THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE

The phrase, "The only constant is change," I heard from a former president of an insurance company to illustrate the period we were going through. It came back to me while watching a clip of an interview with actor Christoph Waltz quoting Voltaire: if change is uncomfortable, permanence is absurd.

This concept, of change versus permanence, is a constant in our lives, especially in today's world. It can be applied both to the radicalism of thought, when people believe their ideas are permanent and immutable, and to the professional reality in a time of booming Artificial Intelligence.

If change is often painful, trying to remain the same is absolutely impossible in times of fluid careers and relationships, technological disruptions, and transformative discoveries. The question is: how do we apply this in practice? What can we learn from this impermanent reality?

Regarding Artificial Intelligence, the advice is very simple: get on board, so you don't get left behind, but don't bet on any definitive truth. All existing truths are temporary, biased, and based on a reality that is still being built. Even AI experts from the largest companies in the sector are still unsure of the final picture. Unlike a common tool, AI changes the context, the premise, the understanding. It's still too early to establish paradigms.

Now, it's one thing to speculate on possible unknown developments and another to ignore what already exists. And that's where a more complicated reality comes in. For example, one of the largest software companies, Adobe.

Those who started using computers in the 80s and 90s encountered a revolution called Windows and a pioneering image editing software: Adobe Photoshop. Although not created by Adobe, Photoshop helped create an empire that was later consolidated with the purchase of Aldus (PageMaker), Macromedia (Flash and Dreamweaver), which joined Illustrator, After Effects, and, most importantly, Adobe Acrobat Reader.

In the subscription model, Adobe reached its peak in the period 2010/2020. Many companies tried to compete, but nothing compared to Adobe Creative Cloud, a nearly complete platform for anyone who works with everything from photo editing to art creation, video editing, and publishing. Nothing could threaten Adobe, so much so that the company began its first experiments with AI when the subject was still not widely discussed.

The problem with leadership is complacency, the loss of a sense of urgency. Upon becoming dominant, Adobe began to see its competitors as isolated initiatives. And it didn't see the growth of Canva, Midjourney, and several smaller competitors. But that wasn't the company's biggest mistake.

The biggest mistake was precisely in the area where it considered itself so innovative that it could set the pace: AI. All the AI ​​promises of 2019 were fulfilled in 2025, and even then, in a lamentable way. Anyone who has known Photoshop since version 3, for example, and is dealing with a 2026 version, will spontaneously swear every 30 seconds and receive no AI assistance worth mentioning. In 2025, Adobe's pathetic AI was more about hallucinating than working. Now, it doesn't work because it has nothing interesting to offer. The tool that has always had the magic wand, the magic lasso, the stamp, image mapping, interpolation, and cloning hasn't known how to transform the use of these tools with AI, leaving the user with the same astonishment they experienced in 1995 or 1996, for example.

And that's not all that hasn't evolved. Much has gotten much worse. There's no more assistance: now, the program is intrusive and tries to make decisions for the user. Creative Cloud is a patchwork that fails to present coherent and intuitive navigation. You open 300 tabs and don't necessarily get what you want. And it doesn't work on mobile. Worse: the mobile app is useless.

Another giant that slept in splendid cradles and is starting to not know how to justify its price. And I haven't even touched on the AI ​​animation tools, which are ridiculous. With each update to the Adobe suite, I feel that usability and ease of use are going backward. I'm just waiting for Photoshop to realize it doesn't need laryers, like the early versions did.