The 5 Ways AI Will Transform Creativity with Adobe CSO & EVP Scott Belsky

So, so thanks for coming to this session. And I thought what we would do is talk a little bit about the impact of AI on creativity and digital experiences. At Adobe, we've been actually playing with AI in our tools for almost a decade, but certainly over the last couple of years, it's become very clear that there's something in a great magnitude of change that's happening right now in the entire creative industry. And also in how marketing is going to be done. How marketing is going to be done by the biggest brands in the world and how, you know, and also small emerging businesses of all sizes will also have to rethink, you know, how they create content, create variations of content, personalize that content, and deliver it at scale. And it's been fun to to be in a company like Adobe thinking through the impact of this technology and how it's really gonna probably change everything to some extent. It's one of those moments, one of those seismic moments, or Cambrian explosions if you will, that I'm sure a lot of you are feeling and encountering as well. So what I thought I would do is talk a little bit about some of the big kind of waves of change that we're seeing that may or may not be relevant to you, but hopefully are at least interesting, And then would love to hear any thoughts or questions on this or anything else that I can be helpful with as you build your businesses. So no doubt this new age of creativity is going to have these seismic changes or seismic levels of impact, especially in the area of what people do for a living, how people learn, and the competitive dynamics of brands and entertainment. We're living in a world where every brand is only as relevant as its latest content. And also, you have to increasingly tell a story, a very relevant story at the speed of social, right? Which is always moving, and every day is a different sort of pulse that you have to tune into. And the traditional machine and tools are just not made for this world. And so this is one of the sort of underpinnings of a lot of this change. But let me now use this time to just go through 5 waves of change that I'm really excited about again, and then we'll have some time for whatever is on your minds. The first wave of change is that, you know, is this notion that the creativity is the new productivity. And if you think about it, productivity tools have been deployed through organizations large and small for the past few decades, and we have increasingly been— we've over time been promoted and given opportunity and been successful based on how productive we were, how much we got done with finite resources. And I think that this is one of those moments where there's an inflection point and people are going to start standing out more for their ideas and their creativity than how quickly they are getting things done. Because so much productivity is being offloaded to compute, and this is kind of increasingly how we're standing out. And I think about that term workflow, which a lot of us use in our businesses. And there's a famous book on creativity by this guy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, sort of like the most famous book on creativity. He talks about the state of flow, where creatives seek to get into this zone where everything that's in their mind's eye is sort of flowing without a lot of friction and process. And how do you achieve that? And you look at the, the world of, of, of machines that things have to go through to get done. And then you look at the impact of something like generative AI, and you're realizing that the work part of workflow is being reduced. And in some cases even eliminated, and what does that actually mean for people's careers and for students, et cetera. Talking about education, or starting with the enterprise rather, I believe that just like productivity tools like Excel and Word and PowerPoint have been deployed, and obviously I'm biased 'cause I'm coming from a company that makes creative tools, but I think that the creative tools now need to be increasingly deployed as well. Why? Because back to that moment, that point about story at the speed of social, Who are the people who are making these brand moments and having these communications and all this kind of stuff? It's increasingly the social media marketers. It's the product marketers. It's the product-led growth folks who have an insight and want to test it and share it in real time. Modern brands need to be able to think and act in real time, and they need creative tools deployed in order to do so. Education, which is also a deep passion for our teams. It's just kind of a tragedy that Art class has always been confined to like 1 or 2 periods a week, and everything that is supposed to creatively develop a child is sort of squeezed into these 1 or 2 blocks. When in fact, if we know that people will increasingly stand out through their creativity and ideas, this should be permeated through the entire curriculum. I mean, why should we even write history papers anymore? Especially in the world of ChatGPT, why shouldn't we be making narrative videos? Of a historical moment, you know, that we're covering as a 5th grader, for example, and learn the tools of storytelling. I think that that's something we're also going to see as creativity becomes the new productivity. And so the big shift here that I just want to, you know, put a capstone on Wave Number 1 is that the standout, the success, the promotion is increasingly going from this, this advantage, this competitive advantage on the productivity side to one that's more around creativity. And we'll get to more of this in a moment. Wave number 2. Wave number 2 is anchored with another kind of strange tragedy of humanity, which is that our confidence creatively is at its highest when we are 5 or 6 years old. When we're 5 or 6 years old, everything we do gets put on a refrigerator, gets gratification from a teacher, gets adoration from our friends, and then we slowly but surely realize that there are these people called critics out there, and that a lot of other people have more or better skills than we do, and our creative confidence starts to go down. And that's when we stop showing rather than telling. We stop drawing, we stop sketching, we stop creating. And it's kind of strange that most of humanity stops doing stuff because of this lack of creative confidence that naturally