Intentional Innovation

How is meaningful innovation, driven by AI, transforming the digital media services sphere and empowering creators everywhere? 🌍

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Govind Balakrishnan, SVP and GM, Adobe Express at Adobe, joins The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2025 as one of our Enterprise Apps speakers. He shares a compelling conversation with host Melody Brue on the future of creativity, and meaningful innovation in the digital media services sphere.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹Adobe Express: Creativity for Everyone: Discover how Adobe Express empowers a diverse range of users—from marketers and solopreneurs to small businesses and educators—with quick, easy tools for creating standout content.

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🔹Real-World Enterprise Success with Express: Hear compelling success stories from Adobe Express users, highlighting the significant gains in efficiency and brand integrity achieved by major enterprises like Red Hat, dentsu, and ABB.

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🔹Customer-Centric AI Innovation at Adobe: Learn about the profound significance of customer-centric innovation at Adobe, including how AI is enhancing creative processes, exemplified by tools like Clip Maker for effortless video content creation.

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🔹The Future: Human Creativity Amplified by AI: Explore the convergence of creativity and productivity trends, with Adobe leading the way by integrating AI-first capabilities in Express to foster creativity and amplify communicative impact for business growth.

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Learn more at Adobe.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

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Melody Brue: Hi, welcome to the Six Five Summit AI Unleashed and this enterprise app Spotlight Intentional Innovation. I would like to welcome Govind Balakrishnan, Senior Vice President and General Manager responsible for Adobe Express. During his 19 plus years at Adobe, his passion has been to build tools and runtimes that cultivate creativity on all platforms. Most recently, this has led to his leading the Adobe Express business. Govind, thank you for joining us.

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Govind Balakrishnan: Thank you, Mel. It's my pleasure to be here. 

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Melody Brue: Great to have you. Before we dive into this topic of intentional innovation, let's set the stage a bit. Can you tell us a little bit more about Adobe Express? Who's it for? What it aims to do?

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Govind Balakrishnan: Yeah, more than happy to. So we've been on this journey with Adobe Express for a few years, for two or three years now. We've had it in the market for, I would say around a year and a half. And the premise, so to speak, is that Adobe Express brings the best of Adobe's creative and document tools into an application that's quick and easy to use for everyone. And the idea is that it enables everyone to create content that helps them stand out. And we have numerous examples of a number of users from different genres, so to speak, using the application in very impactful and meaningful ways. We have marketers who have successfully used Express to create new campaigns, to repurpose content from existing campaigns, to localize content for regional markets. We have solopreneurs and small businesses using Express to build their professional and personal brand to grow and to grow their social audiences.

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We have educators using Express to help students communicate and learn more creatively. We also play, we also see Express playing a very critical role in enterprises as it relates to their content supply chain solutions. We are empowering both business professionals who need to create visual content, be it presentations or social content or even sales pitch decks, and sort of working hand in hand with marketing leaders who are focused on ensuring that the content that's created stays on brand, right? It's not that you just enable everyone to create content, but the core component or a critical component of the content supply chain is ensuring that any content that gets created within an organization stays on brand. And marketing leaders are sort of collaborating very effectively with business professionals to ensure that any content that's created by business professionals in the enterprise stays on brand. 

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And the good news is that through these efforts and through some of these initiatives, we have seen a very large number of enterprises experience a significant level of success with Express. Some of the examples that come to mind are AstraZeneca, Virgin Australia, Provincial Financial, Workday, Paramount. The list is really, really long, and we believe that as we continue to go through this journey, we expect to see an incredibly large number of large businesses, actually its large and small businesses for that matter, deliver success from leveraging the capabilities of Express.

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Melody Brue: So you named a variety of users like marketers, solopreneurs, small businesses, educators, and enterprise teams that use Adobe Express. Can you share a couple of examples of how some of these customers have achieved success with the platform?

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Govind Balakrishnan: Yeah, sure. A couple that I'll go drill deeper into are, one is Red Hat, where we have seen them in power, the breadth of their organization to create content using Adobe Express, which has helped their company achieve a time saving of almost 10 x, which is incredible to hear. The other one that I will highlight is with Dentsu, where we are seeing that they have enabled their entire distributed marketing and social teams across 120 offices to create content using Express, which has helped them get to market 70% faster than they could without Express. So two clear proof points of success where our customers are realizing some significant ROI from incorporating Express into their workflows and processes.

