Adobe Firefly at MAX: third-party AI models, custom brand AI, and threading the Hollywood needle

bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. You can go to fin. ai to get started. And we have a Neil Chak Chakraarthy from Adobe in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP Ultra. Anal, great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking time. It's almost like you guys are in the creative industry. Yes. Yeah. Likewise.

Great to meet you and thanks for having me on. Thanks for hopping on. Uh I assume you're at Max. Take us through the big headline news. What's What are the most exciting things happening in the Adobe ecosystem these days? Yeah, I'm coming here live from Max in LA.

We have over 10,000 people, everybody from individual creators to people in Hollywood who work with creative in the creative industry, enterprise customers, all kinds of people. It's been really exciting.

Obviously, it's all about how we bringing uh we're bringing AI in the creative tools that everybody loves and knows so well. Uh and we're really talking about how to make responsible use of AI, right?

You know, uh we have our own models with Firefly and we had had a ton of innovations around Firefly, which is, you know, designed to be commercially safe, but we announced a big partnership with Google around Vo and Imagine and all kinds of other third party models that are now integrated um into our tools.

uh Runway and Luma and many many others. Uh and then we also announced how we can um help customers with their own custom models. So we call it Firefly models, partner models, your models.

And you know if you are Disney or Home Depot or uh Newel brands, how do you have a an AI model that really protects your IP and becomes your brand brain? Uh so that's really what uh what's really what's been exciting. How are you thinking about the the creative journey of the customer?

I feel like uh there's probably people in the audience who might have uh became an Adobe customer uh by pirating a version of Photoshop in 1998 and now they pay for cloud uh every month.

Um, and but you know now there's even more varieties of like niche use cases where a consumer can use a point solution and then they grow and grow and grow into the ecosystem. Is it more important than ever that you set up teams to capture those longtail interactions?

Uh just a face swap over here or just a background remover over here and then funnel everyone into the ecosystem or do you want to focus on just capturing people once they're ready to to go into the enterprise workflows?

Yeah, you know, exactly as you mentioned, we have such a a wide variety here of people who have had their journey with Adobe. We had uh Brandon Bomb on stage who was exactly like what you said. Yeah. He said he was 11 years old when he started using a a cracked copy. This is the thing. Yeah. [laughter] Exactly.

After Effects and he said he's a paying subscriber now. Of course. And and then you know what he said was you know he said he started playing with you when he was a kid. He got hooked on it. Yeah. And he showed how you can do it with Firefly.

I mean he posted something yesterday and you know he that a video that he created with Firefly and then uh you know he got some comments and said somebody said hey looks like this is going to be a plot twist here and so he did the plot twist on stage today.

He used Firefly and all the tools to just take the next episode in that story.

M so we got all types you know you got enterprise customers who are like hey we would love to use all these new genai tools it's got to get through our systems our regulation our compliance uh Adobe people trust Adobe so if you can make it available it becomes so much easier to use all of this innovation uh and then we have a lot of people like you said who um have their favorite tools and they want to see all this AI in their favorite tools and then there are many many others because you know uh we think uh maybe more than half the people at max are attending for the first time.

Wow. So they just want everything on a mobile app. They they don't have the you know desktop machine with Photoshop on it there. They know every layer and all of that. So they just want it on their uh on on their on their mobile app. And so we got all types.

So the creative journey ideas can strike you anywhere and we want to help you turn that into creativity. What's your what's your read on how Hollywood's been navigating Gen AI?

We're here in LA ourselves and uh when I when we talk to people in the industry on or off air, it seems like everyone is trying to be get ahead and be and and leverage the tools to the best of their ability, but there's this pressure to not piss off the broader industry of people that that make it possible.

But uh what's been the read from from people that are talking at the event? Uh because there's a little bit of like if you're too much at the bleeding edge and too loud, you know, you might get uh people people might come after you. Yeah, exactly. They're threading the needle. Uh exactly.

They are excited about the potential. They see what AI can potentially do in terms of everything from ideiation uh from helping create and make those uh uh make the movies and other content for TV and then also then getting the audience to participate.

you know, everybody can have you it's so easy to create variations and get uh get get the, you know, make it more like fan experience that like the sports teams are doing. So, they they're really interested in all of that potential. Uh but like you said, uh they want to make sure it's top-notch quality.