dwindles. And so you look at new technologies that are emerging, like whether it's Midjourney or Stable Diffusion models, or we have Adobe Firefly, the ability to take something that's in your mind's eye and instantly generate imagery without any skills required actually starts to restore some of that creative confidence later in life. You look at the emergence of a lot of these new web-based content-first tools, whether it's Adobe Express or Canva or others that are allowing people to start from something as opposed to nothing. I mean, these are really, really important, especially as the stakeholders of creativity in an organization go beyond those with just the skills from design school. And so this is the type of tool that I'm talking about that should be deployed. So I think this shift is entering us in an era where everyone should be able to discover content, to just leverage, share, create variations of. People need to feel that creative confidence to make compelling content, to show rather than tell. And also, this fact that creativity has always been confined by a skill set, is also going away. We used to have a world where you were either a graphic designer or a product designer or an illustrator or a video editor, and increasingly, everything is being displayed on platforms that are mixed media. And so of course we shouldn't confine ourselves to this kind of skill-based background if all of the content we're creating is mixed media anyways. You look at big company marketing budgets, and a lot of our customers have shifted at least, if not more than 50% of their marketing spend towards social platforms, away from a world where everything was destined for video or TV or print or whatever, to this new mixed media world, we have to have tools that enable us to feel confident to create that kind of content. So the, the shifts that are happening in this Wave #2 are very simple. We're going from a world where we always had to find someone with skills to tell our story, to a world where we can tell our own story. We're going from a segment-constrained world where everyone operated within a specific segment in the creative world to one that is more imagination-constrained. And it doesn't matter whether you come from that segment or not. And we're also going from a world— and I'm really excited about this shift— from a world where creative tools are very exclusive to one in which creativity is more democratized. Now, of course, at different levels and with different levels of constraint and that sort of— and brand consistency. There's a lot of creative controls that will still be applied by those that are creative professionals. But the rest of us are taught how to fish as opposed to always having to go to these people to do everything for us. And I'm very excited about that. The third big shift here is the opportunity of creative exploration expanding. And this is where I address a common question that we get from our customers who are creative professionals. And also our investors who are like, wow, Scott, this technology is really powerful and I love this idea of creative empowerment. But what does that mean for the future of creative pros? You know, are there going to be fewer of them? What are they even going to be doing? When you talk to a creative professional and you ask them about how they do their greatest work, it oftentimes boils down to a function of time. Do they have more or less time to explore more possibilities? If you go to a branding agency and you ask them to come up with a new brand for your company, they, with the amount of time they're given, you know, they'll have 7 iterations of ideas, they'll whittle it down to 3, and they'll present those 2 or 3 at the end to you as the client, and then you choose the one you like. And if they had more time to explore more surface area of possibility, they would come up with a better solution. And this is the case for every part of creativity. When I spend time with our customers in Hollywood, They take many variations of different scenes, and then the director sits in rooms with editors, and they look at all the different options that the actor presented or that the director requested, and then they choose the one that works best. And if they had more time, they would shoot more and explore more and review more and have a better outcome as a result. And so when we think about creative exploration and the digital bar of experiences going up, right, better experiences for all, We just need to outfit creators with more cycles. They need more cycles. And so this is where this generative AI technology becomes really, really profound. I mean, these are just a few social posts I saw the other day of the fun things that people are doing with this superpower. You know, there are some fun memetic ones like taking these memes or iconic images from our past and using this technology to deduce or hallucinate what was around that. That asset. You know, in, in the chat world, people say that hallucination is the bug, but in our world, the hallucination is actually the feature because the AI needs to be very creative in support— in suggesting all the variations of possibilities for what was actually around that, you know, that Beatles walk across the, across the boardwalk on that album cover. But this technology is allowing people to try many different variations far, far more quickly. So we actually just announced the other day a new capability in Adobe Illustrator, which is probably the most popular product for illustrators, called Generative Recolor. And this is, I thought, a perfect example for you to illustrate this point. If you're an illustrator and you're making, you know, the graphic design for one of these trucks that surround us, these food trucks or any other sort of campaign, a lot of your time is spent trying variations of colors that go well together. And that process is excruciatingly long. You come up with the color palettes you want to try pretty quickly, but then the process of actually trying them is excruciatingly long. So here you can actually put any prompt in, select the entire illustration with one click, and then instantly change all of the color palettes across the entire document within seconds. And when we show this to our customers, some of them actually cry. They literally tear because they're like, "Oh my goodness, the amount of my life I would spend just doing various versions of this for my client or