The One Thing That Makes Your Content Stand Out in 2026 | Govind Balakrishnan, SVP at Adobe Express

0:01This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

0:38Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Some content gets promoted by social media, it gets admired, and some content just stinks. What's the difference? Our bar for what we are willing to consume as content is actually going up. This is Govind Balakrishnan. He runs Adobe Express, and Adobe put it straight into Microsoft Copilot. 350 million people now have his tool inside the apps they already use.

1:19I find that a number of creators are essentially just using AI to create content, but not spending the time to actually make it their own, to bring their own voice into it. The best content still takes a lot of time, even with AI. What advice would you give them as someone who's been in the industry for 20 years? I would say to start with, embrace the change that's happened. The way you create content has evolved, has changed. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl and welcome to CAN. We're here at Adobe with Govind who's running Adobe Express and does a lot of cool things at Adobe I'm really excited to talk to you about the future of creativity What designers should be thinking about when it comes to planning their career in five years?

2:04What should creators be thinking about when they're using a lot of AI tools to create content? So my first question is we all got access to these amazing tools but some content gets promoted by social media, it gets admired, and some content just stanks. What's the difference? I think if you really think about it, I mean, what's changed quite recently is that everyone now has access to tools and capabilities that helps them be creative. Like for the longest time, creativity was limited by the tools and the need to be proficient in those tools before you could actually create content. Now we are in that phase where everyone has the ability to create content, but the difference between content that succeeds and the ones that don't, it really comes down to the human element that goes into the content.

2:59So when we look at content that succeeds, we find that the creators who focus more on a distinct point of view, a clear visual identity and a voice that their users trust. The people who focus on bringing those elements into their creativity are the ones that are actually standing out. If all you're doing is creating content using AI and just putting it out there without essentially bringing your voice into it, then chances are it's not going to really stand out. It's not going to be successful. How do you learn it? So I understand telling my own story when it comes to just talking to a camera.

3:37When it comes to creating something visual, how do you learn this taste? Because what actually matters these days a lot is taste. And I don't think I have great taste. I have designers on my team. I have a stylist because it just doesn't come naturally to me. Is there a way I can learn it so that I create visual assets that blow people away? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to knowing what your voice is. What do you stand for, right? What's your unique sort of taste, as you put it? What unique sauce do you have that will make the story, the visual, the creative that you're working on stand out?

4:16Because at the end of the day, we all have our own visual identity, right? And the key and the trick is to find ways to pull that out and have that surface in the content that you're creating. So with a tool like Adobe Express, for instance, or Firefly, for that matter, we are giving you a number of controls to bring your own taste into the picture, into the conversation, right? You can either use the granular controls that we have, or on use it by filters, by controls, by fonts, by colors and all that, but we are now also surfacing the AI assistant in the tool. Oh, I saw it. It's in beta. Yeah, I clicked it yesterday.

4:58is still exactly and and what it does is it actually it was as of a couple of months back we gave you the ability to enter a prompt and have it generate content for you right it can be an image it can be a design it can be a presentation as the case maybe but we have taken it further to make it conversational and through that conversational interface you're essentially speaking with the tool with the application to get it to build or create exactly what it is that you're trying to create so that your unique taste and your unique voice comes through yeah and at some level as you asked i mean how do you know you know by actually seeing the content and feeling like you relate to it like more often than not i find that a number of creators are essentially just using ai to create content but not spending the time to actually make it their own, to bring their own voice into it, to bring their own vision into it.

5:57And that's where I feel like, through trial and error, I feel like the creators who have succeeded have figured it out, and those are the ones who break through. Would you say the best process is, before you even generate something with AI, is to talk to AI and figure out your brand kit and then move it to everything? Would you say that's the right thing to do? I think that's a great first step for all creative creators. And it's a step that is quite often forgotten, I would say, or ignored. People don't start by clearly building their brand or brand kit in a tool like Express. Once you have your brand kit, you can actually iterate through a number of designs and apply your brand kit on those designs.

6:43Like we have a one-click brand, apply brand capability in Express, where you can essentially create a bunch of variations, so to speak, of your design and apply the brand kit and see how that looks. And what I would also encourage you to do, if you're still in the midst of finding your true, your identity, so to speak, is to test the content, right? We make it incredibly easy to publish your content to various channels, publish different versions of your content to different channels and see what resonates with your audience. Because at the end of the day, your audience knows, you know, you better than or you know yourself better than anyone else, actually.

