Adobe Summit, Google Next dates set

Two of enterprise tech’s biggest spring shows are about to overlap in the same city: Adobe Summit runs in Las Vegas from April 20 to April 22, 2026, and Google Cloud Next starts there on April 22 and runs through April 24, with both companies also offering online access. (adobe.com) (cloud.google.com) That puts marketing software buyers and cloud infrastructure buyers on the same Las Vegas calendar, and it gives Adobe only a two-day head start before Google begins its own keynotes, labs, and product demos. (adobe.com) (cloud.google.com) Adobe’s event is aimed at customer experience teams, which means the people who run websites, ads, emails, analytics, and commerce tools for large brands. Adobe says this year’s pitch is an “AI-native platform” built to create content at scale and personalize customer journeys. (adobe.com 1) (adobe.com 2) Google Cloud Next is aimed at the technology side of the house, where companies buy computing power, databases, security tools, and artificial intelligence services that run behind the scenes. Google is already previewing sessions on Google Kubernetes Engine, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and “agentic” systems that can carry out multi-step tasks. (cloud.google.com 1) (cloud.google.com 2) The reason the overlap matters is that both companies are now selling the same broad promise in different language: artificial intelligence should stop being a demo and start doing a job inside a real business process. Adobe says that job is creating and tailoring customer content, while Google says that job is running applications, data, and operations more efficiently. (adobe.com) (cloud.google.com) Adobe arrives with more pressure on it than a normal conference season. Reuters reported on March 13 that Adobe shares fell after the company said longtime chief executive Shantanu Narayen would step down once a successor is appointed, adding to investor worries about how Adobe will compete in an artificial intelligence market moving very fast. (reuters.com) The stock slide has been part of a wider software selloff, not just an Adobe problem. Reuters reported on April 9 that the Standard & Poor’s 500 Software and Services Index was down 25.5% this year as investors worried that newer artificial intelligence tools could automate work that old software companies used to charge humans to do. (reuters.com) Adobe also heads into Summit with security questions hanging over its document business, because Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader have a long history of critical memory-corruption bugs that can let an attacker run code when a booby-trapped Portable Document Format file is opened. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency keeps exploited Adobe Acrobat and Reader flaws in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, which is the government’s list of bugs already used in real attacks. (cisa.gov 1) (cisa.gov 2) That changes the standard for a flashy keynote. If Adobe shows a tool that can generate campaign copy, resize images, and assemble landing pages in seconds, customers will still want to know how permissions work, where the training data came from, and how the company keeps the same platform safe when one bad file can become an entry point. (adobe.com) (cisa.gov) Google has a simpler stage setup because its conference agenda already leans toward infrastructure, and infrastructure buyers usually ask about speed, cost, uptime, and deployment rather than brand safety. Google’s own session guide for Next highlights high-performance computing virtual machines, storage for artificial intelligence workloads, and lower-cost inference on Google Kubernetes Engine. (cloud.google.com) (cloud.google.com) So next week’s real contest is not who says “artificial intelligence” the most times in Las Vegas. It is which company can show one concrete workflow, one measurable cost or revenue result, and one believable security story before the other conference takes over the same city. (adobe.com) (cloud.google.com)