I mean AI has been a hot term today, although I'm really glad that we covered a lot of other topics outside of just the hot technology of the moment, which is great. But I do, like many of you, think that this technology is going to refactor many industries and it's going to impact the way not only we work but also the businesses that we build. What I thought would be interesting is, Zach asked me to share some thoughts that might be of interest to you, is to actually look at my own industry. So you know, I'm in the creativity and marketing world, and I oversee a big part of our product engineering and design organization at Adobe, and we're always thinking about the next generation of creative and marketing products. I also run strategy for the company and M&A for the company. I spent a lot of time with companies out there that are building in this space, and I thought it would be interesting to summarize the five waves of change that I think are actually happening right now as a result of this new technology, with the hopes that maybe you will find some language or some proxies in the industries that you're all in. I also think that in some ways, all of us are in the business of marketing and creativity if we're all telling a story about the businesses that we're building and trying to get out there in the world. So I think that hopefully some of this will be useful to you. No doubt this is a new age of creativity and personalized digital experiences that are going to change everything, and I'll explain to you what I mean more by personalized in a minute. But I want to just jump right in. I'm going to go through five waves of change and some of the implications, and see if you have any thoughts before I hand it over to actually have an interview after this.
The first being creativity is the new productivity. So what do I mean by this? I mean that if you think about it, for the history of humankind, it's all been about productivity. We got promoted based on our productivity, how many things we achieved, how many stones we collected on a farm, how many things we prepared in a supermarket, whatever the case might be. Now you have this new world where so much of productivity is offloaded to compute, and a lot of the things that we used to do through productivity tools are going to be done for us. That begs the question: what are we going to do with these newfound cycles that we have? I would argue that creativity is the new productivity because it's going to be how we stand out in the future. If we stood out more for our productivity in the past, creativity will be more how we stand out in the future. There's this author named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher on creativity. He wrote this very famous book that was just very boldly titled 'Creativity,' but the whole idea of the book is about seeking the state of flow, and what gets in the way of flow is friction. Friction is the workflow, the stuff that you have to do in order to express ideas and get them out there. So a lot of the work is actually being reduced, and it's an interesting insight: the return of flow, the ability for us to have less friction in terms of our ideas and actually expressing them. So perhaps this means that while companies like Microsoft and others have deployed productivity tools throughout every company to make people more productive in the past, maybe the name of the game will be to deploy more creativity-oriented tools throughout an organization. Why? Because instead of just giving your report, you're going to have to make infographics that take your data to tell a story. A picture is worth a thousand words, and I also subscribe to the idea that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings. If you can sometimes show the insights that you have as opposed to tell them, you can get everyone aligned very quickly. I think in every function of an organization—HR, legal, finance—being able to tell a story is ultimately how you are going to stand out and make an impact, and you have to have the tools to do so. So that's wave number one. The shift here is really standing out through your creativity as opposed to your productivity.
