The Adobe Takeover Nobody's Talking About & The Future of Creativity

0:00What did you steal? Secrets. Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg's best film in 20 years. Are they people? No. Are they human? My god. Spielberg does this better than anybody in history. I can see you. They're coming. Disclosure Day. Rated PG-13. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. In theaters Friday. Get tickets now. Welcome back to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today's episode is a little bit different. It's more of an audio documentary. We recently partnered with Adobe to make this special episode where we actually go behind the scenes of one of the world's most influential tech companies.

0:45Speaking to a couple of people who are at the forefront of shaping its future. So because of that, like I said, it plays out a bit more like an audio documentary than a standard interview. There's a bit more story, context and history before we dive into the conversations themselves. Without further ado, let's get into it. How does Adobe secretly power the world? Chances are you've interacted with Adobe tech today without even realising it. And weirdly, could they actually become one of the biggest protectors of creators in the age of AI? Over the next half an hour or so, I'm going to show you.

1:26Most people think they know Adobe, but it rather depends on who you are. You probably know a completely different version of the company to somebody sitting next to you. Maybe you're a creator, so for you, Adobe means Photoshop or the video and editing tools. Basically half the modern internet. Or maybe you work in an office and know them as the PDF company and not much more. But what if I told you Adobe quietly powers some of the biggest brands and experiences on earth? The Premier League, Tesco, Disney Parks, banks, governments and even streaming platforms. And the chances are you've interacted with Adobe Tech today without even realising it.

2:15But there's a massive problem coming. because AI is about to completely change creative work. And Adobe sits in a weird position because they're building AI tools while also trying to convince creators they're protecting them from AI, which sounds slightly impossible. So today, Adobe partnered with us here at Jimmy's Jobs to snoop around their London headquarters to show us what they're actually building and to answer the uncomfortable questions. Is AI going to destroy creative jobs? Who owns your work now? Can creators stop AI copying them? And how does a company like Adobe avoid becoming the thing that creatives fear most?

3:03But before we go inside Adobe, here's a quick history lesson. Adobe has actually existed for more than 40 years. photoshop launched in 1990 illustrator came out in the 80s and imagine spending three hours on editing an image and then faxing it on to someone that was genuinely the workflow and now the same company is helping power everything from tiktok creators and youtubers to premier league fan experiences to ai systems government are using to fight misinformation. So yeah, this got way bigger than we expected. Let's go inside Adobe. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Can you tell us your name and your job title?

3:55My name is Simon Morris and I'm responsible for international marketing here at Adobe. So my job and that of my team is to understand the local nuances and the pain points and the customer in the different markets and make sure that we're delivering our, tailoring our marketing to those different audiences. And what does Adobe actually do? So when I think, if you ask people about, what does Adobe do? You probably get a lot of different responses. Some people think about Adobe in the context of PDF and others might say, oh, it's Photoshop. I know Photoshop. We actually do a lot of different things all the way through from our creative products, which really help everybody, whether you're a student, or a photographer, or a videographer, or a large enterprise create great content and tell their stories effectively.

4:50Then we have our document management tools, like I mentioned, Acrobat PDF, and that's really helping organizations with their productivity workflows and getting insights from their documents. And then we have our marketing technology, which is really helping massive organizations like Sky or like Channel 4 or the Premier League deliver those personalized experiences for their customers or their fans at scale. So it's really creative document and marketing solutions all powered by AI. And give us examples of some of those amazing brands that you've talked about there, what the work is that you've done for them.

5:29I mean, if you take a Tesco, for example um you know one of the biggest retailers obviously in you know in the world in the in certainly in the in the in the uk and you know we're for them it's really about understanding their their shoppers preferences and behaviors they've obviously got their loyalty programs how does adobe fit into that so we have you know data is really a cornerstone of any organization understanding your customer so many different platforms um online offline in store on their own website. We basically help an organization bring all of that different dispersed data together and all that siloed data together into one unified view so they get a 360 view of the customer and they can really understand the customer's preferences, their behaviors, and based on that data serve up relevant experiences off the back of that.

6:24And that That could range from a retailer like a Tesco, it could be a financial institution like a NatWest, or it could be an organization like the Premier League, who have fans, almost two billion fans spread out right across the world. The experience you deliver a fan in Brazil is going to be very different to a fan that might be going to a game in the UK. Explain what you do with the Premier League and how you help them figure this out. So it's really, you know, they've got, as I said, like two billion fans around the world. Only a tiny fraction of them will ever actually go to a game. But those fans want to, you know, engage with content.