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Melody Brue: That's great. It's great to hear those outcomes and innovation that it has to be customer centric and it has to solve real problems, but that doesn't just happen. It's not magic. So what does that customer centricity mean for Adobe, and how do you ensure that these tools enhance the process for your customers?

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Govind Balakrishnan: Yeah, as you've heard me say that, that's a topic that's near and dear to my heart, Mel. As I've said in the past, one of the key components of innovation is to ensure that obviously the capability is inherently interesting and compelling by itself. But innovation that does not necessarily do enough to address real customer problems to well, we have to ensure that we are identifying the right set of customers that the innovation is addressing, identify the right problems that we are addressing for those customers, and then making sure that the innovation that we deliver drives the right business outcomes. I mean, that to me is when innovation becomes truly magical and is something that we try to deliver to the extent possible. 

Within Adobe, it's about finding the right problem for the right customer to drive the right outcome, and obviously the capabilities themselves, how to be compelling to start with.

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So once we get to that, the question then is how are we applying that within Adobe? And I would take the example of Adobe Express and how we have built Adobe Express. When we started on the process a few years back, we ensured that we built every feature with a clear customer in mind. The question that we kept asking ourselves is, who's the bullseye for the product to start with and what pain point are we addressing as it relates to addressing the needs of that bullseye customer? And then once we started delivering the capabilities for that bullseye audience, the question is, okay, what business outcomes are we driving for that customer? And we started that process by ensuring that we validated every one of our capabilities within Adobe. So we have a very compelling dog footing program, so to speak, where we encourage every one of our users to use the products or use every one of our products on a daily basis.

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But more importantly, we also get them to use some of the new capabilities that we are intending to launch and have them provide feedback before we have them made available to the external audiences. So we sort of start by ensuring that we are delivering real value to our customers. And there are a couple of examples where I feel like this has really moved the needle. One is with how we brought generative AI into the product. When we started building the product, we had started building it as an AI first solution, but generative AI sort of became a thing while we were building the product. And rather than bolting generative AI onto the product as an afterthought. We decided that it made more sense for us to be customer centric by contextually integrating generative AI into these workflows that our customers go through to ensure that it does not feel obtrusive, but ends up feeling more like something that they can leverage as they go through the creative process. It's clearly helped us see signals where the ability to use generative AI as part of their workflows has helped them create significantly more compelling content that has helped them drive better business outcomes. So there are a few more examples, but I will pause there and see if you have any other questions related to that.

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Melody Brue: Yeah, I mean, you said it allows them to create more. And so let's talk a little bit about creativity and productivity because we're seeing a trend where those concepts are really coming together. They really have to, right? I mean, this is somewhat caused by demand. So how do you see Adobe's role in this?

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Govind Balakrishnan: Yeah, this is an interesting trend that has actually been around for a while. I mean, we've always known that visual communication is by far the most effective form of communication. But an interesting trend that we have been noticing recently is that even PDF documents that have historically been more text-based are increasingly visual in nature. I mean, we did some analysis recently and found that roughly 10 to 15% of all PDF documents that are created today are visual in nature. So it is clear that creativity and productivity are coming closer and closer together. More and more communication is happening through visual channels. Previously, it was primarily personal communication, but we are also seeing business communication happening through social and visual channels. And the opportunity that we have obviously is to make sure that we deliver solutions that meet the customer needs that we are sensing in that space.

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And we are doing that by ensuring that the products that we have, like with Express, for instance, are deeply integrated with Acrobat. We are increasingly building workflows that connect Acrobat with Adobe Express and the capabilities of Adobe Express that make it easier for users of Acrobat and creators of PDF documents bring in more visual elements into into their documents. We are also looking for opportunities to make it so that even within Express, you have the ability to bring in your creative assets from applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, bring them into express and build on the content that you have created in some of these flagship creative applications. And we are taking that even further by ensuring that we have expressed, well integrated into the downstream applications for building full-fledged campaigns by ensuring that we are integrated into applications like AEM, Workfront and GenStudio.

