Las Vegas, March 20 -- On Tuesday, Shantanu Narayen, the chief executive of California-based tech firm Adobe, led the company's two-hour-long pitch to convince businesses and analysts that in the race among Big Tech firms to sell their innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), it warrants a seat at the top. While a new full-stack agentic AI platform would see Adobe rival the likes of Salesforce, its key executives are clear about one thing: selling AI to businesses still won't be an easy task.

In the long run, Adobe wants to become the one-stop software seller to businesses for all purposes-including letting them access third-party foundational AI models such as Google's Gemini for reasoning tasks, and Runway's Gen-3 and beyond for ge...