials, as feedstocks, then driving circularity
Speaker 4: so that those materials, once they're transformed into a plastic
Speaker 4: or a polymer or packaging use or durable good use,
Speaker 4: don't go into the land fill, but actually get reused
Speaker 4: and recycled. I mean that ultimately will really benefit the planet.
Speaker 2: But does it not get recycled because it's just not
Speaker 2: cost efficient to do so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's more cost efficient today unfortunately to use virgin
Speaker 4: hydrocarbon resients and virgin polymers. What you know, we were
Speaker 4: advocating and what I would still support, is some kind
Speaker 4: of a market based price on carbon. It's not something
Speaker 4: that currently have is happening in the United States today,
Speaker 4: it is happening in other in other countries around the world. Canada,
Speaker 4: our neighbor, for example, does have a market based price
Speaker 4: on carbon. And if you implement a market based price
Speaker 4: in carbon that will encourage and financially incentivize people to
Speaker 4: actually do that recycling.
Speaker 3: But what about the idea of these plastics actually getting
Speaker 3: into our bloodstreams through microplastics? Now, nanoplastics is the study
Speaker 3: that Carol was referring to that we talked about on
Speaker 3: our air a couple.
Speaker 4: Of weeks ago.
Speaker 3: That's something that's relatively new to me and that that
Speaker 3: we're just learning about.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: How do you think about all that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we need a lot more scientific study.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's really that we need to let the
Speaker 4: science drive the answer. Uh. And I mean I would
Speaker 4: say that's the that's the biggest thing that we can
Speaker 4: do as a society.
Speaker 3: Would you say there's not evidence for that at this point?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: Not significant.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: We're talking with Howard Underlider. He is former president chief
Speaker 2: financial officer at Dow and he's joining us on Zoom
Speaker 2: in New York City. One more thing. I want to
Speaker 2: kind of go back to what we ended on Howard,
Speaker 2: if I may. And I was just thinking about all
Speaker 2: those things and even really wonderful and just kind of
Speaker 2: going with us on it and talking about it. But
Speaker 2: I think there are a lot of industries out there,
Speaker 2: like I think about I spent a big check in
Speaker 2: my career, like watching what happened with cigarettes and the
Speaker 2: settlement pesticide, sugar, trans fats, lead, asbestos, mercury, red dye
Speaker 2: number five. Yeah, exactly. Although they that settlement, you know,
Speaker 2: no wrongdoing to be you know, just to be fair
Speaker 2: and transparent. There are so many things we learned years
Speaker 2: after we've been using them that they are bad for society,
Speaker 2: for individuals. So at the same time, so much that
Speaker 2: companies do that have improved our lives in immeasurable ways.
Speaker 2: How does the chemical industry, though, adapt to kind of
Speaker 2: an environment where we are looking to make or that
Speaker 2: we're not impacting individuals, not impacting the environment. You know,
Speaker 2: carbon credits are one thing, but we want to make
Speaker 2: sure that we're actually not creating harm in the first place.
Speaker 4: Sure, And I think, I mean, it's a great question,
Speaker 4: Carol and Tim and I would just say that I think,
Speaker 4: you know, spending thirty three years of my career at DOW,
Speaker 4: it was all about the science, right and every you know,
Speaker 4: and science, technology improves, analytics improve and the industry at
Speaker 4: least coming from a Dow perspective has improved over the
Speaker 4: last thirty years in a significant way. And you know,
Speaker 4: you try to use the best available data and analytics
Speaker 4: and tools and technologies to develop the right polymers. And
Speaker 4: there are many there are many chemicals that used to
Speaker 4: be used decades ago which are no longer used because
Speaker 4: we found much safer molecules in order to be able
Speaker 4: to deliver the products and the features and the benefits
Speaker 4: that we as consumers and co owners like. And I
Speaker 4: would just say that we've got to continue to do
Speaker 4: that as an industry and frankly as a society.
