Wrapping Up Adobe MAX – Enterprising Insights EP41

Hi everyone. I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, research director with the Futurum Group, and I'd like to welcome you to Enterprising Insights. It's our weekly podcast that explores the latest developments in the enterprise software market and the technologies that underpin these platforms, applications, and tools.

This week I'd like to talk about Adobe Max, which is the annual conference that's focused on the new innovations and the creative community that uses Adobe products. This is an event that happens each year, um, actually this year is the first year that they actually held it in Miami, Florida, after normally being out in the Los Angeles. Uh, it's a large event, I think it's something like 10,000 attendees.

And what I'm gonna do is talk a little bit about the new announcements that came out of the conference that resonated with Nate. Give you my overall impressions about the event, and then we'll discuss kind of what we'll be watching from Adobe in the coming months. So then, of course, I'll get into my rant or rave segment where I pick one item in the market and I will either champion it or criticize it.

So let's get right into it. So Adobe Max, as I mentioned, we were in lovely Miami Beach, which is a nice change, uh, from Los Angeles. And Adobe really took this oppor this conference as an opportunity to talk about some new features, but also kind of refocus its messaging on creators, which is sort of a core that the core of their basic user groups.

Uh, essentially when you think about creators, they're the artists, the designers, uh, the sound editors, the video creators within organizations that use their products. In the past, uh, over the past, oh, I don't know, probably a couple of 'em, uh, couple of years, there's been a lot of messaging around what Adobe could do for enterprises. You know, what it can do for things like, uh, content, scalability, uh, utilizing new technology to improve productivity and efficiency and all of that.

And, and of course, all of those messages are certainly resonating in the market, given this desire and this need to create more content, uh, more quickly, uh, you know, over a, a wider range of variations, uh, different regions, that sort of thing. But in some ways, I think the perception was that Adobe kind of, uh, did not do a Gordon enough job, you know, kind of talking to their creators, uh, talking to people who actually utilized the product to create new art, to create new campaigns, that sort of thing. So at this event, they explicitly reached out and basically said to their users, Hey, we, we appreciate you.

We, you know, are certainly working to do everything we can to not incorporate new products that will put you out of a job, but will help you do a better job, but will help you do things more efficiently. That will help remove sort of the, the boring, repetitive, uh, tasks that nobody wants to do, and really let these creators focus on doing the things they want to do, which is, you know, uh, discovering new ideas, uh, trying out new variations, uh, basically focusing on the creation of new content as opposed to doing administrative tasks. So that was a really great message.

It was, you know, repeated several times throughout the event. And of course, it very, you know, it very much dovetails nicely with, uh, some of the, the new features and functions that they were announcing, uh, at the show. So, really, um, they, they really announced a ton of different things at this.

So, I, I can't go through all, all of them. Uh, certainly do check out Adobe's website, uh, in their press room to get a full rundown on all of the things that they announced. But I'm just gonna go through a few things that really resonated with me.

Um, AI obviously was sort of the, the star of the show, as you can imagine. So one of the things that they announced is generative ai, uh, features that are being incorporated into their creative Cloud application suite. So, uh, a lot of new AI features, generative AI features are being incorporated in core applications like Photoshop or Premier Pro.

And one of the things that was really interesting in Premier Pro, which is their video creation editing, uh, application, is the ability to extend video clips seamlessly. Now, what do I mean by that? So let's say you're, you're working on a campaign where you have a 32nd spot and you have various images coming in, and you're going through and you're putting everything together, and then you realize that there is a five second gap where, you know, you don't have any content, um, you have music going underneath, you have a story end of going through, but the clips that you have just aren't long enough in duration.

Well, this new feature allows through generative ai, uh, to extend that video clip. So it seamlessly looks like, um, it's almost like a continuation of the action or motion within the clip that's generated through AI to really kind of help fill those gaps. So, amazing technology.

And the most interesting thing about it is, unlike a lot of generative ai, uh, tools or features that have been announced, uh, not just from Adobe, but just in general, this is something that really is, that that addresses an unmet need. Uh, if you think about it, video is really challenging because once you've shot video, it's very difficult. Uh, if you, if you know anything about the way, uh, a lot of these things work, it's very difficult to go out and reshoot original content.

