Adobe makes big bets on AI and the public cloud

Adobe held its annual MAX conference for users of its Creative Cloud earlier this month. That's where the company usually announces new and upcoming features to applications like Photoshop or Premiere Pro. This year, however, Adobe also introduced Sensei, its new artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based platform that combines Adobe's knowledge of working with photos, videos, documents and marketing data with a unified AI and machine learning framework. Just like Microsoft and Google are trying to imbue all of their products with "intelligence," Adobe, too, is now on a mission to bring more smarts to its products -- be that in the form of machine learning-based tools and features, or through smarter traditional analytics. Sensei is Adobe's version of this.