With ArcGIS Pro, the ability to export to .ai files has been replaced with .aix files, which requires the Adobe Illustrator extension. My idea is to bring back the .ai export functionality that exists in ArcGIS Desktop.
You'll be able to find documentation on this elsewhere - but Adobe closed off the .ai format, so there's really nothing Esri can do about it. I agree that the .aix is extremely frustrating, and the lack of support for something functional has really interrupted my workflows. The current version doesn't support the current AI version, and this seems to happen frequently. It's slow to update. Even when it is "updated," I've never gotten the extension to work properly - it always contained unclipped lines, no data, other problems. The best workaround, which is almost equally frustrating, is to export as PDF and open that in AI. You'll have clip groups on clip groups to deal with and no layer structure but it's something. Hope this helps.
The AI format has been closed/proprietary for many years. What Desktop exports is a very old version of the AI format, and it has limitations even when it is "imported" into modern Illustrator.
The AIX + Maps for Adobe workflow is the vendor-supported way for us to bring content from ArcGIS Pro into Adobe Illustrator, and my team and the Maps For Adobe team both spend a lot of time working on it at each release of Pro.
If you are having UX or functionality challenges with AIX or the Maps For Adobe extension, please be sure to report them as bugs and include your repro cases/data at https://support.esri.com/en/report-bug so that the core Pro development team and the Maps for Adobe team can fix them in a future release.
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