A lot of times what happens is you wind up having to reuse existing shots, or maybe you're not necessarily using the best shots if you're trying to fill gaps. This is a great way to allow a designer or a video designer to take a clip they really like and make sure that it fits, uh, the spaces that they have. So, really interesting, um, feature there.

Uh, the other thing of course, is, uh, Adobe announced a new Firefly, uh, video model, which is, you know, essentially this is that technology, the underlying technology that allows video to be generated from, uh, a text prompt. So if you think about, you know, the use of generative AI to create images, photos, that sort of thing, it's very similar. This will allow the creation of video simply from a text prompt.

Uh, and the most important thing to remember about it is not just the fact that it can be done, but it's being done in a safe way. And by safe I mean that the video model is only trained on either licensed content, uh, within Adobe stock or images that are, uh, royalty free. And that's rare that we're gonna find that.

But, but this is really important because if you think about the use of video in a commercial setting, it is absolutely critical that any content that is incorporated into this, you know, into a campaign that the it is basically cleared, it is licensed, paid for, so there's no possibility of infringement upon, uh, you know, someone else's work that that was not credited. Uh, the other thing that's particularly important is making sure that you're not infringing on other IP rights. Meaning if you were to say, I would like to generate an image of two people sitting down at a restaurant enjoying, uh, you know, a soda together.

Well, the problem is, if you just train models on images from wherever that are not properly labeled, you may wind up generating two people sitting at a table drinking a soda, but the soda, because of just the fact that it wasn't sort of vetted, it could actually have a brand on there. And that could be a real problem, particularly if, you know, it's supposed to be used in a, um, you know, in any kind of a commercial campaign. So the idea here is to make sure that the model is only trained on licensed content, and that there are proper controls applied so that when you ask to have a generic image generated, it doesn't come back with branded content that you shouldn't be using.

So that was a really interesting announcement. Um, there are a couple other things that really kinda struck a nerve with me. io.

io is their application that allows folks to collaborate on various video projects. So for example, if you were to record a video and you wanted, uh, your client to go through and make annotations, uh, say, you know, make this session longer, cut this out, uh, make this jump, this cut look, you know, more seamless, that is the tool that allows that collaboration to do it wi within a platform where the video is running. So it's, uh, you know, a real sort of, uh, you know, a way to, to streamline that collaboration process with video.

Now, they also announced, um, some new camera integrations that'll allow for a direct upload from Canon, Nikon and Leica cameras. That's really important because there, there's a direct link in the field from the camera to the cloud, so you don't have to go back to the, to your studio and upload it. But even more importantly, uh, these cameras are also supporting the content authenticity initiative, which incorporates metadata to show the source of the image.

And then of course, uh, it captures any other data that's, uh, in terms of, you know, was this image modified by AI or not? Uh, you know, is this a composite? That sort of information, and that is really important, uh, for many organizations in terms of, you know, making sure that, you know, if someone is interested, they can identify is this particular image, you know, you know, what is behind this image.

Uh, it doesn't necessarily mean truth or not, you know, a true image or not, because that's all based on context. But you can I assess that, okay, the image was taken at this date, at this time, at this location. Now, some of the other, you know, credentials in there can be, can be modified.

For example, there's a great example of where you might not want to have a photographer's name attached. If, let's say they are working as a photojournalist in a conflict region, um, they may not want their address and phone number and, uh, and name attached to that photo because that could put them in in danger. Uh, but at any rate, um, all of these new, uh, enhancements are designed to, you know, again, create, you know, essentially streamline the creation of content, make it easier for folks to work on that content together collaboratively.

Um, now there were a couple other announcements that that really kind of, um, were interesting there. They, Adobe announced Gen Studio for performance marketing. This is a new application that leverages ai, uh, to optimize the entire market content, uh, marketing content creation process for planning through measurements.

What does, when does all that mean? Uh, essentially, if you think of content and being using it for various campaigns these days, it's not about this, you know, mass marketing approach that was taken several decades ago. The idea is that you wanna reach out to people and reach a, the right segment of people and then make sure that you're appealing to them in a very personalized way.