Speaker 2: Love that. Well, then let's go a little bit further
Speaker 2: in terms of what you do next. And I think
Speaker 2: I've read somewhere where you want to make an impact
Speaker 2: or continue to make an impact, and it could come
Speaker 2: in a couple different ways, whether it's CEO of a
Speaker 2: publicly held company or private equity. When you say impact,
Speaker 2: what do you want to do specifically, Howard?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So let me start with what I am doing.
Speaker 4: So I've signed up as an operating advisor for cdn
Speaker 4: R based here in New York. I'm also on the
Speaker 4: board of Kindrel, which was the IBM spin out of
Speaker 4: the managed infrastructure business a few years ago with Martin
Speaker 4: Schroeder and David and the team there at Kindrel, and
Speaker 4: I'm enjoying both of those roles phenomenally well. You know,
Speaker 4: creating long term value for all stakeholders is what I
Speaker 4: would say gets me very, very really excited. I mean,
Speaker 4: dealing with complex three dimensional problems and challenges and working
Speaker 4: to create long term value, not just for shareholders or
Speaker 4: the owners of a company, but really and what I
Speaker 4: learned in my thirty three year career is you have
Speaker 4: to invest and create value for all of the stakeholders.
Speaker 4: That's your customers, the communities in which you operate, and
Speaker 4: the citizens and the ultimate end consumers. Depending on where
Speaker 4: you are in the value chain, would you be focused.
Speaker 3: On would you consider going full time in house somewhere
Speaker 3: and as a CFO or CEO.
Speaker 4: Sure, I would. I mean, I'm having lots of interesting
Speaker 4: conversations as you don't imagine. I mean, I promised myself.
Speaker 4: A lot of the people that I've spoken with that
Speaker 4: I respect, they say you can say yes to every conversation,
Speaker 4: but don't say yes to anything full time for at
Speaker 4: least six months. Give yourself a little bit of grace,
Speaker 4: give yourself six months to really refresh and hit the
Speaker 4: reset button. So I mean, I'm doing just that. I'm
Speaker 4: having conversations, But I will tell you I really am
Speaker 4: enjoying the CD and R folks. I'm enjoying being on
Speaker 4: the board of Kindrel, and I'm really enjoying the conversations
Speaker 4: that I'm having a bone and beyond that as well.
Speaker 3: Hey, Carol and I were talking earlier in the day
Speaker 3: about Archer Daniels Midland. I don't know if you saw
Speaker 3: this news. I know you were traveling today, so forgive
Speaker 3: me if you haven't. But Archer Daniels Midland plunged twenty
Speaker 3: four percent, the most ever in a single day, after
Speaker 3: the company suspended its CFO and cut its earnings out loook,
Speaker 3: pending an investigation into its accounting practices. We should know.
Speaker 3: That's what we know so far. No wrongdoing has been
Speaker 3: there's no wrongdoing being accused of anyone at this point,
Speaker 3: but there is an investigation going on. Just as a
Speaker 3: CFO a former CFO. How do you read into something
Speaker 3: like that, like news like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Look, all I know is what I read on
Speaker 4: Bloomberg on my phone on the way from the airport.
Speaker 4: So I can't comment on that specific issue. What I
Speaker 4: would say though, in terms of being a publicly traded
Speaker 4: company or any company the United States, US gap accounting
Speaker 4: is the Bible. It's a combination of the Old Testament,
Speaker 4: the New Testament, to Kuran, pick your favorite, pick your
Speaker 4: favorite religion. You have to abide by US gap accounting.
Speaker 4: That is table stakes. Now, if all you do is
Speaker 4: focus on the gap accounting, then you're not likely in
Speaker 4: a great long term value for stakeholders. But you have
Speaker 4: to start with gap accounting. It all starts and stops
Speaker 4: at gap a county. You have to do that. So
Speaker 4: I would imagine, you know, we'll see what happens over
Speaker 4: the next over the next few weeks and months. Is
Speaker 4: that story unfold?