7:06They want to be, they want to co-create like the fantasy Premier League. They get a chance to actually kind of, you know, pick their team and co-create. They really want to understand how does that customer, no matter where they are in the world, what type of communication do they want to have? Who's their favorite club? Who's their favorite player? Do they want to play fancy Premier League? Do they just want to get the latest goal flashes or goal alerts or updates about their clubs? But understanding all of that information, then based on all of that information that the customer gives them, they can then tailor the communication accordingly.

7:40so if you're receiving a weekly newsletter from the Premier League it's tailored to the type of content you want to receive rather than just kind of generic content sent to everyone and if you take the example of the Fantasy Premier League I mentioned that 12 million players of the Fantasy Premier League don't know if you play it so we gave the opportunity going into this season for players to create a personalised badge that they could attach to their team. There's even now a dedicated league for people that created the badge. And it just allows people to feel more part of the experience rather than just picking the players.

8:20They're designing the, you know, they're expressing their fandom effectively through badge creation. So we've discussed kind of supermarkets and the Premier League there, which are, I think, brands that everyone has some sort of relationship with and can relate to in one way. Financial services banking is a bit more kind of opaque in some ways. So how do Adobe help banks out? It's the same principle around orchestrating the best possible customer experience. So whether you're a customer of a bank or you're going to shop at your local online or in your local store, or you're viewing, you're watching content on Channel 4, whatever it may be, like you want to feel like you're a uh you're community being communicated with as a person of one rather than a mass communication so it's about delivering that that more personalized experience and and i think we've seen just generally in in in um the likes of like the spotify's the netflix the amazons of this world have kind of really raised the bar in terms of the expectations of from consumers that that their customers really know them and are delivering them personalized experiences you know i'm sure whether you i'm sure if you have netflix or you know you see that you get recommendations and they kind of know you better than they almost know yourself in terms of what you might want to watch next or or what you know person you want to listen or what artist you want to listen to totally no no i i get it spotify i think is unbelievable at that but how does it you know with the banks and financial services because it's it's not quite so much of a capture market right i get when you're in netflix spotify you are there to listen to music etc when it comes to financial products it's not entertainment it's not as exciting we don't look forward to it as much and there's always some sort of you know kind of interactions with banks are generally a lot more static standards and so on so how how are you working with them to understand the like i'm just trying to understand where you're kind of pulling in the data from?

10:25I mean, if you think about like online banking and, you know, the type of experience that you go through when you try and do, you want that online banking experience to be as seamless as possible. You want to be able to be, you know, super easy to log in, to access the information you want to access, you need to be served up the right, you might want to serve up the right, next best offer for that particular customer of yours. So it's really about making sure that every interaction that a customer has with your brand, whether it be through the online app or whether you walk in the bank, the physical store, a physical bank, if you do that, you want it to be a seamless, great experience with minimal friction.

11:12And what is the campaign you are proudest of working on? Favorite campaign would probably be one we had, I think a few years ago, where it was called the hidden treasures of creativity and you know for me what i loved about this campaign is that it really brought together the art and science um the the science is that we had you know like customer insight around the fact that um in this case we could see that some of our customers that used brushes in photoshop had a higher retention rate than those who didn't so you know we had that insight we then um went into the sort of the art and the creativity side and our creative heritage and we had the opportunity to partner with the Monk Museum in Oslo to recreate the physical brushes of Edward Monk and so we went into the vaults of the museum where the brushes had been hidden away we brought them out of the vaults we then used a one of our famous photoshop brush makers to turn those physical brushes into digital brushes and made them available to our customers in Photoshop.

12:22We then ran a competition whereby our customers could recreate their version of the famous painting, Edvard Monk's The Scream painting. And it was just a really successful campaign. And what I loved about it was that storytelling, combining the art and science and telling a beautiful story that also added incredible value to our customers. And what else might surprise people about your job and some of the different things that you've worked on? The nuance in terms of how you create marketing content that resonates with that audience can be very different. We know that, for example, our customers in Germany like a lot more information before they make a decision.

13:05Same as in Japan, they require a lot more information before they make a decision to purchase. so we have to really you know spend a lot more time educating a lot more faqs and detail once they make a decision you know they're extremely loyal yeah um so the importance of understanding the customer um you know deeply their insights their motivations their pain points and how they vary from market to market is is so incredibly important there's a lot of changes in media behavior and kind of community and communication preferences but actually you know i really agree with what sir john hegarty talks about which is principle practices may change but principles remain so the importance of deeply understanding your customer you know deeply understanding like who you are as a brand like what you stand for what your values are you know what your design principles are as a brand um and then deeply understanding like the pain points of the customer and serving up or building products that actually meet a pain point of your customers, like those principles have remained true forever.