And that all requires data. And what Gen Studio for performance marketing does, it is designed to make it easy to have one place where, uh, a marketer can go in, find the audiences that they want, segment those audiences, and then incorporate various data from, uh, you know, their own sort of data sources to then personalize that, to make sure that campaigns go out to the right segments and have the right elements there all on a single platform. And of course, because it's part of the Adobe, uh, ecosystem, it is part of the platform.

It's very easy to integrate and pull content from a variety of different places, whether we're talking about the, uh, you know, uh, Adobe experience, um, asset management system, or the content hub studio or, uh, you know, assets that are being worked on in, you know, different applications. The goal is to make is to provide a sort of a sim a single platform to make it easy to grab all those assets without having to, you know, make a thousand copies where you're not sure which generation is the right one. Uh, so that's an interesting announcement.

I'll have more on that later, uh, in subsequent, uh, podcast. Uh, but, you know, ultimately the main thing to remember about that is Adobe is trying to make it easy for marketers and creators to work together, and then to quickly take all of these assets and then really activate them in marketing campaigns. Now, uh, the last thing that I'll, I'll mention here that was really interesting is something called Project Neo.

And this is something we got a preview of. It's not available yet, uh, but it is a technology that allows the creation of 3D images, um, you know, in, in a 2D space allows. Basically the, the goal is to make it easier for 2D artists to transition into creating 3D art.

And I actually saw a demo of this on stage, and it was really interesting because they were taking an image, incorporating different elements and really allowing that creator to make very realistic 3D models that, uh, not only look great, but where each element was able to be controlled as sort of a separate layer, allowing it to be reused, resized, repositioned, getting different angles, all of that kind of stuff, which is very important, particularly as content is sort of the core assets of content are increasingly being reused in different media, both in, uh, you know, static still imagery as well as in video. And the creation of 3D arc and objects is sort of a key to unlocking, you know, additional, you know, additional eyeballs because it is pretty interesting to look at. Now, I think there's a couple of things that are kind of overriding in this whole, uh, conference that, that are interesting.

Uh, and I sort of alluded to it earlier, but when we think about Adobe, it is a very, very powerful platform. It is obviously geared to enterprise use, and I think that's really important to, to, to think about what are the elements there. Well, obviously it's robust, it's scalable, and increasingly if you think about the types of content that is being, you know, worked on, created, these files are really, really large.

So when we talk about large files, we're talking about massive, massive video files that honestly, if you would've moved them around, it's gonna take a lot of time. If you're gonna copy them, it's gonna take up a lot of space and you could wind up having issues in terms of, you know, which generation are you working on, uh, who is, uh, you know, changing what elements. So the idea that this is a single platform where there's one spot to go for that asset, and people can basically go in and modify that, uh, within a single platform, that's sort of a huge benefit to using an Adobe, you know, product versus some of the other ones out in the market.

And, and I don't mean just in terms of creation, but I mean about actually, you know, going outside of the creation part and actually getting into the activation part, which is looking at some of the marketing solutions. Uh, and, and, and again, you know, does this matter as much for small organizations? Not currently, but I think it will in the future.

And the reason for that is we call of these tools, particularly generative ai, it is gonna become much more cost efficient for designers and marketers to create not just a couple of dozen variations, but hundreds or even thousands of variations on a single asset. So you can have different assets in different formats for things like Instagram or Facebook or the web or text or what have you, but then you could also have variations based on region and language. Then you can actually segment that even further in terms of, well, maybe one asset would be designed to appeal to people being a specific generation or a specific gender or, or what have you.

That the, the combinations or the possibilities are, are almost endless in terms of how many different ways you could segment the market. Up until generative ai, it was almost impossible to create variations for all of that because it just too much took too much time. You'd have to have a desire going through and manually changing all of those elements every time you wouldn't have a variation Yeah, of generative ai.

You're actually able to create variations at scale. And that is sort of the, one of the, sort of the core messaging points about Adobe and generative ai. It's not just that it really allows people to, you know, create things from, let's say a text pro.

It's really about improving scale, you know, by allowing them to, allowing desires to basically create, you know, hundreds of variations on a single asset very, very quickly instead of, you know, forcing them to do that manually. Now, I'd also just mentioned an interesting point about, you know, using generative AI to create initial assets versus using generative AI to, you know, to create variations. I think we're an interesting point in the market right now where very few creative teams I think, are using generative AI as sort of the genesis of their, their ideation phase.