Speaker 2: This has been great because we've been covering so much
Speaker 2: as kind of going on in our news today and
Speaker 2: kind of some of the big narratives, if you will.
Speaker 2: Having said that, politics is a big narrative, and we
Speaker 2: know we've got the New Hampshire primary underway. Politics, how
Speaker 2: do you believe Global CEOs us CEO should be planning
Speaker 2: for the outcome here in the United States come November.
Speaker 4: Look, I think you know businesses have to have to
Speaker 4: go through many different political cycles. Right, If you're going
Speaker 4: to be successful over the long term, you know you're
Speaker 4: going to outlive an individual elected official if you're doing
Speaker 4: if you're doing the service for the industry. When I
Speaker 4: think about twenty twenty four, you know, certainly the economy.
Speaker 4: You know, what I heard Jenet Yellen talk about the
Speaker 4: other day was that, you know, declaring success and a
Speaker 4: soft landing. I hope she is right. I hope we
Speaker 4: are dealing with a soft landing. With that said, you know,
Speaker 4: we it's never been done yet. So what I would
Speaker 4: say to fellow CFOs out there or people who are
Speaker 4: running companies, is, you know, prepare for a choppy twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four. Prepare for a twenty twenty four that looked
Speaker 4: a lot like twenty twenty three. I think for the
Speaker 4: most part, certainly in the upstream parts of most value chains,
Speaker 4: de stocking is most likely over. It's an open question
Speaker 4: on whether that d stocking will come to an end
Speaker 4: or continue to extend in some of the downstream consumer
Speaker 4: oriented areas. But I think, you know, hoping for the best,
Speaker 4: but preparing for something less than the best is what
Speaker 4: you know. I always tried to do, and certainly what
Speaker 4: multiple crises, whether you go back to the financial crisis
Speaker 4: that we were talking about or the pandemic, you have
Speaker 4: to do scenario planning. You have to have a plan, Howard,
Speaker 4: a plan B and C.
Speaker 2: We have to run, do come back. It's one of
Speaker 2: our favorite kind of conversations, Howard Underlider. Thank you so much, Carol.
Speaker 3: I think I told you about this last week.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So some good friends over at our place a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks ago. They picked up the dad picked up
Speaker 3: the family's holiday card, showed his family on a fall
Speaker 3: day in Central Park, beautiful smiling leaves behind him. He said,
Speaker 3: you want to know a secret about this card? Yeah, said, yeah,
Speaker 3: of course I want to a secret. It's a holiday card.
Speaker 3: They're no secrets here, he said, Okay. He used photoshops
Speaker 3: AI feature to remove people from the photo and put
Speaker 3: freeze back in place, so it actually makes them look
Speaker 3: like they were alone in Central Park on a fall weekend.
Speaker 2: That's your friend's not an expert at this time, that's
Speaker 2: the thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he No, he's a doctor. He has no idea
Speaker 3: how like he's not trained in photoshop. Like it wouldn't
Speaker 3: be that impressive if somebody.
Speaker 2: But he trades a graphic artist on the side.
Speaker 3: He said he watched a YouTube video and then it
Speaker 3: was like he said, he called it. He was so
Speaker 3: easy to do. I thought it was kind of cool
Speaker 3: because like it's professional photo editing, but it's actually using
Speaker 3: generative AI. And all he had to do was like
Speaker 3: put the cursor over this one area and then trees appear.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: Our next guest is nodding. She is in studio. We're
Speaker 2: delighted to have with us, Ashley Still. She's senior vice
Speaker 2: president of Creative Business at Adobe. As I said, here
Speaker 2: at Bloomberg headquarters in New York City, you're nodding because
Speaker 2: like anybody can do this. Now it seems like.
Speaker 5: Yes, that is my favorite holiday card story. Now, thank
Speaker 5: you so much for showing that. And it's great to
Speaker 5: be here. And that really just crystallizes the power of
Speaker 5: generative AI to make creativity more approachable or accessible to everybody.