14:17What are you looking for when you're recruiting young marketeers now? Those who will progress fastest aren't those that know it all. It's those who are able to learn it all. And I think people that, when I look for, when we do interviews, we speak to potential candidates like marketing is such a rich area for people to actually be able to demonstrate and show what they're able to do rather than just talk to it so you know i love people who come in and talk about a side hustle they've got going or a personal brand they've built online that's got engagement on followings there's so much that you can do in marketing and that you can actually build um rather than just talking about what you can do show it like show show me how you built engagement on TikTok or how you created an engaging newsletter using different tools.

15:09So I think, yeah, those who are able to learn and then experiment is super important. How do you think that people should be thinking about themselves as mini creators, right? Like what tools can they be using in the Adobe Suites to take advantage of it? so when i think about like creators you know i do you know firstly our mission at adobe is empowering everyone to create because you know we believe that everybody has a story to tell and you know that story could be a personal you know hobby or it could be a you know you could be a coach of a local football team and you want to talk about how the team's doing or attract more people to come and come to trials it could be you know a photography side hustle everybody has a story to tell and you know we provide tools um for every for everybody to tell that story and so that could be anything from you know adobe express which is you know a a a tool to create any any type of content really easily and quickly um create content for different social platforms create make your podcast sound fantastic um create you know character animations and uh But just really tell your story in a really professional way, all the way through to creative professionals who might be using our tools day in, day out to create amazing content.

16:34And obviously, we're building AI into those workflows so they can eliminate some of the mundane tasks and enable them to really ideate and create some incredible storytelling. But when everybody has accessibility to these tools, a bit like the badge on the fantasy premier league where will the value be created when everyone has got access to creativity and can do interesting and cool things like that where will the value come we actually sponsor we're you know camden town women's football club it's the i think it's the nearest like um uh women's football team you know to to this office so they're in the sixth or seventh sixth I think of the Women's Football League and you know we were able to we felt that by giving them the tools to really create the brand for what Camden Town Women's Football Club stood for, design their kit, design their match day programs, their newsletters.

17:32You know we wanted to really demonstrate that these type of tools can really help to level the playing field when they're competing with other you know other you know clubs and not just football clubs but any clubs that are attracting people's time and attention um and it's it's really shown the power of creativity and so i think that um we want ultimately we want to in the case of can we want to inspire more women in sport and so the more that you can you can educate these these or make these aware to these clubs, these tools are available. They're free to use and they can create great standout content.

18:09That's going to help up level the game, inspire more women in sport and up level the game. I think ultimately the spark of inspiration comes from the human. And so what some of these tools do, particularly if you think about Adobe Firefly, it eliminates the fear of the blank page. Often often people struggle um especially like people like myself like maybe marketing professionals but like you know it's that where do i start where do i start what might be the challenges in two or three years time because we can all get used to using that and i agree it's it can be amazing but what what why what might we end up losing i think that actually i i look at it in a different way i think it's just going to enable us to be more productive we're gonna be able to get more done i think you know if you think about um well certainly if you if you go back to the creative space if i when i'm talking to creative professionals whether they be freelancers or working in small agencies the biggest challenge they have is time you know they often they'll get briefs that have to be turned around in 48 hours and it's like oh just if i had just a little bit longer i could do such for even better work so the biggest challenge for them is time you know what what these tools really allow is it gives that it eliminates a lot of the mundane tasks to give them more time to think about some of those big ideas the big creative ideas that that creative professionals love to get their teeth into interesting interesting and you you politically almost as a politician swerve what have you used in your personal life have you used it for recipes so i've used it i've i've used it um to obviously to create my fantasy premier league badge so uh um you can you can check that out i'm not doing too well but um uh we have a very big elite fancy premier league adobe i think there's about 500 people in the in the fancy premier league adobe and about 150th um but yeah i've used it in fancy Premier League.

20:18I actually use it a lot for travel planning now. So I'm going to Orlando in the summer. So two weeks, 14 theme parks or 10 theme parks. I actually used it to help me plan the optimal schedule to which park to go to on which day based on crowd congestion and travel time and which rides I wanted to go on. So it was able to create an incredible schedule which I hope is accurate um based on that sorry can I just clarify you're going on holiday and you're going to visit 14 theme parks I think it's however it's like 10 12 theme parks yeah so you're going to a different theme park every day pretty much yeah oh I hope my back holds out

21:06what ah cool I grew up near olden towers so like okay I love going to theme parks and so on um I'm looking forward to experience... Yeah, well, you know, I'm looking forward to going to the Disney parks, because Disney are also a big customer of Adobe. You know, we deliver a lot of the experiences. And so, you know, experiencing the Disney app, I'll be able to give real-time feedback as to how great an experience that we're helping them deliver. So we're here in London, right in the heart of Tech City, literally on the corner of Old Street Roundabout in the White Collar Factory. How does Adobe impact the rest of the UK, though?

