Adobe's Vision for Redefining Creative Workflows in the AI Era

Enterprise leaders now own a problem that used to sit squarely with creative teams: content demand is climbing faster than most organizations can staff for in both volume and quality.

Keith Kirkpatrick, Vice President and Research Director at Futurum, is joined by Elliot Sedegah, Director of B2B Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe, to unpack Futurum's newly published research report, Redefining Creative Workflows in the AI Era: How Organizations Are Transforming Content Creation to Deliver Business Value, authored by Kirkpatrick in collaboration with Adobe.

The conversation explores why content demand continues to outpace teams' ability to produce it, even as generative AI becomes more widely adopted, and what separates companies seeing dramatic productivity gains from those still struggling to move beyond experimentation. Sedegah shares how Stagwell cut its creative pitch process from weeks to just three days while saving $50,000 in outside production costs, offering a real-world example of what's possible when AI is built into the creative workflow. He also discusses how Adobe is bringing partner models like Google's Nano Banana and OpenAI into Creative Cloud, and how Firefly Graph helps teams capture and reuse creative workflows so the work of one designer can benefit an entire organization.

Key Takeaways:

 🔹 Content demand has outpaced supply, even with AI in the mix. Buyers now expect hero-quality content personalized down to individual segments, and most creative teams can't hit that bar without embedded AI support.
🔹 People, process, and technology all gate AI value. Task forces that stay experimental science projects don't move the needle. Organizations pulling ahead tie AI workflows directly to business objectives and give IT the controls to unlock access fast.
🔹 Individual productivity gains need a translation layer to become business results. Sedegah points to Stagwell's compressed pitch timeline and $50,000 in saved production costs as the kind of number that gets a CFO's attention.
🔹 A unified platform compounds value instead of just capturing it once. Sedegah describes Firefly Graph this way: "You move from this single-use tool to something that gains value..." as it gets used across an organization, not just by one designer.
🔹 AI is redistributing work across roles. Some jobs are shifting between teams while others gain new leverage, and the throughline across every leading organization Sedegah cites is investment in people alongside the technology.

Adobe's approach shows what happens when AI gets embedded into governed, connected systems instead of scattered across disconnected tools. The organizations pulling ahead are turning scattered AI experiments into repeatable, measurable business outcomes.

Be sure to check out the full research report to dig deeper into these findings.

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Elliot Sedegah:
They were able to get that pitch down process from weeks to three days, saving about $50,000 in there in an external production cost. Those are real dollars where you can start to take some of your best creatives, your best minds, and then put them towards the next client.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

Hello, and welcome to the Six Five virtual webcast. I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, Vice President and Research Director at Futurum, covering enterprise software and digital workflows. Today, we're taking a deeper look at Futurum's newly published research report, Redefining Creative Workflows in the AI Era, How Organizations are Transforming Content Creation to Deliver Business Value, which I had the opportunity to author in collaboration with Adobe. The research explores why many organizations are still struggling to realize the full business value of generative AI, and what leading enterprises are doing differently to modernize these creative workflows and improve measurable outcomes. Joining me today to dive deeper into these topics is Elliot Setigo from Adobe. Elliot, it's great to see you again, and welcome to The Six Five.

Elliot Sedegah: 

Keith, thanks for having us.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

Absolutely. Well, you know, Elliot, we're in a really interesting time right now when you think about content. It seems that the demand for content, new and different content, continues to grow really fast, you know, faster than many organizations can realistically support. So from your perspective, Why has this become more of a supply, more than simply a creative team challenge? And why is it now a broader business issue for enterprise leaders?

Elliot Sedegah: 

Thanks, Keith. Excellent question. So one, thanks again for having us. As you are aware, it's been quite a journey over the last year since generative AI kind of took front and center in terms of what our customers have been looking for, what their customers expect of overall experiences. And what you've seen has been pretty much an arms race. In many cases, you've seen that the demand for content has been increasing at a rapid pace, and not just larger volume, but higher quality as well. Like the expectations of content has gotten to the point where People are expecting higher quality hero content, whether that's images or videos or 3D content. And the demand is just outpacing the supply, even with all of these new tools that we put out there.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

When you're talking about demand for more, is it in terms of like more variations, more personalized? Can you expand on that a little bit?