Speaker 3: So I think the thing that I want to talk
Speaker 3: about with you, like we want to go a lot
Speaker 3: of places. We want to talk about the economy in
Speaker 3: what you're hearing from companies and sort of like the
Speaker 3: B to B side of things. But I want to
Speaker 3: talk about how you're leveraging AI in this different way
Speaker 3: because I think there's a lot of concern right now
Speaker 3: about generative AI and it being quote unquote safe and
Speaker 3: like copyright issues. We see New York Times filing lawsuits.
Speaker 3: What do you do at Adobe to make sure that
Speaker 3: what you are providing customers with they can then go
Speaker 3: put on their holiday card and they're not going to
Speaker 3: get in trouble for it.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, So obviously the creative community is incredibly important to us.
Speaker 5: You know, as you mentioned, your friend is a doctor,
Speaker 5: but many of our customers are artists and designers, but
Speaker 5: also businesses. And so we made a decision very early
Speaker 5: in all of our research and development around generative AI
Speaker 5: to actually build our own foundational models and use our
Speaker 5: own content that we have licensed to to train the models.
Speaker 5: And that really separates us from pretty much everybody else
Speaker 5: because our content is what we call creator friendly. It
Speaker 5: respects the intellectual property.
Speaker 2: If you're training with content that you guys have rights to,
Speaker 2: it's going to stay within that universe exactly.
Speaker 5: So we don't go scrape content from the public Internet.
Speaker 5: We only use and we have a service called Adobe
Speaker 5: Stock where photographers and creators all over the world have
Speaker 5: actually contributed their content and given us a license to that.
Speaker 5: They've been compensated for us to train to both resell
Speaker 5: that content but also train our AI models on that content.
Speaker 3: Take me through this decision here, because this is Adobe,
Speaker 3: this is not Adobe's first rodeo, whereas a lot of
Speaker 3: these startups it is their first rodeo. So when did
Speaker 3: this decision happen and how expensive has this decision been
Speaker 3: over the course of development.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean we first of all, we've been developing
Speaker 5: AI for a decade, so we're not new to needing
Speaker 5: to think through the data that you're using to train models.
Speaker 5: We've been uh you know, kind of building that uh
Speaker 5: that muscle for a decade. We also have been in
Speaker 5: the stock business for at least a decade. It's not
Speaker 5: for the stock photos business, and uh and so from
Speaker 5: early on we actually have had the rights to and
Speaker 5: we realized probably again probably like at least date or
Speaker 5: ten years ago, that we needed to expand the idea
Speaker 5: of stock content to be not just reselling again for
Speaker 5: licensed content, but to be using for training. So this
Speaker 5: is actually not new.
Speaker 2: So when you hear all the concerns and worries that
Speaker 2: are out there. Do you think that there is somewhat
Speaker 2: of an easy solution in terms of the worries about
Speaker 2: kind of what generative AI can do and where it
Speaker 2: can go.
Speaker 5: Well, in terms of copyright, I think they're choices, right,
Speaker 5: there's lots of lots of topics around generate event. I
Speaker 5: mean it's in terms of but in terms of copyright,
Speaker 5: I think it's about choices. There's models. So for example,
Speaker 5: if you want to create a Starbucks coffee cup using Firefly,
Speaker 5: which is our generator AIA service, you can't because we
Speaker 5: have not we have explicitly never trained our models to
Speaker 5: know what a Starbucks coffee cup looks like. And so
Speaker 5: if you're and I'll get to some of the things
Speaker 5: that we're working with companies on, we think the solution
Speaker 5: to that is to then actually just work with Starbucks
Speaker 5: if they want to create Starbucks coffee cups, to extend
Speaker 5: the model with their content. Right, But if you go
Speaker 5: to some of the other services in the market they
Speaker 5: have trained. On the public Internet, there are plenty of
Speaker 5: Starbucks coffee cups on the public Internet, holiday ones, regular ones,
Speaker 5: and so there's a lot of content that it would
Speaker 5: have been able to be trained on. But again, but
Speaker 5: you don't have a right to that brand.