21:44is it just a london-centric company no obviously our headquarters you know are here in london um but you know we've got a and we've got you know hundreds of employees based out of our beautiful office here in in old street um but we've got all sorts of initiatives that are truly uk-wide initiatives so anything from you know we uh we work with a lot of the um as part of our sponsorship of the women's fa cup we work with the 570 clubs that enter the competition from which are right across the country many of them are amateur we've given them adobe express to help them create great content for their clubs and inspire more players to come along and train and promote their match days so really democratizing you know the the the content creation across all the clubs we also have our adobe digital academy which is it's actually it's a global initiative running but also running across the UK, which is really about helping address the digital skills gap that we know exists.

22:46And it's providing courses and making them accessible to people on places like LinkedIn and Coursera and YouTube to help address digital skills gap when it comes to kind of creativity and AI and digital marketing. We actually have a goal of reaching 30 million learners by the end of 2030. More recently, we're working with the government on their tech towns kind of initiative, which is picked kind of Barnsley as the first city. And we are really looking at how we, you know, provide AI, you know, skills and learning in many different hubs across the town of the city of Barnsley. And we're working with government and a number other companies to help to really you know help train people on how to use um ai tools um in in in their lives so what's the most common frustration you get when you meet a creator i'd say that the the biggest fear um is that they're kind of there is around the kind of copyright of their work.

23:55And so for Adobe, like responsible AI is at the heart of our AI strategy and really protecting the creator is foundational to everything we do from an AI perspective. And so, you know, particularly when we speak to our creative community or enterprises, the fact that our AI models are commercially safe and only trained on licensed content is incredibly important for Adobe and for our community. Honestly, I didn't realise quite how much of the modern economy Adobe quietly sits underneath. Like when you hear Adobe, you think creators. You don't think banks, supermarkets, the Premier League, government systems, theme parks, or global customer data and infrastructure.

24:47But the really controversial bit is the AI side of things. because Adobe's customers are creators. So if creators start feeling exploited by AI, Adobe has a problem, which is why we sat down with the people inside Adobe trying to solve exactly that. Hello, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Can you tell us your name and your job title? Sure. Thanks for having me. I'm Stephanie Balthus-Scott. I'm heading the policy and government relations team at Adobe for Europe, Middle East and Africa. And so what does that job entail then? Give us like a weekly breakdown of what you might be doing. Oh, I wish there was a weekly breakdown.

25:26I would say no days like the other. So it's really generally about talking to governments, engaging with governments across the region to share best practices, see how we can support them and their policy work. And then also engage on, you know, critical topics that how they can solve some of the challenges that they're facing between kind of this intersection of technology and policy. And so what's the key issue that you're lobbying on when it comes to AI? Because there's a lot of nervousness with governments and individuals around what might happen with AI. What's your position on it? Yeah, I think of it as kind of three different buckets.

26:03So one is really coming from the, let's say, AI governance side, thinking about how to deploy responsible AI, how governments can come up with frameworks that kind of foster that kind of responsible AI environment. The second is very concretely on copyright and protecting creators in the age of AI. And I would say the third one is probably about skilling and, you know, upskilling and digital skills to really make sure that people know about it, know how to use it, to make sure adoption is there. Because otherwise, you know, innovation doesn't really work if people don't feel comfortable and confident using it.

26:38So how are creators being protected, right? Because this has been a big thing in the UK. You've had some of the sort of greatest creators the UK has ever made, right, in terms of Paul McCartney and Stephen Fry coming out with the whole kind of Make It Fair campaign. Where does Adobe sell? Yeah, I think it is a fair point, and there are valid concerns, as you've just shared. I think Adobe is in a very unique position because we are an AI company and we innovate. And at the same time, we work for creators and the creative communities, right? their major customer base. So our interest is always to look at it through from both sides and really try and make it work, you know, on the AI side, but also on the creative protection side.

27:22And what we're hearing from the creative community is that a lot of concern is on, it's either around trust, you know, looking at like what kind of content is out there that you can actually trust. How do you get attribution for the content that's out there? And at the same time it's about copyright and making sure that you still have a way of making sure that what's out there is attributed to you and make sure that, for example, AI doesn't impersonate you. That's a big concern that we're hearing. And for us, it's not really either or. It's not about getting it right for AI companies or protecting creators or slowing down innovation for having and creative protection.