7:22Can you walk me through posting with Adobe Express? What's the process? Oh, see, so we have this calendaring option within Adobe Express. So from within Express, you can connect your social media channels, be it Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. You have the ability to connect. those channels through the app itself and you can schedule your content uh through them you have a full calendar view so if you're working by yourself you can essentially uh schedule and post your content the calendar itself can be shared with your team you said you have creatives who work with you yeah you can essentially uh collaborate through the calendar where everyone has access to the same calendar and you can post different pieces of content to different channels at different points in time, date, etc.

8:16through that interface and through that experience. And all of that is integrated deeply into the product. What do you think is going to happen to the content world in general if AI is lowering the barrier to enter and then everybody starts working on their style and sense of what's beautiful? don't you think there will be too much content in the world so that it's going to be very hard for new creators or even like established creators to get visibility get business done with the new american express graphite business cash unlimited card with unlimited two percent cash back on all eligible purchases unlimited five percent cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through american express travel online and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business, you'll have the confidence to keep building.

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9:40Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. Absolutely. I mean, this is something that I've been saying for a couple of months. with the advent of AI, what we're now seeing is that the barrier to entry, so to speak, for content creation has been lowered dramatically. So now if you're an individual who has a story to tell or has an idea to put onto a visual design, there is no excuse to not try to do it. But what it's translated to is that we as humans are now flooded with content. And I think what's happening there is that our bar as humans our bar for what we are willing to consume as content is actually going up it's rising actually social media is so smart now that's right people are so smart people are smart right i mean if you just post so ai generated content people just tune you out they don't actually look at it like basic stuff nobody cares nobody cares it's it's and the and the distinction is so stark like we keep talking about how the social media algorithms are filtering out content that's created by ai the reality is it's us humans who are filtering it out right if you don't take the time and effort to make your content stand out it will not break through it will not break through because we are dealing with a sea of sameness of content like we have flooded with content just coming at us from everywhere and i think as humans it doesn't even matter what the algorithms are doing as humans we are doing a great job of tuning out content that doesn't resonate with us.

11:17And the onus then is on the creators and the creatives to make sure that the content that they produce is unique, is distinctive, has a unique point of view, and breaks through in a meaningful way. At least breaks through with their audience, right, that they're going after. Yeah, I think, I don't know if you're seeing, like if you have any stats on this, but what I'm seeing as a creator, yes, AI tools augmented the process how I'm creating content, but I'm still spending pretty much the same amount of time when it comes to writing a beautiful text. Yes, my process is different. I'm chatting to my AI and saying, oh, I don't like this, change that.

11:53But it still takes like an hour to create a beautiful piece of content. Do you have any stats for that? Because I think the process has changed, but the best content still takes a lot of time, even with AI. I completely agree with that. I don't have a stat that supports that, so to speak. It would be interesting. It would be very interesting. But I'll say this, right? The narrative that I hear a lot of these days is that AI is eroding creativity. And what we are seeing through our tools and through the work that's being done by the users of our products is that AI is actually amplifying creativity.

12:32what it's giving you is that is the ability as you rightly said to have the time and the space to bring human judgment into your creative work and into your creative process right it's no longer you're no longer limited by your skill level with the tool like that part has been taken care of for the most part yeah right so you you get to a point i mean i it's you can say whether it's 20 percent or 80 i would say in most cases you get to 60 to 70 percent of the creative work using these tools that get you there really really fast but then now you have more time to get that last mile whether you call it 20 30 10 doesn't matter but that last mile where you introduce your unique taste voice sauce you can use different words you now have more time to do that and you now have more time to get that right and make that content really compelling yeah so that's the part that i'm really excited about like because i feel like the narrative is quite incorrect ai is not eroding creativity it's actually making it more accessible but it's also amplifying creativity in very meaningful ways so do you think with all of this we're gonna have more designers in the future or like i'm just trying to understand like when it comes to engineers, for example, right?

13:53Their process has been augmented by, I don't know, 90%, right? Because it's mostly AI, AI generated code, and then people just check it. When it comes to designers, do you think they are the next profession that's going to be augmented? And does it mean we're going to have less designers? I would position it slightly differently. I think the role that designers play in the creative process is evolving, right? As we just spoke, the speed at which you create is changing, right? So you don't need a designer to do everything by hand as much as you did even a year back. But what the designers have to do is to really figure out the strategy of how you get the content that you're creating to stand out and really meet your audience where they want to be met.

14:51And that is a pretty significant shift. So I wouldn't say that the... And this is exactly what's happening with software engineering as well. At least we haven't gotten to a point where we need fewer engineers. We are getting to a point where the work that's done by the engineers is slightly different. and the speed at which they can create or generate code or build code, build capabilities has become faster. But their role has changed. And similarly with design, you need people who come up with a strategy, strategy for what is the unique voice that I bring to the table, which channels work better, what kind of content works for which channel.