Elliot Sedegah: 

Right. So you think about the end of the day, like what are we using content for in many cases in the enterprise? In many cases, they're looking to leverage content to accelerate their brand or to sell a service. It's always connected to business results. So the pressure of using content to connect a business hasn't been at a higher sense of need across all the customers that we speak to around the world. In Adobe, we're seeing that front and center where That demand for content is turning into higher quality, especially around personalization. So you think about that dream of personalization that's been out there of creating a personalized experience for all the different segments is eventually getting down to that segment of one where you need to create some content that really is compelling for that audience or that segment or the individual or that buying center. But just sending out content and another variation to them is not quite going to do it. It has to really hold on to those brand standards, that experience that your customers are looking for. And their customers are expecting a much better experience. And what we've seen happen has been the tale of two cities. across the world, across our different customers, we've seen the creative team be under pressure to meet that bar. And as you know, if you think about the creative team, in many cases, they're centralized. They have a lot of tasks to do. They have a whole long list of requests. They're never really quite able to get to, but they're able to do that at a higher volume and higher quality than before with generative AI now baked into these creative workflows. But what we've seen happen is been now that the creative team is empowered to create all this different content, we've also seen the broader organization be lit up as well. Like generative AI is up leveling the skill level of of the other content creators that sit around that core creative team, whether the social media team, the marketing team, some points of the product team as well. And it's turning into effectively a cycle. That core creative team is creating some compelling content. Those other external content creators that work around them are creating content much closer towards the audience that's in there. And the demand cycle continues to grow from there. So what we're seeing, Keith, is a big change, like generative AI is starting to spark higher levels of productivity, but in turn, getting more demand for content.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

You really mentioned an interesting point in the middle there, talking about driving business outcomes. I'm curious about what are some of the barriers that are in place that sometimes inhibit organizations from actually deriving value from AI?

Elliot Sedegah: 

Yeah, yes. So there's many barriers so that we've kind of overcome some of them over the last few years. But quite frankly, some of the organizations aren't really catching on to capturing the full value relative to the leaders that we see. So we've seen some of our leaders in generative AI really take on this, take on the tools head on. And they're seeing just outsized gains, five, 10x in terms of the overall productivity, output, and quality that they're seeing relative to those who haven't been able to capture that value, if you will. So there's a few things that come up in terms of adoption. So first is, in many cases, many teams have probably started a smaller AI task force, and you put a team together to come up with these new workflows and then diffuse those out throughout the rest of the organizations. If you're employing those, that's a great way to do it. But enabling that team to be more than just an experimental science project and actually embedding those and aligning those to clear business objectives has been what we've seen the difference between those leaders and those who are still learning how to just kind of experiment with generative AI and then take those into business. So that's one of the first things I'll mention there. Just make sure that connected with those teams that we have in there are aligned towards business teams.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

You obviously have the leaders out there that have figured out how to do it and the laggards haven't. Is that a process issue? Is it a technology issue? What's sort of the barrier there?

Elliot Sedegah:

It's always a combination of those three, right? People, process, and technology. The first one, I was starting to hint to that, is that process. And that process of how the technology comes in, how you're identifying use cases, how it's diffused to the rest of the organization. Those standards are starting to come out now. So now there's a process as a way to get that locked in where they're aligned towards business need and the team. Second is technology. And access to the latest and greatest technology has been one of the key barriers that we've seen happen across many different companies where there will be a new model seemingly coming out every other week. It's really hard to keep up with that. There's a new technology that we're building on top of that. We have other vendors who are building amazing technology for these creative workflows. as well. And then the challenge is, how do you take this technology and diffuse it across your organization in the most responsible but operationally efficient way as possible? And those technologies may need to go through technology security reviews or legal reviews, for example. And that's been like sort of a bottleneck there. But, you know, one of the things that we had to do to help work around that, to help our customers accelerate this technology is, one, we're going to make, we're working to get the fastest, the best technology in, coming from Adobe, as well as broadening the ecosystem into our technology as soon as possible. But they're also giving the IT teams the controls so they can start to unlock this technology for those teams who are approved to use it as quickly as possible. So that technology diffusion is one. And then the last piece is your people. And if you've… If you've seen the transformation in your people, they need to be very AI forward today. I'm sure many, many organizations are saying, hey, well, you have to use a ton of credits or take these training pieces out there. But there is some truth behind that in terms of transforming the individuals, finding people in many cases who are thinking about how can they take this technology and then use it and align towards those core business use cases. It is a mind shift that you need to start instilling in your people. And one of the best ways to do that is, in many cases, some of the people who are introduced to this new technology, in some cases, they don't know exactly how to use it in their workflow. They're being told to use it, but they don't know quite what's going to be actually effective for them to actually help them out on a daily basis. So what we see from some of the leaders as well is, you know, we're doing educational courses, we're sharing things as a vendor. But one of the strongest things that you can do is having your own organization, the leaders within your organization who've cracked the shell in terms of specific use cases that actually drive higher content quality, higher content velocity, better content output. For example, share their learnings, share their workflows, specifically with others across their organization. It's the quickest way to get AI adoption. It's the quickest way for the AI adoption to go from that individual to the broader group. And then now you start to see that value realized across the organization.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