Number two is interesting to me: this idea that creative confidence is growing. I would venture to say that all of us were most creatively confident when we were six years old, because everything we drew got put on a refrigerator, and every idea that we expressed we were told, 'Oh, that's wonderful, why don't you go do that?' Then what do we realize? We realize that there are these people called critics and skeptics. We realize that other people have more skills than we do, and we recoil. Many of us stop drawing beyond the age of eight or nine, and unfortunately a lot of us atrophy when it comes to creativity. Well, what if that were to change? That's what we're starting to see with some of these new technologies. It started with template-based technologies, products like Canva and Adobe Express, and now it's become all these AI-assisted technologies that have prompt-driven creativity, where you can suddenly have an idea and express whatever is in your mind's eye. Obviously we're playing with a lot of this. We're starting to see adoption of creative tools by non-creatives, but more importantly for non-creative tasks—things that we typically didn't think were creative, like making a finance report or making an HR email, or instead of making an email, making it an animated video. A lot of people have better ideas of the ways to do the things they do, they just don't have the confidence to do it. What if this technology can actually boost that confidence? It's a really exciting value prop. So what will this world look like? It's going to look like a world where people can discover content to edit and share very readily, where people can feel creatively capable of making compelling content. It also means that whatever skills you do have creatively, in my world our customers have always defined themselves as either a designer, a photographer, an illustrator, or an animator. Now they're being increasingly asked by their customers to make mixed media content, because what is on TikTok, Instagram, Snap, and everything else is actually all mixed content, as opposed to the original Facebook which was just photos. So they need to have those skills beyond their own category, beyond what they were taught in school. They also have to become more creatively confident across all the categories of creativity. So there's this resurgence of creative confidence in humanity, and for creative professionals in particular, that I think is really important that this technology is enabling. That's why that second wave of change is that creative confidence is going up. What are the implications here? Well, instead of always trying to find someone with skills to tell our story, we're going to be able to tell our own story. Instead of feeling segment-constrained by the things you've always done, you're going to start to feel imagination-constrained. By the way, that also goes to other functions in an organization. A lot of these new tools in every function are being reimagined right now as multiplayer tools. So if you're in a financial planning organization, the new tools you're using allow other stakeholders to participate. So again, everyone's starting to feel less constrained by the segment that they work within.
The third piece here is really interesting: instead of creative tools being very exclusive and being skills that we almost wear as a badge of honor because of how complicated these products are to use—if we know them, we're really proud of ourselves—now they're becoming somewhat democratized. That brings us to this third wave, and also brings me to the response that I'm oftentimes giving to our creative professionals that are like, 'Okay Scott, this sounds interesting. Creativity, I want everyone to be able to be creative, but what does that mean to me as a creative professional? What about my career? Am I going to still be hired? Am I going to still put bread on the table? What are the implications for me if creativity is democratized? That sort of sounds good, but actually for me it doesn't.' That's a common question that I get, which leads to this third wave of change: the opportunity for creative exploration is also expanding and exploding. So what do I mean by this? When I go and sit down with creative professionals and ask them how they come up with their best ideas, it is simply a function of the time that they are given to explore the solution to a problem. If you commission a brand agency to come up with a new brand, they will come back to you with three ideas typically that came from the seven that they came up with. They'll pick the best three. But if you gave them three more months, they would explore 30 or 300 variations and come back with the best three. So it's a function of time. Every creative professional is in a fight against time to explore this full surface area of possibility to find the best solutions. So now you have these new technologies where instead of having to mask and create layers and all these painstaking things that I would have normally had to do, I can just start to use generative AI to explore variations of all these different things. We have integrated a set of models that we call Firefly into our products. They were all trained on licensed content. Whereas other models went out and scraped the internet and violate IP right and left because they're trained on just everything, we only trained on content that we licensed and compensated the contributor for. Then we use those models to be able to... There are some advantages certainly in us doing the right thing. There are advantages also in market and selling commercially safe models. It turns out there are also advantages in the quality of what models are capable of when you have a controlled data set. But when we've integrated these capabilities into our products, what we've seen is our customers, our pros, basically doing hop, skips, and jumps through the creative process to explore a far greater surface area of possibility to find better solutions. Here's a quick example I figured I'd share with you. This is something that I shared with a group of illustrators that use Adobe Illustrator all day to make packaging design. They are incredible vector artists; they just spend hours, if not days or weeks, making these incredible designs, whether it's for packaging or for posters or for whatever else. But what they also always have to do at the end of their process is figure out the color palettes. In order to substitute in a different