Adobe and Uber face slow obsolescence risks

Adobe has borne the sharper punishment. The stock closed at $252.23 on Sept. 11, down about 27% from $346.26 in early December and well below its 200-day moving average of $266.60. The 50-day moving average at $252.61 now sits almost exactly on top of the share price, while the RSI reading of 36 points to a stock still near oversold territory rather than one that has reclaimed momentum. That combination usually describes a market that has not yet decided whether a selloff is a buying opportunity or the start of a longer de-rating.

The bear case is straightforward: Adobe sits in a category where generative AI can gradually commoditize functions that once justified premium pricing, from image creation to workflow automation and basic content production. Even if the company remains highly profitable, investors may be asking whether its software remains indispensable enough to support the kind of multiple it carried when it was seen as the default creative stack. The risk is not that Adobe vanishes, but that it becomes more ordinary — and ordinary software rarely deserves a rich valuation.

Uber faces a different but related form of obsolescence. The stock closed at $71.67 on Sept. 11, below both its 50-day moving average of $73.93 and its 200-day average of $76.03, with RSI at 31.6, also deep in weak-trend territory. The shares have been volatile, falling to $65.94 in late July before rebounding to $78.82 in late August, which suggests investors are still searching for a stable narrative.

Here the market is wrestling with autonomy. Uber’s own filing says autonomous vehicle technology could meaningfully affect the industries in which it competes and warns that rivals bringing such vehicles to market first could hurt its business and financial prospects. That is not an immediate earnings threat, but it is a structural one: if self-driving networks eventually reduce the role of the human driver, Uber’s platform could either become more valuable as an aggregator or less valuable if the best fleets bypass it. Investors are effectively assigning a discount for uncertainty over whether Uber will be the operating layer for autonomy or a middleman that gets squeezed.

The bullish argument in both cases is that the market is getting ahead of itself. Adobe still has deep enterprise entrenchment, recurring revenue and pricing power that many software names would envy. Uber remains a massive marketplace with scale advantages in mobility and delivery that are hard to replicate. Both companies still produce real cash and retain strategic assets that would be difficult for challengers to duplicate.

But the valuation debate has shifted from “How fast can these businesses grow?” to “How long can they avoid becoming structurally less important?” That is why the shares can look cheap without looking obviously safe. If AI erodes Adobe’s creative moat only slowly, or if autonomy turns Uber into a lower-margin platform intermediary over time, the market may keep rewarding other names with stronger forward vectors while these two drift lower in quality-adjusted terms.

For investors, the key catalyst is not a single quarter but proof of durable relevance: Adobe must show that AI enhances rather than dilutes its pricing power, while Uber needs evidence that it can capture value from autonomy instead of simply being disrupted by it. Until then, both stocks may continue to attract value investors — and to trade as if their best years are already behind them.