You know, it sounds like what you're talking about there is really kind of scaling the use of AI across the organization. And that kind of leads me to another, you know, kind of related question. I mean, you talked earlier about AI and some of the benefits you can have in terms of, you know, improving individual productivity metrics. But I'm curious to hear what you think about measuring success across the organization. and really thinking about what are the business outcomes that companies should be keeping in mind as they're deploying AI.

Elliot Sedegah: 

Yeah, you're right. I think at the end of the day, you're thinking about it from a company lens, for a broader enterprise. There's lots of questions like, hey, is the enterprise getting a lot of value from this? Lots of new applications are being deployed, lots of workshops and task force and credits being consumed as well. But at the end of the day, it's a business. So I think that's what you're hinting towards. And so there's sort of two sides of the coin, right? We know that the individual productivity, for those who are really understanding those key workflows, has been there. So I guess the best example I could think of is, if you're mastering your usage of chat GPT, or one of those other LLMs, for example, like you know that, hey, this saves me a ton of time. But in many cases, the business doesn't see that they're like, well, I don't know, Joe or Keith, whoever.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

Are you actually redirecting yourself in that saving time into doing something productive that moves the business forward?

Elliot Sedegah: 

Yes, exactly. So if you think about it from one of the things that we've seen at Adobe is, how do you capture that value of that individual creative? And then that individual creative, can we use that to redirect their energy or make them even more productive in the next task? And then on top of that, can they make the rest of the creatives around them even more productive as well? So you just want to see some huge savings. So a great example of this is Stagwell. Stagwell is a large creative agency, and they use capabilities within Creative Cloud. And if you think about what their core part of their job, they need to do internal pitches, think of different concepts, go pitch to clients. And they were able to get that pitch down process from weeks to three days, saving about $50,000 in their, in an external production cost. Now you start to think about that. Those are real dollars where you can start to take some of your best creative, your best minds, and then put them towards the next client. Right. So it'll start to be meaningful in terms of getting that business results out there. And those are the outcomes that a CFO will look at and like, Hey, I finally understand where the value is coming from. Let's do this again in the supply towards the next business use case.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

Absolutely. I mean, you know, when you talk about efficiency, what that really does is it gives these creative teams in this example, more at-bats, more at-bats, more likelihood of closing more deals, which hopefully improves your top line and bottom line. So absolutely. One of the things that our report really kind of takes a look at is, you know, sort of the value of moving toward a unified creative platform that connects workflows, AI, and governance. What practical changes does taking that kind of platform approach enable that sort of these disjointed or fragmented approaches? simply can't actually match up.

Elliot Sedegah: 