color palette for your work, you would normally have to manually take color palettes and reapply it. But now you can just type in 'Winter' and see winter, you can just type in 'Spring' and see spring, you can just type in 'neon spray paint' and totally change the entire creation that you've spent weeks making instantly into color variations. We were doing this focus group sharing this technology, and this woman in the focus group who was an illustrator for a big brand that does a lot of packaging design for cosmetics and stuff started to tear up. She was basically like, 'I can't explain how much of my life has just been substituting color palettes.' She just could not believe that she would no longer have to do all this menial, repetitive work when she could spend her time on the art itself and on picking the ideas as opposed to implementing them in such a tedious way. That was an unlock for me a little bit. I was like, okay, she's going to find better solutions to her customer internally, better solutions to the problems, by getting all these cycles back in her day. I thought that was very interesting. So now what I'm trying to work on with the teams is I'm saying, 'Hey, we have to bring our customers beyond the prompt era of AI. We want to kill the prompt era. We think it is in some ways bastardizing creativity, marginalizing the impact that a creator can have. We want to bring people into what we're calling the controls era.' The controls era is when you use the new technology, which is AI, but you give people all sorts of levers and controls to really start to accomplish what they have in their mind's eye. A few examples we're starting to put in market: one's called Structure Reference, where you can actually start to pick a structure that you want to reference. But now we've actually created a 3D modeling software, something that we call Project Neo. You can make an exact model of something and then use it to create a new asset with generative AI. It's such an incredibly incredible level of precision for someone to get what they actually want out of the technology. We've launched generative video, but with generative video we're also launching new capabilities. One's called Character Consistency, where you identify a character that you want to keep consistent, then you can keep it consistent throughout a story or frame by frame, and a whole suite of capabilities that are all sort of the control levers for generative video. Something that we call Custom Models. This is also interesting: we take our base model Firefly, commercially safe, only trained on licensed content, and then we go to these other brands and say, 'Hey, if you want to take all of your SpongeBob SquarePants content that you own, that you've created, and put that into the model and have a variation that only you can use—the SpongeBob SquarePants Firefly model—you can do that.' So what they're doing is they're using that not only to create interesting marketing collateral of the moment, think and act in real-time social media marketing type stuff, but they're also using it for character exploration, for generating ideas on mood boards and stuff like that. Again, creatives who are using this technology now, especially in the private betas that we have ongoing, they're all coming back being like, 'I'm coming up with so many better ideas because I have so many more cycles to explore more ideas and pick the best ones.' So that's the theme here: this world where we lived in this limited time for discovery of the best ideas, we now have 100x or more cycles of discovery to start to play and discover and see them, instead of this limited surface of exploration. There are really just so many more possibilities that are emerging as a result of this. So in some weird way, the second wave of making creativity more accessible, making us more creatively confident, what that's done is it's lowered the floor. All these people that never even dared to touch a creative tool—sales teams, social media teams, knowledge workers, people in finance, legal, HR—they're suddenly using these tools to express ideas and to tell stories, and it's really exciting. What we're also realizing is that we're raising the ceiling, because all of these professionals that were always constrained by the cycles that they had to work within to solve problems now have this huge unlock.
Now sometimes I also get this pushback where people are like, 'Yeah, okay, but if your creatives are going to become so much more productive, doesn't that mean you're going to hire fewer creative professionals?' So I hired some economists and we embarked on research around this question. We started first of all with the engineering space. Engineering has gotten more productive every decade for the last two or three decades, and yet we keep hiring more and more and more engineers. Why is that? The TL;DR on this is that the ROI on an engineer has also gone up. When you can get more out of an individual person, unless you are a penny-pinching private equity-owned company, you typically want more of those people. Why? Because they want to do more markets, they want to do more tests, they want to do more products, they want to do more variations of product. 'Oh, let's translate that marketing. Oh, let's take that in-house.' The growing list continues. The same thing is happening with creative pros. By not having to do all this mundane, repetitive stuff, they are being tasked with more ideas, more regions, more campaigns, more stories, more markets, more and more and more. I think that's why the ceiling going up for them is also really important. What I've also observed is that the time our customers are spending in the products is actually also changing. They used to spend a lot of their time in this refine and finish zone, people toiling away in Photoshop or Illustrator or Premiere Pro, trying to get something exactly right. What we've observed is that their time is starting to shift upstream to this explore, exploit generation, brainstorming, mood boarding phase. It turns out that this was actually oftentimes the part they liked the most—getting inspiration and coming up with themes—but they never felt permission to spend time in it because they had to save all their time for the execution. So it's interesting to see that time shift, and we're actually building some new products now that are actually made for that brainstorming, mood boarding in the age of AI part of the phase of discovery.
