Adobe today announced and previewed AI tools for its GenStudio marketing content supply chain that will unleash creative AI agents into marketing workflows — for better or for worse.
Amid the transition from longtime CEO Shantanu Narayen to successor Anil Chakravarthy, who is scheduled to take over on December 1, Adobe has focused on the enterprise capabilities of its marketing and design tools. Leading the charge of new Adobe AI tools is the expansion of CX Enterprise Coworker into GenStudio, which Adobe says has generated 7.8 trillion content assets so far this year.
That focus on enterprise tools has been driven by "internal headwinds" at the company, suspects Liz Miller, analyst for Constellation Research. Adobe has been under intense scrutiny from investors as its stock price has fallen and financial analysts have downgraded their ratings.
Miller believes financial commentators have overstated the threat Canva and other AI-based competitors pose to Adobe's Creative Cloud business. "It is maddening to me how little investment media understands about Adobe that they can say nonsensical things like that," Miller said.
The browser-based, drag-and-drop Canva helps beginners get their design ideas off the ground. At the same time, Adobe applications offer deep editing tools for professionals making customer visual art from scratch.
What's new
CX Enterprise Coworker, previously available for customer experience orchestration in Adobe's marketing cloud, will be added to the back-end creative tools that generate that marketing content. Marketers and creatives can create campaign briefs, evaluate target audiences, produce asset variations more quickly with AI, and automate personalized content creation.
Coworker can handle tasks such as locating visual assets, building briefs by analyzing past marketing efforts and applying them to upcoming campaign goals, and incorporating content performance data into both new and existing assets.
"It brings the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign through an end-to-end workflow — including the identification of audiences and then creating that audience — [which] has been typically pretty hard to do," said Varun Parmar, SVP and general manager, Adobe GenStudio and Firefly Enterprise.
Also coming is deeper integration of Brand Intelligence capabilities into Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Firefly. This feature suite manages compliance with a brand's visual design rules as AI takes over low-level tasks such as resizing web banner ads or cropping pictures for mobile content.
Adobe is also advancing its 3D Digital Twin technology, an Adobe user's digital replica of a product, to drive variations in content without starting each one from scratch.
Keeping human elements in an AI-generated world
The adage "there's no accounting for taste" seems to have predicted the first waves of AI-generated marketing content. Two minutes of scrolling through an Instagram or TikTok feed will reveal all kinds of artificially peculiar cognitive dissonance caused by, for example, vintage pictures of long-gone celebrities colorized with AI — sometimes with motion added.
Adobe tools, long the gold standard of technology for designers, have unlocked digital capabilities that, in the wrong hands — such as marketers whose design skills aren't as strong as those of true commercial artists — can quickly spin up gimmicky content.
"That's not creation. That's iteration. That's production work, and production work is painful."
Liz Miller
analyst, Constellation Research
While Adobe GenStudio AI tools can, among other things, bring motion to products and people, Miller said that users will likely use them to put finishing touches on video content and imagery that would be too expensive or even impossible to create in the moment.
That and creating product images with different color backgrounds, in different sizes and with different rotation angles, comprise the repetitive, everyday work for many designers.
"That's not creation. That's iteration. That's production work, and production work is painful," Miller said. "I don't need someone wildly creative figuring out where to crop images 15 different ways because I've got 15 different formats of a banner ad — but that's what we've been asking them to do for years."
Video tools in this GenStudio release will likely also be used to reduce production time and budgets, she said. AI video cutdown tools enable line-of-business users to create social media clips from longer webinars and other speaker content with plain-language prompts — rather than spending hours in professional video-editing applications.
Moreover, Adobe's creative AI tools can generate new content to bridge video scenes — such as overhead views of a set that would cost thousands of hours and dollars to recreate if left out of an original shoot.
Parmar said that Adobe research has found that motion drives 17% to 25% more digital engagement than stills.
"We believe that creativity is an innately human task; a lot of these workflows have creative intent: imagination, taste and judgment," Parmar said. "You can use a tool like Creative Cloud to produce things — or you can actually ideate — using a Gen AI or Gen Media Tool and create the content."
It's up to the user to decide what to do with these new capabilities and keep the output tasteful. Adobe is counting on humans in the loop to lead to the best results.
"When creation is done by agents and models," Parmar said, "it's the creative intent, judgment, taste and vision that is the differentiating factor."
Adobe announced and previewed the tools at Adobe MAX, held Nov. 10-12 in Miami Beach, Fla. Some are planned for release in early 2027.
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.
