How Adobe is boosting AI fluency internally

Adobe challenges you to a duel!

Internal employees accepted that challenge in March, participating in the company’s inaugural Security Grand Challenge event. Adobe CSO Aanchal Gupta told IT Brew in an interview at RSAC that the affair, which took place over the course of a week, was intended to boost AI fluency by challenging employees to solve a difficult business problem with AI.

“We said…‘It is not important that you find the final solution to the entire problem, but any piece, even 30% solution will be a celebration,’” Gupta said.

Challengers. Since she joined Adobe in 2025, Gupta told IT Brew AI has been top of mind. While she described the software company as an “early adopter” of the technology, making sure that internal employees are effectively leveraging AI to innovate and secure the company remains one of her key priorities.

“There are always people who are very front and center [with using new technology]. They will go do whatever is the next thing,” Gupta said. “But then the rest of the population, they are so busy. You have to carve out some motions for them to go engage.”

The Security Grand Challenge event was Gupta’s attempt at this. Employees were given about 20 different company-centric problems to choose from, which teams had to solve over the course of a week. One team, for example, used AI to help adjust access permissions for when employees changed positions in the company.

“This team built a solution where they looked at when the employees are moving and…this agent was proactively sending a note to the manager, saying, ‘This person is leaving your team. Here are the things that they should not have access to anymore,’” Gupta said.

Gupta’s own security team, meanwhile, was able to use AI to reduce the time it takes to scan Adobe’s surface (described in an email by Adobe spokesperson Carly Listman as the “overall footprint of systems/assets” that Gupta’s team scans against new threat‑intel indicators) from three days to 15 minutes.

AI on the job 101. Making sure employees know how to use AI tools to unlock productivity gains is a continuing struggle for companies. At the IDC Directions 2026 conference, Anthropic Principal Architect Alex Koren said most companies wrongly assume they can just buy AI tools and that it will suddenly “enable” their business. Instead, he said, companies need to invest in education and internal cultural shifts to get the most out of their new tools.

“A lot of these large organizations, mid-size too, are buying the tools, but not simply making the changes they need internally to really make the most of them,” Koren said. “That’s the pattern we’re seeing most often.”

Along with the Security Grand Challenge event, Adobe has also created an internal Security AI Guild, a small group of employees tasked with bolstering AI-driven security innovations in the company. As a part of this effort, the group curates internal learning materials for employees.

“It is really hard to go and say, ‘We are going to bring in this company or this vendor to train,’ because the material is changing so fast that you have to internally curate,” Gupta said. “So, that group did a fantastic job of hand curating that material.”

Challenge complete! Adobe’s Security Grand Challenge event was positively received by employees, according to Gupta.

“They came up with solutions that they themselves were very positively surprised that they could solve in such a short span of time,” Gupta said. “As a side benefit, they learned AI, and now they are using it day in, day out.”

She recommended companies looking to bolster AI use in their organization create environments where employees feel comfortable to experiment with the technology freely.

“Me and my leadership said, ‘We are not expecting you to solve these hard problems. We just want you to go explore,’” Gupta said. “And that safety for them was huge, because a lot of times, there is this fear of failure that stops us from exploring.”