for my internal client or for the poster I'm making or whatever suddenly eliminates." And then they start to say, "Look at all the things I can now do with that time. Instead of just exploring color palettes, I can use that time to make variations of this illustration. I can really be far more creative in the paths that I'm going to pursue to solve this problem I was given. And you're seeing this in all kinds of technologies, right? I don't mean to just talk about Adobe's. I mean, there's this great product out there, Runway, that's also allowing people to just use text-to-video capabilities to explore all different types of possibility. And imagine making an ad and being able to, with quick iterations, make various versions of that ad and just test them in rapid time. This has never been possible before. And so what's going to end up happening is it's going to make experiences better. And I believe that actually when you get more ingenuity per person that you employ, the people on your creative team, when you get more possibility from each of them, you're going to actually want to hire more of them. Look no further than engineers. Engineers have gotten more productive every year for probably the last two decades, and yet companies want to hire more of them. Why? Because as natural— beings and natural entities and capitalism, we want to build more products. We want to solve more customer problems. We want to build more features. And so if we get more per person, we end up actually wanting more people. And I think that's my bet as well for the creative space. So the shift of this big wave here is that the limited time for discovery that every creative person I've ever met feels constrained by will suddenly yield 100x more cycles of discovery. And that's going to be really exciting for them and for the rest of us that get to witness what they create. And then this limited surface area of exploration that you had to look through to find the solution to a problem you were trying to solve, you're going to vastly expand the surface area you're able to cover in a given amount of time. And that 100x possibilities is going to ultimately yield better discoveries, better realizations, better solutions. No doubt about that. So when I think about the box of creativity, and I'll be ironic and put creativity in a box for a moment, it was always constrained. It was constrained by the skills you needed to get into that box, right? You may have felt daunted by Photoshop or Illustrator or After Effects. You felt you couldn't make that animation to show how your product worked, right? You never felt like you could get into that box. You always had to hire someone to do it for you. And if you are in that box, you were constrained by time to find better solutions. You could never break through the ceiling because the ceiling was just the number of cycles you had to discover stuff and you could just never break through that damn ceiling. So the good news about this technology is that it's doing two things, right? It is lowering the bar for the minimum skills required to get into this box, which is a lot of new people coming into the funnel, right, for any creative product. And it's also raising the ceiling, right, of what's possible within the given time that you actually have. And this is, I think, a great thing for the creative industry. So 100x more possibilities through that surface area and 100x more participants by people having access, by not needing the skills to get involved and having more creative confidence to take a shot, right? So what does this yield? Well, 100x more possibilities and 100x more impact, you know, powered by this AI and data that's being captured on all of these interactions we have with our digital experiences every day. This is yielding the next wave I want to make a case for you for, which is this world of far more engaging and personalized digital experiences than we could ever imagine. This to me is the fourth wave that's going to change everything, especially for your products. We are going to be in a world where we're going to expect every digital experience to know each of us. We're gonna expect things to be tailor-made for us, right? When we go shopping at an e-commerce website, we're gonna expect it to know our shoe size, to know our gender, to know what things we liked and didn't like in the future. We're gonna expect that entity that we're shopping with to have a conversation with our personal agent and have a sort of a pre-brief in milliseconds of what our experience should be on this website so that when we go, we're welcomed by name and we know why we were welcomed by name. It's not creepy ad tech, it's actually personalization at scale on our own terms as consumers. I believe our documents are gonna wanna talk to us as opposed to us reading through and trying to find things. The documents will say, what do you wanna know about me? And you'll just have a conversation. These applications, documents, experiences are gonna meet us where we are as opposed to us always having to meet these apps where they are, which transforms the whole nature of onboarding and personalized experiences for every digital product that is out there. The data that we all have, right, that we selectively share or our agents choose to share on our behalf is the fuel that will allow us to be known. And this has always been one of my cardinal convictions of technology, both as an angel investor, as a founder of Behance, which is the company I founded many years ago, and now in my role at Adobe. I believe that all of us as humans long to go back to the way things once were, but with more scale and efficiency. That notion of walking around a small town and being welcomed by the butcher who knows your favorite cut, or, you know, having— going into an apparel store where they know and they remember what you bought before, and they know your kids' names, and they suggest a gift for a friend of yours. This small-town life that we lost in the Industrial Revolution might be something that our ancestral kind of brain somewhat craves, especially in this world where every brand's about to flood the zone with content. We're going to be having so many things thrown at us at all times. We're going to want to be known. And I think that that's one of the things that all brands and companies and digital experiences need to think about. Some companies are already thinking about it. This is an example of Carvana. They