I think most are still, you know, doing it the old fashioned way where they have an idea and maybe they'll sketch something out and create the concept that way from their own mind. Um, we might just start, start to see that shift a little bit. But, uh, I, I still think there's a lot of, a lot of pride and a lot of value in having ideas come, you know, directly from the minds of creators.

Instead of having it be somewhat derivative by using a generative AI text to image or text to video tool. Um, you know, we'll have to see where the market goes, but, you know, that's my sense. Now, I've talked to several creators on site there who, who also tended to agree with that approach.

And, you know, that being said, um, you know, Adobe has, uh, incorporated tools making it very easy to capture the, you know, let's say a hand, a line drawing of a particular image and pull that into Adobe. So it can be, you know, modified, reused changed, you know, in, in terms of taking it from a static sort of analog drawing to a piece of digital art where the different elements can be separated into different layers and modified. So I think Adobe realizes that as well.

Uh, what else? I think there is, uh, uh, another thing that, that I think, you know, i I should address here is Adobe really focused on announcing a ton of things, more things that I haven't even had time to talk about today. And I had attended a couple of Adobe bets early in the year, and I spoke with some creators, and there was, you know, there definitely were people who were talking to me who said, you know, I like Adobe, but I feel that in some ways with some of their products, they have fallen behind some of their competitors in terms of the number of innovations and the functionality of their pro products.

Now it's always hard to validate whether or not that's accurate or not, uh, but sometimes perception is reality. But I would say that Adobe did a great job of coming out and essentially overwhelming everyone with these new innovations. Now, I think it was very important to do that.

This is normally the event at which they kind of roll out the, you know, the, the dump truck and dump all these features that are, you know, particularly, uh, interesting or, or have a lot of wow value to them. And I think they needed to do that because you do have some rivals out there like Figma, like Canva, you know, which have continued to innovate and you know, in some ways are viewed as sort of being the, um, you know, the more nimble upstarts. Now that being said, I don't think anyone is going to argue that certain Adobe products, you know, are, are clearly sort of leaders in the market.

Uh, if you think of it's something like, um, uh, Adobe's, um, video offerings there, you know, like Premier Pro, that's clearly a very, very popular application. I forget the exact statistic, but it has, you know, a massive amount of market share. Most professional desires are choosing that platform, uh, and I think all they need to do there is to show that there will continue to innovate and incorporate new features.

There again, you know, the, the most important thing for Adobe, I think is the fact that they have positioned themselves as the safe vendor for companies looking to do commercial work and incorporate images and video that may have some element that has been, uh, generated through ai. You know, they have a very strict approach, which is they will only train their models on content that has been licensed and is sitting in their stock, Adobe stock or, uh, content that is royalty free. And that would be like public domain images.

Now, they've had some challenges in the past and they admitted it in terms of the messaging around their terms of use, they were a little confusing. I I think a lot of this is a combination of two things. One, Adobe could have been a little clearer when they, uh, revised their terms of use, uh, terms of service.

And the other thing is that I think just in general, sometimes the community, the creative community will see something not fully understand it, and then assume the worst. And then of course, like anything else these days, uh, they hop on their message boards and things kind of go viral in the wrong ways. I still believe that Adobe is taking the right approach and is probably one of the safest, if not the safest platform for folks to, you know, to use generative AI to create video text, what have you.

Now that being said, if they wind up having issues again with, uh, content that is being generated and it's either violating, uh, you know, any kind of ip, or if it's spewing out toxic material, Adobe's gonna have to deal with that again. And, you know, hopefully they, they've learned from sort of past slight missteps, I think they have. Uh, but you know, that's something where I really do believe that most organizations out there realize that Adobe is, you know, sort of a leader in the space and has taken a very strong approach by saying, when we're gonna use AI at the very start, we're going to make sure that we only train on content that we believe is safe to be used.

This kind of stands a little bit in contrast with some rivals. Canva, for example, uh, takes a wider approach to incorporating content and ingested content into its models. And then once it's in their, you know, in their model, they will go through and, you know, address it by going through and, you know, making adjustments, uh, to make sure that, uh, you know, there art, uh, the model does not return any sort of, uh, ip, you know, it does not violate any IP or does not return inappropriate images, that sort of thing.