28:07It's really about kind of that balance and getting it right. And I think that's really where Adobe sits. And we're trying to engage with governments on that and bring in ideas how they can kind of get the best out of both worlds. But I suppose it's sort of like a Napster, Spotify comparison in some ways, isn't it? In terms of like Napster, turn of the millennium, like made lots of work, music accessible to people, but nobody was getting paid for it. And then Spotify came in a few years later and professionalized it all. So whereabouts do you sort of sit on that scale? Yeah, so I think we're in that transition at the moment, right?

28:41I feel like there's one way to look at it is like what has happened so far and how kind of were the approaches and how AI has been trained. And Adobe took a very deliberate approach there and said, we'll only train our AI, our Firefly model based on licensed content and content where copyright had expired. And at the same time, we're really advocating for additional rights that will help creators. We're not there yet, right? So we don't have a lot of that out there in frameworks, but there are a lot of good considerations in terms of how to change copyright frameworks, for example, which is a lot about the input side of things.

29:17So it's really about like what kind of works you can use for AI training or not. And we really believe that you need to empower creators to make that choice themselves, right? It should be the creator who decides what happens with their work or what doesn't. So it's really about enabling them to say, I don't want this piece that I created to be used for AI training, or I'm fine with it being used for AI training. And we're not there yet. The technical tool does exist, but we also, where the policy comes in, we really need to make sure that the policy frameworks kind of catch up with that. And then there's also, I think, a big part, and that's kind of what we're hearing from our creative communities.

29:57there's a big concern more on the output side of things, which is really about, for example, if you type in something, create something in the style of Jimmy, right? Then the AI might produce you an audio or a podcast using your voice or sounding very much like you and you wouldn't want that, right? Because that could then compete with you in the marketplace. And we truly think that that's kind of like a new right that needs to be established to protect creators in the age of AI. How can government kind of keep pace with this technology, right? because one of the things is that legislation can take 18 months, three years.

30:31I mean, the Online Safety Act, it's taken sort of eight years in the UK alone. Companies have started and scaled to sort of multi-billion pound companies within that time. So how can governments keep pace with the technological change? Yeah, I think it's really about focusing on risks and use cases, which will not be outdated, right? So if you focus more on risk than actual harm that's being created and you try to regulate that versus the technology itself, it's more future proof. Because, I mean, you've seen it, for example, in the EU with the AI Act. They've been working on that for years. And then all of a sudden, ChatGPT and others came along and policymakers realized, oh, that's new.

31:14And we kind of now need to react to those kind of new AI systems coming up. And I think that's never really a good approach, right, to just react to something that's just popped out of somewhere. And then I think it's much better, again, to focus on actual risks and use cases and then kind of let the rest of the AI and the innovation flourish. Can you give us an example of where you think governments might be able to use kind of creator tools to improve what they're doing? Yeah, I think also for governments, I think a big challenge today is being trusted, right? And also creating content where people view it and they can confirm and verify that it's actually coming from government.

31:58Yes. So I think that's something that we've also partnered with lots of governments across the region, also with the UK government, to find use cases where they could use our technology that we call content credentials, which basically enables you to add your name to a piece of content and show your viewers how you created it. Have you used AI to create it? When it was created. So really attaching kind of the basic metadata to this piece of content. And that travels with it wherever it goes online. And it shows the viewers with an easy symbol to say, oh, I can see that this is coming from Downing Street or I can see this is coming from the UK Parliament.

32:36So users actually have a tool to verify the content that they see online, because I think that's a huge challenge for governments, right, that they reestablish trust in content that they're sharing online. So what are you going to government and saying that creators are thinking? What are you seeing at the coalface? Because in a world that's moving so quick, that's a really important role as almost the union master for creators. Yeah. I spoke to a friend of mine who's a designer, and she said something I think very simple but very impactful. And she said, I love how AI helps me be more creative, but I'm really worried about losing control of my work.

33:17And I think that really sums it up nicely, right? Because it's about enabling creatives and making sure that they use AI and, you know, use the potential of it. And at the same time, I feel governments are in an important role where they can really make sure that they protect creators also from it, right, with the right frameworks. And again, looking at it through more of the lens of what can you do on the side of making sure how AI is being trained. And I mean, a lot of that kind of has already happened. Right. And again, Adobe took quite a different approach to other companies. But it's not just about what happened in the past, but it's also a really huge aspect about it is what are the decisions that we're basing our decisions on for the future and how will AI look like in the future?