15:32When we spoke about the sea of sameness, how do I stand out in the sea of sameness? How do I not look like everyone else? What strategy can I use from a content, from a text, from a visual point of view to make it look different? So I think the role changes. I don't think the number of designers actually changes. In many ways, given the need to stand out, I would say that you probably will end up needing more designers over time. Can you give an example of a process that has to be done with AI? Like so that anyone can do like a quick check. What am I doing day to day? What should AI be handling for me?

16:12It can also do things like accessibility checking. It can make sure that your text is of the right font, the right size. All that can be done automatically. You don't have to do it manually. And I am continuing to see more and more, sorry, designers not necessarily adopt these capabilities probably because they don't know that they exist maybe we need to do a better job of surfacing them more prominently but the capabilities exist and it's a matter of just you know using them and not spend the time fine-tuning these capabilities sorry these brand elements the other one i'll quickly touch on is essentially creating variations of your content for different channels because most creators and creatives are creating are trying to meet their audience and their community through various channels and they are tweaking the content by hand to essentially optimize the content for various channels when in reality tools like Express within Express give you the ability to do that with a click of a button like for example okay you can essentially create a post for Twitter Instagram Facebook with a click of a button oh Oh, with like different resolution.

17:29Resolutions. And it will essentially reset your design and adjust your design to fit the format that you're trying to resize for. Okay, we need to take it a step further. I want to be able to upload my podcast and create a carousel, please. I think using, like connecting the formats, because it's still where a lot of work happens, I'd ideally just give it the highlights and tell like, hey, this is a podcast. This is what ideally I want it to be and just create this repurposing. I think this is what the market really, really wants. Yeah, so this is very, very much aligned with some of the work that we're doing.

18:04So as I said, I think you have a role to play in our advisory board, so that's great. But one of the areas that we are actually investing quite heavily, it's not taking a podcast to create content, but we're investing heavily in taking PDF documents in Acrobat. and taking the consumption workflow of documents in Acrobat and converting them into visual documents, like a presentation, like a flyer, like an Instagram post. That's the new Acrobat feature, the spaces, right? I really, really like it. I think it makes so much sense. Instead of sending a PDF, you can just chat with it, basically. You send a workspace that you can use for whatever.

18:50I think that thing, I really, really appreciate it as someone who works with a lot of PDFs and has to chat with them. So the use case that you brought up around taking a podcast and converting that into an Instagram carousel is another use case that's quite similar because you're taking a consumption modality, so to speak, to a creation modality, right? And that's an area, as I said, we are absolutely focused on. We're spending more time doing that right now with PDF documents and Acrobat, but we do expect to expand that to other modalities as well. That would be awesome. Hopefully, like, in the next year.

19:27It's more automated because that's a lot of management from my side when it comes to, like, distributing the podcast across different social media. I have another question. So what's happening with the way we work these days is that we basically, like, it used to be multiple windows, right? My email, my Slack. Then I have different windows open with different apps. what we're seeing now is that we select one AI that we're working with and a lot of tools are getting embedded in that AI there are connectors etc so I'm just basically in one chat window do you see this as a threat to as a threat to Adobe if Adobe is integrated in my AI and I never see the brand I'm just like calling out a tool and I'm just talking to my chat yeah at the end of the day what matters most was Marina is the ability to meet our customers where they are and they're trying to get their work done right as you said increasingly these surfaces are becoming your one-stop shop for work all the work all your work right yeah and to expect you to or to force you to essentially go to a completely different product or different experience just for your creative the creative part of your workflow when everything else is happening in these chat platforms feels uh doesn't feel sort of welcoming or doesn't feel you know creator friendly so our focus right now is to essentially meet our customers where they are uh we as i mentioned briefly we have already done this at scale with with an acrobat where we are now contextually surfacing many of the creation capabilities that you get from express with an acrobat so you could be reading a document you have an you see an image we give you the ability to edit that image uh you could take a document and create a presentation from it so you're not forced to go into express to create a presentation you're in acrobat you're creating a presentation you're in acrobat you're editing an image so we started doing that around a year back and we have built a ton of experience and expertise doing that by contextually surfacing the right experiences in that surface.

21:44And now we're taking that further by contextually surfacing design capabilities in some of these platforms, chat platforms, so that we meet you where you are. You still have the ability to go to our products and use them there. You may still need to go there to do finer grained editing and finer grained control, but we are hoping that you get a good part of the way by just using the capabilities that are accessible through those platforms. So you've been doing this for 20 years, right? You've been in the industry. And you've seen so many things happen, right? We went from computer to mobile, social media.