Speaker 3: Right, So let's go there, because that's a really interesting
Speaker 3: development in this sort of new world. I think for
Speaker 3: a lot new for Adobe necessarily, but I think new
Speaker 3: for a lot of people is this world of AI.
Speaker 3: So if this partnership were to happen, who pays whom?
Speaker 5: Oh in terms of you and Starbucks for example, Oh well,
Speaker 5: we we see that as actually a benefit to being
Speaker 5: a customer of Adobe that they we would enable them
Speaker 5: to extend Firefly to uh to understand again what Starbucks
Speaker 5: content looks like. That doesn't necessarily mean that they need
Speaker 5: to enable that for the entire world. Okay, so it's
Speaker 5: like it's a brand extension for their use.
Speaker 3: Oh, I see what you're saying. So for for starbucks
Speaker 3: own use, So they could they could help create marketing
Speaker 3: materials using Firefly. Not necessarily. Let's say there were somebody
Speaker 3: who was upset about a union negotiation between Starbucks and employees,
Speaker 3: creating a Starbucks image that the company wouldn't.
Speaker 5: Exactly and of course we could look at brand partnerships
Speaker 5: to bring that content into the public version of our
Speaker 5: Fly but that's not something that we've we've done yet.
Speaker 3: Do companies want to do that? Are they scared of
Speaker 3: that world?
Speaker 5: I think they're first trying to understand how they use
Speaker 5: generative AI for their own internal use cases. I think
Speaker 5: they're thinking a little less about, you know, going back
Speaker 5: to your friend's holiday card example, do they want to
Speaker 5: be able to have your friend holding a coffee cup
Speaker 5: in that image? I think they're more concerned with how
Speaker 5: do we expand our marketing, how do we get scale
Speaker 5: versus you know, some of those use cases.
Speaker 2: So I only have a been a minute and a
Speaker 2: half here left, So I am always curious about someone
Speaker 2: in your position, right you're working with lots of different
Speaker 2: clients finding out what they need, what they want. How
Speaker 2: would you describe the business environment and the ease at
Speaker 2: which companies are spending right now?
Speaker 5: You know, I think we've been in a similar position
Speaker 5: for a while, Like I don't. I don't think anything has.
Speaker 2: As a year ago same as two years ago.
Speaker 5: I think it's been the same for about a year,
Speaker 5: particularly for large companies, where there's just more scrutiny of
Speaker 5: big contracts and spending and really pressing to see the
Speaker 5: ROI of these investments. I think absolutely we've seen continued
Speaker 5: strength and digital and you know, a very significant portion
Speaker 5: of Adobe's businesses actually through Adobe dot com, and that
Speaker 5: has actually been really strong and certainly something.
Speaker 2: Stronger than it was the past six months or a
Speaker 2: year ago.
Speaker 5: You know, it's it's been strong throughout the past year,
Speaker 5: and particularly as you were mentioning, as we innovate in
Speaker 5: our products like Photoshop, which generative phil and Firefly, we've
Speaker 5: actually seen demand for our products increase. But certainly it's
Speaker 5: both of those I would say, you know, I've seen
Speaker 5: more scrutiny on the business side for spending and continued consumer.
Speaker 2: Put You really explained it really well in terms of
Speaker 2: the copyright, right the information, It sounds like any easy
Speaker 2: fix if people just do that responsibil responsibly started.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if they started by training in the beginning, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: We just stuff that they've got approval of license like
Speaker 2: that is pretty amazing, so easy, right, but it works. Ashley. Thanks,
Speaker 2: This kind of flew so hopefully we get to catch
Speaker 2: up with you soon in the future. Ashley, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: Senior vice president of Created Business over at Adobe. As
Speaker 2: we mentioned, she's here at our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg Radio.