Fourth wave of change: an implication of the through that we just went through. You're going to get 100x more participants because we're all more creatively confident, and you're going to get 100x more possibilities because the ceiling has gone up and we can explore far more surface area to find the best solutions to problems. So when you put all this together, you get some math here that suggests that we have a world ahead of us that is full of far more engaging and personalized digital experiences than we can even imagine. Imagine every website welcoming you by name and only showing you stuff that is relevant to you, that might be matched well with things you already have in your closet. The fact that we go to a website today and it asks us our gender and it shows us stuff that isn't in our size and it treats us like a stranger is pretty weird. This kind of trigger is one of my cardinal beliefs in great technology: I think that really great technology brings us back to the way things once were, but with some degree of scale and efficiency. I would argue that until maybe a few hundred years ago, humanity was always known. Wherever we went, we were in small towns, we were recognized by people on the streets, the butcher remembered our favorite cut, people knew our kids' names. Everything was sort of in a very personalized world until the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities, where the world became, especially in the digital world, where we're all anonymous and we're all treated like strangers. The only way for a brand to know us is to secretly get data around us. So maybe we're getting to a world where it can be far more personalized. That's this fourth wave: a future of a far more personalized digital future, where we actually, just like we've always longed to be known, I think we still do long to be known, we just want to know how we're known. I think that we can start to have that experience with brands that we actually are customers of. Here's an example: this company that many of you know, Carvana, they decided last year to send a million videos out to each of their customers that bought a car. This video starts with the street sign of their hometown, features the car, the make and the color of the car that they actually bought, addresses them by name, and thanks them for starting their car journey with Carvana. People loved it. People felt like this was marketing that was made for them, and so they actually watched it. I don't think people had watched a generic Carvana video. Every digital experience, I think, is going to become a conversation. We are going to go to brands, they're going to welcome us back, they're going to have very long context windows where they're going to remember our past inquiries and purchasing experiences and likes and dislikes. I think that's going to have a huge impact. The shifts here: we're going from this world of generalized experiences that is basically all we've known for the most part, to a world of really personalized experiences. We're going from a world where we would always have to search to find something, to a world where we basically just have a conversation and get proactive suggestions for things we might not even know we're looking for. I think we're going from a world where we've always had to learn an application—in my career I've always been the onboarding guy, I've always helped people with first mile experiences and tool tips and helping someone learn how to use a product and make a product more accessible—I will become useless because an app is going to learn you instead of you having to learn an app. The app's going to meet you where you are, it's going to progressively disclose all the capabilities as and when you need them, and it's going to have this chat-like interface that you can use to even avoid learning how to use the product altogether. I think that's happening sooner than we think. I also remember years, not too many years ago, saying every organization needs to be a data-driven organization. I don't even think that's true anymore. I think you have to be an AI-driven organization. You don't even need to know where the data is per se, you don't need to even access it, you don't even necessarily need a data analyst to go and mine it and tell you things. You just need to have AI that has access to all of it and can have a conversation with you to understand what the data tells you. That's what an AI-driven organization does: it decentralizes the idea of getting insights on what's happening, so you don't have to always go to the same person who has that secret window that tells you what's actually happening.