Yeah. So I'll talk first from the people in the workflow perspective, because I think the mindset that we've seen, some of the leaders in terms of the customers that we encounter, mindset change has helped them actually get towards leveraging a platform that connects all these workflows and governance, et cetera. So first is actually recognizing that you have these different technologies across and seeing the uplift that you'll get from that. If you go across any organization that creates a lot of content, you'll see that they're using dozens of different types of tools and technologies. And it might be productive for that small team or group. But if you start to take a step back and look at what the broader business is trying to do, you'll see a quite a bit of unlock there. So we're actually recognizing that up front and establish a task force to identify those core teams, those core workflows that you need to address is really the first step. Then after that is actually looking at the technology. And there's many different vendors out there looking to pull together some of these technology. But at Adobe, we're doing quite a bit of work to embed the generative AI directly into the tool, but built in a way that connects the workflows in a system that's governed to help drive scale and efficiency across all of the different content creators in your organization. So those core designers, the video team, to those other creators that I mentioned from product marketing teams to the social media teams that are working across the system, they all need to be connected. So I'll give an example of a couple of things that we did in the last recent months. So across Creative Cloud, as many of you are aware, we have some of the world's best creative and design tools in there, from Photoshop to Illustrator to Firefly, which is our new AI studio, which is used for a wide variety of purposes. But one of the key things that we wanted to do in that was make sure that we pulled in partner models that may come in from many different areas. So Google's Nano Banana is a part of it. OpenAI is now infused directly into those tools. And we want to make sure everything is connected into our key workflows for anyone to use. As we talked about previously, now that the tools are connected, we need to be able to unlock these workflows more broadly. And we recently introduced a new technology, which is called Firefly Graph. And if you think about Firefly Graph, the idea behind that is we have all of our 30 years of creative technology and tools and technology that's everything from shading to knocking out backgrounds, combined with all this new generative AI technology built in a node-based surface. So you can actually design these workflows and say, hey, Keith, you're my best designer. Show me your best design and actually build it into a workflow that's repeatable, reusable. So guess what, Keith? You don't have to do the same step over and over and over again. But on top of that, Keith, you can now share that workflow with anyone in the organization. So now anyone in the organization is now inheriting your superpower. Keith, you have this amazing design skill that can take this product shot and turn it into things that we'll put on our commerce website and little social videos and all be on brand. Now enable everyone to be able to do that. And the power that you get from that is now you move from this single use tool to something that gains value as you use it. So as you use the system, it actually gets smarter and smarter. So you can actually share these codified workflows across this platform. And then the broader organization gets value from that. So those are some of the things that we're doing as a technology vendor. But as I mentioned first, you have to get the people and the process right first for any of that to make sense.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

Absolutely. And that kind of brings me to my last point here is, and I think you alluded to this, but as we continue to see AI capabilities evolve and improve, and again, you'd mentioned before, the pace of innovation around AI is just, it's like nothing we've ever seen before. What are the things or what's the thing that will really help organizations transform how they create and deliver content across the business?

Elliot Sedegah: 

So the first is getting started with real use cases. So moving out of that experimental phase, I know that it was 2023 moving to 2024 where we're still experimenting. But that's the first thing I would say to some of those who are really trying to figure out, well, how do I get advantage of this, take advantage of this? is go out there and learn. You start to see how quickly your team is begging, in many cases, to adopt this technology to move forward. From that is there's tons of learnings. Like if you put out this technology, if you think about what's there, and not just that final experience that's out there where customers see, but the learnings of how you actually got there. Sharing some of those best practices I've seen has really transformed an entire organization. Because at the end of the day, Like your best asset are your people. And if you constantly share those best practices with people, it starts to change the minds and how they think about what that next new innovation is going to be to drive the organization forward, to create content at scale across their, to support their core business.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

So it sounds like what you're saying though, ultimately, you know, this, you know, conventional wisdom that AI will replace people, not applicable here. It's really just sort of another aid. to further the human spirit in terms of creativity and productivity?

Elliot Sedegah: 

Well, at the end of the day, the jobs to be done have always been there, right? And those jobs to be done need to be done better, faster, with higher quality. And there might be different people that you have involved doing those that are moving across where you may have some people who are going to have incredibly high leverage And then others who are going to be adapting and bringing on new skills. So what we've seen has actually been a mix. Some of the jobs have shifted around from different teams. But then others have been amplified in terms of the expectations that they can do. And they're just doing some outstanding, outstanding work in terms of transforming what was possible. When about a year ago, I had no idea that was possible. I didn't know idea that was going to be possible, but they're making some outstanding, amazing work. And the people are at the heart of that.

Keith Kirkpatrick: 

All right, well, we'll have to leave it there, but I can't wait to see what's possible in a year from now. Well, Elliot, thank you very much for joining us here today. Keith, thanks for having us. All right, well, thank all of you for tuning in to the Six Five virtual webcast. Be sure to check out the full research paper, and don't forget to hit subscribe, follow us on the social media, and check out all of our latest coverage at sixfivemedia.com. Thanks, and we'll see you again next time.

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