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So it's the end-to-end connectivity, so to speak, of making sure that Express can work with both creative and productivity applications. To build that seamless end-to-end workflow is an area that we have focused on. And we've taken that even a step further by bringing the product extensible and ensuring that Express as a product can be integrated with solutions that our users are leveraging outside of the creative space. So ensuring that Express is integrated into applications like Box applications like Slack. We have recently launched an integration with Miro, which actually has been doing incredibly well, or even actually in an interesting way, integrating it into consumer use cases like an integration that we launched with EA Sports. That was a fun one with the college football game and EA Sports Chat, GPT. And more recently, we just announced a partnership with the NFL that we are super excited about because we see that there's an opportunity to drive fan engagement with a tool like Express through our partnership with NFL. So it's sort of the fact that creativity and productivity are coming together has helped us take our solutions like express to new levels by enabling more of our users to be creative even in productivity, like use cases and situations.

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Melody Brue: That's really helpful. I love the overview of Express and also how Adobe is working hand in hand with customers to answer to those organizational demands. And also really just to answer to human creativity and expression. And as you look towards the future and where we go from here, what do you think people need to be thinking about when using AI in their organization and when adopting it? I actually love what you said about just getting AI into people's hands. I think that's really great for you as an organization with the feedback mechanism, but also getting it into people's hands is such a big way of getting people to use it, right? So what do you see in the future of how to get people to adopt it, getting it people's hands, where do you think we're going from here?

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Govind Balakrishnan: Yeah. One of the key tenets that we have held true to all along at Adobe is that everyone has a story to tell. And the opportunity that we have had all along is to enable everyone to tell their stories in a visually compelling way. And when I look at our journey with Adobe Express and where we started when we started, as I said, we started working or building this product around three years back. And back then one of the key components of building the product was to make it AI first. And the idea there was we would provide our users with tools and recommendations and contextual recommendations to help them on their journey using AI to help them on their journey to get to their output as quickly as possible. That was phase one or step one. 

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Step two was when generative AI became a thing, and we started incorporating generative AI into the tool where not only do we provide contextual recommendations, but now you have the ability to use a prompt to convey or to communicate what you're looking for. And we would be able to generate either images or videos or even text effects in the context of your workflow as you go through the creative process with a tool like Express. What we are now seeing though, is the next step, so to speak, or the next phase of this evolution with Agentic ai, where now with the prompt, you now have the ability to essentially generate a design from scratch. And what it does for us as a company, and what I'm most excited about here is that it gives us the opportunity to completely reimagine and rethink creativity and how creativity is done. And it gives us the opportunity to dramatically lower the barrier to entry for anyone to come in, anyone with a story to tell, which we believe is almost everyone, anyone with a story to tell to come in and interact through a prompt.

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It could be a conversational interface or a text base interface, but interact through a prompt to essentially communicate or convey what they would like to create. It could be an image, it could be a video, it could be a full fledged design, and have that show up on the screen. And what's quite exciting or truly exciting about all of this is that we obviously have the ability to generate what's in their mind's eye, but we still have the tools, or they still have access to the tools if they choose to go in and tweak the content to meet their needs. So it's not that the tools are completely taken away from them, they don't need to use the tools, they don't need to learn to use the tools, but if they choose to, they still have access to the tools to go in and fine tune the content as needed. So what it does is it gives us this ability for us to reimagine, as I said, reimagine creativity, and it gives new ways, entirely new ways for everyone. And I mean really everyone to tell their stories and scale their businesses. And that to me is just an unbelievable, unbelievable opportunity that we have ahead of us that I can't wait to deliver on and see what everyone creates and does with.

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Melody Brue: Well, this was great. I love to hear all of this, and we're so appreciative of you joining us at this enterprise app keynote at the Six Five Summit.

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Govind Balakrishnan: Great. It was my pleasure to be here. Thank you, Mel.

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Melody Brue: Thank you. Stay connected with us on social media and explore more conversations at sixfivemedia.com/summit. And stay tuned for more insights coming up next.

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Disclaimer: The Six Five Summit is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

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