Let me now play devil's advocate here. The negative aspect of what I just said, of the world becoming hyper-personalized, of everyone being able to produce content at scale, is that we're about to be inundated by content like we've never seen before. Every brand is going to flood the zone, and it's going to be absolutely wild. We're going to start getting videos like the Carvana one from every brand. We're going to be welcomed back by everything. Everyone's going to suddenly know us. There will be some sensations that are positive, but there will also be a little bit discombobulating. What happens when anything becomes commoditized is that we end up as humans seeking the more scarce and special version of something, something with the story. When shoes become commoditized, we want to buy nice shoes. When cars become commoditized, people want to buy a special car in a color that they love. That's typically the way things work, and I actually don't think it's much different in this new world ahead of us. I think that as a result of all this, we as humans are going to crave storycraft and meaning more than ever before. If you think about what makes art special, if you go to a gallery, they're not going to tell you the cost of the oil in the canvas; they're going to tell you the story of the artist, what they went through, what their influences were, and that is going to develop the value that you accrue to this piece of art. Story: this is a friend of mine, a guy named Casey Neistat, who's also based in New York City, who's a big vlogger. He does these big YouTube videos that kids especially love. He did an experiment in the earlier days of generative AI. He went to ChatGPT and said, 'Make a script word for word, scene by scene, of what Casey Neistat would do in New York City.' Then he decides to go out and film this video word by word, scene by scene, which is a thing he would typically do in New York. He puts this video up on YouTube, and it's really weird because it kind of looks like something he would do, but there are moments—like there's one moment where he's like, 'This is a place where I always come to get inspired, really think about life,' and then all you see is an escalator going down. There are a few moments like that. There's just something missing. You're trying to put your finger on it the whole time as the viewer. Then he turns to the video at the end—of course no one knew that he had how he did this video—he turns to the viewer at the end and he's like, 'Listen, this is the worst video I ever made in my life.' He explains how he did it. He's like, 'I'm not sure why it's so bad because it's actually based on everything I've done or would do, but it just lacked soul.' That's how he described it: it just had no soul. I've been thinking a lot about what that means. What is it about the artifacts of humanity, if you will, that we put into the work that we do—the traumas, everything else that we've all gone through—that shows up in interesting, weird ways in the work that we put out into the world? He clearly realized it. I have another friend who is a photographer who has actually changed his craft to start to incorporate artifacts of humanity, as I like to call them. In this case, he's actually showing the negatives because he's trying to show the process that went into the work. He's trying to reveal the story in a world where he feels content will start having no story. I think that's an interesting trend as well. There's also this question that I want to address around the concerns of this content being generated by machines and whether we can trust it or not. I feel like the new version of trust that verify is going to become verify then trust. We're going to want to know the story behind a piece of work, behind an image shot by a photojournalist featured in the New York Times, and we're going to want to know the story behind what we see before we even determine whether or not we can trust it. At Adobe, one of my passion projects for the last five or six years has been something called the Content Authenticity Initiative. We started this as an open source, open protocol, nonprofit organization that's now known as C2PA. It's a standard, an open standard, that we've now gotten over 3,000 partners in industry, including Meta and Google, and it's on YouTube, Microsoft, a lot of folks have signed on now. This is an attempt to allow people when they're making stuff to put credentials into the content that shows how it was made. I have a small skunkworks team in New York City that has been working under the radar on this, and it's getting wider adoption now. It's certainly bigger than Adobe, and it's exciting. One of the things that we've done here is every time you use Firefly in any of our products, you automatically put credentials in the asset that you made, so you know how AI was used and whether AI was used. I also think it's going to be important in the future which model was used to create something. But I think also credentials is a way of in some way showing the story of a digital piece of work, and I think that's going to become more important over time. So this last wave of change here is that we're going from this world of overstimulating, flooding the zone of content which is starting to happen right now, to a world where we're all going to have higher bars for experiences that really engage us in our lives. We're going from this world where we always were seeking scale and efficiency, especially in the digital world, to a little bit more of a meaning and scarcity-driven model that I think a lot of brands are starting to think about: what does that mean for me? And we're going from a world where we're always engaged by content to a world that's so programmatic and algorithm-driven and AI knows us better than we do in terms of our habits. AI is going to constantly try to engage us by content, and I think as humans we're going to start to be more engaged by meaning, which underscores something I've always believed truly over the course of my career in the creative world: it's the creativity that is creative is only effective if it actually moves us. I think that's the ultimate measure of what is art in my mind. Thank you.
