TIME has named the Top 100 Most Influential Companies of 2026 – and unsurprisingly, the list includes a number of AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. But one software giant has been named to the list specifically for how it balances AI with creators: Adobe.
“The company has over 850 million monthly active users, and as part of its AI integration push, it has kept creators – 86 percent of which already use generative AI based on a company survey – in control of their process,” wrote Tharin Pillay, an editorial fellow at TIME.
While many AI platforms do not disclose where their data comes from, Adobe says that Firefly is trained on licensed work. That makes the AI safe for commercial use, but perhaps most importantly for creators, it wasn’t trained on data swiped from the internet without the original creators' permission – it was built on licensed Adobe Stock, openly licensed content, and public domain works.
Article continues belowAdobe’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro and other tools have long been industry-standard software made for creatives. TIME has selected Adobe for the list of influential companies largely for “creating with creators.”
Those tools are still well used even after the push into generative AI, TIME writes, noting statistics like 86 percent of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival premieres using an Adobe tool and 99 percent of Fortune 100 companies using AI inside an Adobe app.
Adobe’s push into generative AI hasn’t been without controversy among creators. In 2024, creators pointed out an update to the legal terms that said that Adobe “may access, view or listen to your content.” Adobe said that change was an effort to crack down on child sexual abuse material, but later updated the terms to state that Adobe “will not use your Local or Cloud Content to train generative AI.”
A price increase in 2025 for Photoshop and Lightroom further frustrated some users.
But, amid building AI tools like assisted culling in Lightroom and generative AI healing and removal tools in Photoshop, Adobe has climbed to 850 million users across all its platforms, which includes Creative Cloud as well as tools like Adobe Acrobat. That rise – and the number of creators still creating with Adobe – are one of the factors that led to Adobe’s nomination and then inclusion on the TIMNE 100 Most Influential Companies list for 2026.
The TIME list isn’t all about the newest tech – Fujifilm also made the list for standing out “in a consumer tech landscape saturated with AI tools” for its Instax film cameras.
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