22:25What is the one thing that hasn't changed in the past 20 years that you think is not going to change in the next 10 years? Yeah, it's actually been quite a journey, to be very honest. I mean, as you mentioned, tools have changed, platforms have changed, the channels where people create content and publish content has changed. The speed of creating content has changed dramatically over the past couple of years in particular. But the one thing that has actually remained constant is the innate desire that humans have to say something and to create content that is truly and authentically theirs. That's the one thing that has actually never changed.

23:14In the past, you needed to be a creative professional, so to speak. right you needed to be a painter you needed to be a digital artist who's who can use a tool like photoshop and illustrator to actually be able to you know say something or create something that was truly yours now that's no longer an issue so to speak but that innate desire has actually always existed that is why companies like adobe have you know done what they have done because our mission from the very beginning uh previously we used to say it is creativity for all now around a year back we shifted it slightly to say empowering everyone to create and that mission statement is rooted in the fact that every human wants to they have something to say and wants to be able to say it in their own way, their own voice.

24:10And that's the one thing that hasn't changed. Can you give advice to people who really want to start saying something and express their creativity, but they don't know where to start because there are so many tools and everything? Can you give them like first three steps they should take? I mean, coming from Adobe and Express, I would say they should open up Adobe Express or Firefly and start with the AI assistant. We now have the AI assistant in both products to describe what you want to say and converse with the application to essentially help the application create what you want it to create.

24:54And iterate on it enough to make it feel like it's yours. Right? don't just settle don't don't take what comes up with first and say okay I'm done but take the time to really make it yours so start by start with the tool start with the AI assistant it is the simplest way to essentially describe what's in your mind's eye mm-hmm right use words to describe in your what's in your mind's eye yeah and and see what the tool does for you mm-hmm like two more steps or that's it? I would say that's the first that's the most that's the most important one and I would maybe the second or the third step is just iterate on it as much as you can.

25:37And post. I think posting is really important because a lot of people iterate, iterate, iterate and they never post because they think it's imperfect so they never get feedback. That's actually a really important point. It's post and iterate based on results. Don't iterate just based on what you think is right because more often than not what we think is right or what we think is perfect is not what's right oh yeah and you see this trend on social media now when you're trying to create imperfect content to just make sure you know everybody understands that it's in the moment like the the social media style yeah okay um three years from now how much of today's design work you think still needs a human where does the human stay tomorrow morning is knocking stock Hug your fridge now.

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27:05It will come down to the strategy and the human judgment piece that we spoke about. That is going to be where we are going to continue to need humans, especially because more and more content is going to be generated, I think we are going to have to find ways to make the content stand out. And if we don't leverage human judgment to help us do that, I think increasingly you're going to find creators who will struggle to break through. so the speed of evolution the speed of creation is only going to continue to increase and I think we just need to not lose sight of who we are what's unique about us what makes us and our content different from everyone else and how we sort of use the tools and capabilities to make the content different from everyone else.

28:15Can we wrap up with advice for people who are scared about the future? Maybe there is a designer watching or listening to this, and they're like, yeah, I already see less clients because they're opting for AI tools, and I'm scared. What to expect? What advice would you give them as someone who's been in the industry for 20 years? Yeah, I would say to start with, embrace the change that's happening. Embrace the fact that content creation, the way you create content has evolved, has changed. And then look for ways to be unique. Look for ways to show how you can build a brand and extend a brand. And that brand, more often than not, could be your own brand.

29:07and that's perfectly, not just fine, that's actually great. That's the best. That's the best, exactly. So don't settle for something that's no different from someone else. Bring your element, your human element into the creative process and make it stand out. I mean, you have to find what's different because we're all dealing with an unbelievable amount of content that's coming at us, and that is not sustainable. It's not sustainable, it's not what's going to succeed. The creators who succeed are the ones who recognize that they need to stand out in a meaningful way. Totally. And as someone who hires creative people all the time, I would say the market hasn't adopted yet because we're actively looking for people, we need people, But it's so hard to find someone who already embraced those tools.

30:05A lot of people are doing it the old way, which is great and it's still working. But let's think about what's going to happen in two years, right? You just want to execute at a faster speed. You want to be able to create different visuals for different companies within a few hours. And AI tools are going to help you with that. And eventually you'll be able to take on more clients. You're going to be able to take on more clients and still deliver content that stands out, that is differentiated, that can break through, that people want to consume. Absolutely. Govan, thank you so much. It was very inspiring, very encouraging.

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