They want to make sure their IP is protected and that they're not, you know, even unwittingly stepping on somebody else's toes. Um, and they want to make sure that, uh, they're doing it in a way that's monetizable and that, uh, you know, it's, uh, uh, gives them a recurring revenue stream.

So, exactly like you said, they're threading that needle. Yeah. Very cool. Um, did you have a product request, by the way? I did. I want you to bring back PI, uh, Photoshop Mix.

I was a huge user of Photoshop Mix and my favorite features got deprecated and I moved to Photoshop Express and then I got a new phone and one of the features, the one random feature that I use got deprecated again.

And so [laughter] now I am on the full Photoshop iOS app, the official Photoshop iOS app, and I'm learning it. But uh I do feel like one of my children was left behind in the on the Titanic or something and I was left So I I will ask the product team to take a look. Have you tried Firefly? Have you checked Firefly out?

I haven't. I haven't. But but I understand like this is the nature of of of building a large scaled uh you know business. You need to uh move people through the different feature funnels. You can't keep every otherwise it just becomes all tech debt. So uh I understand why things uh go the way they do.

But as as a dedicated user of of the legacy app, why uh in as as few words as possible because we're running out of time. Yeah. Why? What your read on on uh like specifically? I think people the be the bears out there think that that AI is disruptive could be disruptive to the Adobe ecosystem.

Give we're a creative business. We're media company. We're constantly creating media and advertisements and things like that.

Our view has been that it's ob it seems more obviously to be an extending innovation uh or or people being able to generate a video an image or a video and then suddenly have that asset and be like well now I want to change it well what tool are you going to use right it it's probably a tool within the Adobe ecosystem so in as few words as possible what's your view on why AI uh uh would be an extending innovation for the Adobe kind of suite of products yeah you know we look at it as uh the evolution of a new operating system and we are the creative AI platform that runs on new operating systems.

You know when you look at our history uh when it was desktops I mean we ran on Mac OS and Windows OS when it became cloud you know whether it was with AWS or Microsoft Azure or with uh you know with GCP and others when it became mobile whether it was iOS or Android.

So we have [clears throat] the history and the track record of making sure that we work very well with the emerging new operating systems and the new AI is the new operating system.

Now you know you have to believe uh and I think it's a simplistic view that the operating system will do everything that the apps do and yeah I mean that just seems in our view very simplistic. So we think much obviously from our perspective that we're good at working with these new operating system.

That's what we announced with Google yesterday and you know we actually showed within chat GPT how you can work with Adobe tools like express. So it's evolving of how they you know what do the operating systems do and what do the apps continue to do.

There's new layers of AI but you know that's the architecture is evolving fast but we think that you need both. I don't think it's either or and that's where we think the world is going to be. Yeah.

I I mean I've used so many of these little point solution uh AI tools and I've just I feel like I've seen a glimpse of where this all goes and it's like I actually do want a platform that then can sub out different models so I can get Firefly or VO or Midjourney or you know hopefully you wind up building a platform that's so open that all the different features and models are there and it's just like having the lasso tool next to the rectangle tool next to the text tool and that's a very natural progression.

for Adobe. In my opinion, it seems very logical. Now, we got to get you on our consumer advisory board. I mean, you really summed it up really. Yeah. I mean, I I hate that I lost my strong opinions. You'll have to bring it back for you. Yeah. But I No, no, no, no, no. I I don't I don't actually think you need to.

I think you actually do need me to suffer a little bit to get into the proper full-fledged ecosystem that has all the tools in one place because that's where the actual value is right now.

Everyone knows that you can spin up a website that's a text box and it generates one asset, one image, one video, but that's not how creativity works. We're not just going to oneshot a 2-hour movie. Exactly. Exactly. No, you should really check out Firefly. I think you'll enjoy it.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Uh, great to chat and congratulations and have fun at Adobe Max. I' I've been seeing a ton of people uh friends of mine posting that they're there. Wish I could be there. Uh hopefully in a future year we'll be able to attend. It'd be great. Thank you for having me on.

I appreciate we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.