The annual Adobe Summit commenced on Monday, featuring keynote speeches from NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. However, BNP Paribas' equity research division noted ahead of the summit that the content creation platform is facing increasing competitive pressure from Canva.

The Adobe Summit serves as the primary stage for Adobe to announce new services, features, and product upgrades for its creative and marketing software. The 2026 summit officially opened on April 20 in Las Vegas, accompanied by a simultaneous online virtual event.

BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski stated, "Canva has expanded its core design tools into an AI-driven creative platform, and the comprehensive capabilities of its product ecosystem are gradually becoming competitive with Adobe. In addition to its own innovations, the company completed five acquisitions in the first quarter, including tools that integrate creative design, customer data, and marketing automation. If editorial workflows are incorporated into the foundational AI architecture, investors may worry that Adobe's Creative Cloud suite could lose its differentiation advantage."

Canva boasts 31 million paid users and is the third most used AI product, following OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The company reported that its annual recurring revenue has surged to over $4 billion.

Slowinski added, "After offering its professional design product Affinity for free, Canva continues to attract Adobe users to its platform. Our discussions indicate that Canva has a substantial pipeline of potential customers. Furthermore, we believe Canva may be willing to accept lower profit margins in the short term, partly because it is generous in providing AI credits to encourage user adoption and AI interaction. This could continue to put pressure on the profitability of Adobe's AI offerings in the near term."