did an experiment where they made 1.5 million hyper-personalized videos for their customers based on the actual car that the customer purchased, the color of the car that they purchased it in, and the hometown that they purchased it at, and also their native language. And so everyone got this video about their car purchase experience from Carvana that felt like it was tailor-made for them. They felt known. It was an amazing moment of hospitality in a very unexpected place. Buying a car from Carvana, you would never expect that. I think this is a signal of the types of things to come at scale. And so the big seismic shift in this fourth wave that I just described is that these generalized experiences from the masses are going to become personalized experiences for each of us. That you always searching for something or trying to deduce something and read something and figure something out will become a world where you ask and get suggestions on things you didn't even know you needed to know. You learning an application and how it works becomes an app learning you, figuring out how you work and what your skill level is and what you're trying to accomplish. And then this data-driven world where everyone's obsessed with finding data and then using that data to market or whatever is to become more AI-driven. And what I mean by that is that we're going to not even understand fully how the data that we have on our own customers can be used to provide that level of hospitality I just described. But the AI will, and the AI will also hopefully have a relationship with that person's agent that can help us understand their preferences on their own terms. Imagine your agent telling a brand new company that you're actually going to on purpose, and for That one hour, that company can know a lot about you and give you a hyper-personalized experience, and then as soon as that hour is up, you're a stranger again because you want to be. These are the types of things that I believe will be possible with this fourth wave of technology that is rapidly, rapidly coming at us. The fifth wave, the fifth and last wave here, is that I believe as humans we are all going to crave story and craft and meaning more than ever before. I mean, if you think about the reason we ever bought art in the first place, it was not because of the value of the raw ink on the canvas, right? It was the story that someone told. The gallery plays an important role in selling art because we learn that artist's background and their childhood and where they went to school and other collectors and all these data points become a story for us that creates scarcity. And it emphasizes the quality of the craft, and it enables us to value it for something, right? More than what it actually— the raw goods are worth. There was a great experiment that was done recently by my friend Casey Neistat in New York. He's a well-known YouTube videographer, and he goes out and does these iconic videos oftentimes of things in New York City. And he, he, he went to ChatGPT and he said, what is a video tour of New York City that Casey Neistat would do. And it, of course, output an entire script of exactly what he would do. And so he decided to film an episode where he followed the script and every scene direction and every line, word for word for word. And you watch this video, it's a little strange and a little dull. At times he's like, "Hey guys, I'm at the most inspiring motivational place where I love to sit and have a coffee in New York City." And then, like, you see what the video, what he's looking at, and it's like an escalator just going down. And, uh, so anyways, that's basically what the video is like. At the end, he turns to the viewer with a little post-roll and he says, "Listen, that is the worst video I ever made in my life. And the reason is, despite it using the latest technology, is that it had no soul. You know? It had no soul." I thought about this quite a bit because a lot of these models are trained to be intuitive. They're trained on the average of what we do, the things we watch, the things we think. It's trained on the stuff that's been done by default, obviously, through 2021 in some cases. Yet the things that actually jar us and feel like they have soul are somewhat counterintuitive. They're things that catch our eye that we didn't expect. They're mistakes of the eye. There's all these elements of creativity that are ultimately what move us, right? And so I think what Casey Neistat was saying is that, and was reminding us, is that the stuff that continues to be really effective is the stuff that has this emotion that taps into some of these things that are counterintuitive, that are deeply personal. The random number generator in our brain is far more interesting than the random number generator, you know, applied to some algorithm and some training dataset. So what's happening here in this fifth wave? What are the shifts that matter? Well, every brand is going to flood the zone with content, right? Right now it's happening with all these ChatGPT marketing machines that are out there now. SEO, right, is going to be something that's completely used and abused. We're going to get tons of content thrown at us in immersive experiences and future devices that we wear on our eyes and everything else. As we're flooding, as we're being flooded, our expectations for experiences goes up. The bar goes up, and things that move us are going to be the things that capture our attention. Instead of seeking scale and efficiency in everything we do, I think we're actually going to seek more meaning and scarcity in what we do. And just take a trip to Japan and walk around Tokyo and see the things that catch your eye. The small little, you know, bars with 7 seats, or the micro, you know, restaurants with 5 seats. I mean, these are why people love going there so much. Oftentimes, it's the meaning and scarcity of the experiences that are designed not to scale that makes that culture so unique and interesting. Maybe that will permeate other cultures. Maybe that will be something we crave even more, even in America, where everything's about scale and more and more. And then being engaged by content, increasingly we might become engaged more by meaning. And that's really like in the deepest part of my soul, you know, creativity that is effective is ultimately the creativity that moves us, and that's going to keep, in my mind, this industry alive. Thank you.