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Adobe will continue to invest in several areas that it sees opportunities in, including its Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform, as well as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and even 3D technology, according to Adobe CFO John Murphy.

The company sees “large opportunities in front of us,” he said Sept. 5 at the Citi Global Technology Conference in New York. “So, whether it be on the digital media side or the digital experience side of the business, we’re continuing to invest in both and, where there are opportunities for us, to add value,” he said. In Creative Cloud, “we continue to invest in products and services that will expand the market for those products,” he told attendees.

On the digital experience side, recent investments included Adobe’s $1.68 billion purchase of e-commerce company Magento, he noted. That acquisition stands to give Adobe a boost on multiple fronts, starting with the ability to “seamlessly integrate” commerce into Adobe Experience Cloud, Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO and president, said in June.

Magento was the third-largest acquisition that Adobe has ever made, Murphy said Sept. 5, telling the conference: “We’ve proven to be a very disciplined acquirer. The three main criteria that we look at [are] does it make financial sense, does it make strategic sense and is it a strong culture fit for the company, which is really critical to driving the success through integration and synergies.”

There’s a lot of competitors in the “very fragmented” digital marketing sector, but “there’s definitely a lot of opportunity and we have a lot of leverage,” he said. Adobe has “the capability to do larger deals, but I think we’re very disciplined in how we evaluate them and make sure that they make sense for the company,” he told attendees.

Despite competition from companies including Canada’s Shopify, “Magento is actually doing really quite well in the marketplace and … we’re kind of moving more upstream to the enterprise level,” he said. The investment that Adobe is making in Magento is “to continue to drive into the enterprise faster,” he told attendees. But Adobe also wants to make sure that it continues investing in the core Magento business so that it “maintains its competitive positioning in the marketplace,” he said.

After an attendee asked if, after entering the e-commerce market via the Magento purchase, Adobe is also open to expanding into the customer service market, he replied: “We look at all the adjacent markets and see if there’s opportunities that we can really kind of leverage what our customers are asking for.” But that’s a “lower-margin business,” and that would be an important issue to consider, he noted.

Investments also continue to be made by the company in the Adobe Cloud platform, he pointed out. Combined, he said, all the investments are “really kind of balancing the whole portfolio” and “the goal is really to continue to add value on all sides of the business and strategically invest for that.”

As part of its market expansion, Adobe has also “moved into categories like hobbyist and consumer,” Mike Saviage, VP of investor relations told the conference. He added: “We’ve had over 100 million people create an Adobe ID just to access our mobile apps and they’ve become part of our funnel in how we drive awareness, trial use, [and] ultimately subscriptions.”

In recent months, Adobe also announced new projects including Project Aero, a new AR content creation tool, Saviage said, noting Apple showcased Aero at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

More recently, Adobe announced Project Rush, an easy-to-use video authoring tool “for the YouTube generation” that Saviage said makes content look more professional.

The Adobe executives didn’t provide any specifics on the company’s VR initiatives at the conference. But David Helmly Sr., senior manager-professional video for the company’s Creative Cloud Enterprise business, told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) early this year that Adobe was upbeat about the potential for VR and AR. During the past two CES shows, Adobe had been “investigating VR and AR,” conducting meetings and looking at headsets on the show floor, and had also “spent a lot of time with the camera makers,” he told MESA.

This year, Adobe also knew it would benefit from federal tax reform and “would end up having large” earnings per share (EPS) “growth just from” that, Murphy also said. He added: “When we looked at the opportunity of returning that directly to the bottom line or actually using that as an opportunity for us to invest,” the company talked about “investing in certain aspects of the business to take advantage of that opportunity,” including Sensei, Adobe Cloud or “other features and functions across all the three clouds.”

Adobe, meanwhile, “didn’t get a lot of pushback” after announcing a North American price increase for Creative Cloud subscriptions that went into effect in the spring, he said. Some subscription models tend to have annual price increases but “we don’t want to use that lever in that way; we want to raise prices where it makes sense,” he told attendees. It was the first time in five years that Adobe raised pricing but it also added many new features and innovation, providing a “value proposition” for customers, he said.

Piracy was also discussed by the executives. “It’s very hard to quantify, in terms of numbers, the amount of piracy [there is], but we know it exists,” Saviage said. But he added: “We know also, just looking at our run rates in geographies where there’s high piracy rates, we’re growing our business there. It’s because of the low entry point of price. It’s because it’s tougher to steal the product when it’s tethered to the cloud and all this value is being serviced to the desktop product from the cloud.”