Adobe’s CFO is using AI to answer 300,000 emails, cut contract review in half — and make sure finance never slows the company down

Good morning. Adobe CFO Dan Durn isn’t waiting to see how agentic AI plays out—he’s already running the experiment inside his own finance organization.

Durn, who oversees finance, technology, security, and operations, has turned Adobe’s back office into a live proving ground for autonomous AI agents. The results include contract review time cut in half, more than 300,000 emails auto-responded to in a single year, and finance teams surfacing investor insights in minutes instead of hours.

At Adobe (No. 201 on the Fortune 500), the push is deliberate. If finance doesn’t adopt AI, it risks becoming a “rate limiter of growth”—a back-office bottleneck in a company moving fast on product innovation, Durn told me. Inside finance, he breaks AI deployment into three buckets. For a closer look at how Adobe’s finance chief is rewiring the function, and what it signals for CFOs navigating the same pressure, read more of my interview with Durn here.

The rise of AI is also rapidly reshaping corporate leadership. Even long-tenured leaders face increasing pressure from investors to move aggressively on AI. Recent leadership changes, including the announced retirement of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen,........

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