FOR FINDING NEW (AND SOMETIMES BETTER) USES FOR THINGS

Abhay Parasnis

CTO, Adobe

the future of the company’s signature tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat—some of which are older than many of the millions of people who depend on them. This involves applying ever more sophisticated AI to new challenges, as in creating a video version of Photoshop’s crowd-pleasing Content-Aware Fill feature, which can perform feats such as erasing people from an image. “We spent five years saying, ‘How can we replicate that magic but in real time, on moving frames?’ ” Parasnis explains. The answer began as a technology experiment called Project Cloak and wound up as a new feature in the After Effects postproduction software, in 2019. Along with keeping Adobe’s mainstays vital, Parasnis is responsible for taking