And again, you know, they claim that that's, you know, uh, been an effective way to, to deal with that issue. Again, it's hard to say which approach is, is the best, but I think generally speaking, um, it's always easier to say, we're only gonna use licensed imagery and we're gonna make sure that we, you know, train and label our, our models from the get go to avoid issues around, uh, IP violations or toxic content or inappropriate images at the start, rather than sort of pulling them into the model and then apply some sort of moderation. Uh, I think the, the most, um, or, or the other thing that I think is really important here about Adobe is they are, I think, you know, one of those companies that are very much focused on making sure that users are, are able to to, to utilize their, their platform, which is very powerful and wide ranging in a very, very kind of simple way.

And what they've done is made it. So if you are, let's say, a designer, you can work in the application you like, whether it's Illustrator or Lightroom or Photoshop, and once you're done with that, you can save your work and it can be picked up through another application, uh, through the dam or what have you. And you don't need to do anything differently.

This enables, uh, creative people to work in the applications where they feel comfortable. It allows marketers for, for them to work in the applications that they feel comfortable, and there's really only one sort of original asset. Instead of it having versions being copied all over the place that is not just a, you know, a, a hallmark of Adobe, but it's also sort of points to a larger trend, which is meeting the customer, meeting that user where they are and letting them do the work that they need to do in the application that they feel most comfortable.

I think that's a huge win for Adobe, you know, in terms of make it easy for folks to, uh, to use the product where they want and how they want based on the role that they have in the organization. Now, uh, with all that said, I will say I did get a great, you know, uh, demo of their content hub and, you know, very comprehensive and I was asking about certain features. And yeah, they have certain things that are, are kind of still in progress that I think, you know, uh, are going to need some, uh, additional work, uh, largely around the incorporation of, uh, you know, you know, certainly generative AI features to make them smoother.

Uh, you know, the ability to kind of track, um, you know, where content is going. You know, just basic little things like that. Nothing major, but I think the most important thing that I got out of this, they were willing to listen.

They were willing to say, okay, that's something we hadn't thought about. You know, we're gonna incorporate that. And, and that's also something that I think over the past, you know, um, year or so, I think Adobe's gotten better at, you know, really kind of trying to listen to their customers as, uh, you know, as they move forward in market because they realize they're getting more competition.

com. Uh, I'm also gonna be revisiting several of these topics over the next several weeks and months. Alright, with that, I would like to move to my rant or rave segment.

This is where I pick one item in the market and I will either champion it or criticize it. And today I actually have a rant. Uh, this is more of a customer experience rant and it goes to the issue of chatbots.

And so I was trying to inquire about, uh, a certain number of points and rolling them over to certain dollar values, uh, within my airline loyalty program. I tried to do it through my app using the little chat bot, and I tried several times, still did not work properly. Um, I think this points to an issue that, no, I'm not sure, I'm not gonna identify the airline, but I can tell you it's a major, uh, US carrier.

I don't know which vendor they use for it. Uh, I'm just a little surprised because my request was not something that was terribly difficult. Essentially, I wanted to transfer points, uh, convert points into basically, um, uh, I'm sorry, miles into points in the program.

And it's a, it was a rollover thing and there was a way to do it by calling up on the phone, but I was kind of surprised I couldn't even get something handled for something like this, which seems to be pretty common to happen through the app. It didn't even recognize what I was asking for. It did however, eventually kick me to a live human agent who was able to address my issue and eventually it was taken care of.

But I was just honestly surprised that with all of the talk about generative AI and, you know, the use of chatbots as a way to really kind of deal with customer issues, that it couldn't handle this something, this basic. Uh, I hope that this improves in the future because ultimately, you know, I, I did spend a fair amount of time on this task and if you think about a customer like myself who is a, uh, loyalty member with some status is pretty surprising that they wouldn't address an issue like this. So that is my ramp for the week on that.

Alright, well let's all the time that I have this week. So I want to thank you for joining me here on Enterprising Insights. We'll be back again soon to cover all of the happenings within the enterprise application market in the future.

So with that, please be sure to, uh, review rate and subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform. And we will see you again very soon. Thanks and have a great day.