On the Ground at Adobe MAX 2025 | Oct 28, 2025

0:00Welcome everyone to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasrucha and welcome to Los Angeles where we are shooting on the ground at Adobe Max for a very special edition of the show. We have got conversations lined up for you with executives at Adobe talking about GenStudio. We're talking about Firefly and Firefly Foundry. We've also got some folks from Omnicom coming on the show to talk about how the era of AI is affecting advertising. It is a jam-packed show. And so without further ado, let's get right on into it.

0:36I am here with Rachel Thornton, the Chief Marketing Officer of Adobe Enterprise. Thank you so much for having us, Rachel. Rachel, we appreciate it. Thank you. I'm excited to be here, Akash. So before we get into the strategy of Adobe Enterprise, just tell us about this event. I mean, why is this event so important to Adobe? This is the biggest event for the creative community. It is the preeminent event for the creative community. There are 10 ,000 people here with us today learning about all things Adobe and creativity and AI. So I want to dive into each of those topics because there's so much there.

1:09You know, you have an interesting role as chief marketing officer because you spend your time at Adobe effectively talking to a lot of other chief marketing officers. And so that gives you like this very ultimate point of view on what chief marketing officers are thinking about worldwide. So what is on the minds right now of CMOs? Tell us. I think the big areas that, you know, CMOs are talking about or wanting to dive deep on and get ahead of are disruptions in areas like SEO to LLMs. So how people are, you know, increasingly searching for information on LLMs, things like chat GPT, things like perplexity.

1:49I think the, you know, there's this amazing promise of personalization of scale. And in fact, now more than ever, it's a reality, but it means you have to have so much more content so you can really bring personalized experience to life. So CMOs thinking about how much content do they need? How do they scale that content? And then I think also as interfaces change and you get much more conversational AI, like what does that mean for their experiences and how they deliver those experiences to customers? What about CMOs getting access to the tools that they want? Because one of the things that we talk about on our show is how expensive AI is and paying for this software is expensive.

2:34And, you know, chief marketing officers, I have to imagine they're like, look, we want to spend, you know, and is there a part of it that is like, it's never been more expensive to spend on some of these tools? How does that work for them? I think it's actually, there's a lot of interest in AI. There's been obviously a lot of experimentation with AI. Like a lot of the CMOs I talk to about, I talk about, talk with, I should say, you know, they've done a lot of experiments. Now they're looking to understand how they can scale it. And I think doing that effectively, in order to make sure that the investments you're making in AI are really going to deliver the ROI you're looking for, it comes down to do you have a really strong data foundation.

3:15More and more when I talk to CMOs, they now look at their really close collaborator in the enterprise, their CIO. Like, how do they work at the CIO to understand what's the data we have on customers? How can we build a solid data foundation to make sure that all of the investments we make in AI, as we scale AI solutions, they pay off because they have and they're built on that strong data foundation. So that collaboration has really become top of mind for CMOs. And then I imagine that the CFO also gets involved in any conversation that the CMO is having with the CIO. So, okay, so you talked about SEOs, the SEO game changing into LLMs.

3:55And I'm sure there are other three-letter acronyms that we should be talking about. But talk to me about how Adobe is addressing that issue and the issues that you described. Because these are big questions that customers are facing. They absolutely are. And I think what's great about the work we're doing at Adobe is we have such great conversations with CMOs. But to your point, we're also kind of our own testbed. So we, as like my team, we're very much, we use all of our own products. We call it Adobe on Adobe. But we're always looking at when CMOs say, hey, help me navigate this SEO to LLM Optimizer conversation.

4:29We're like, great. And hearing that feedback has helped us with products. So, for example, we recently went GA with Adobe's LLM Optimizer, which is a product solely designed to help marketers make that shift, to help them understand how they can show up better when someone's searching in an LLM for their service or their product. And so Optimizer is basically, and we hear these tools time and time again, it's where you can sort of use these marketing tools to show up better in these chatbot results. Exactly. Exactly. Do you think about, you know, the startups that are playing in that space? I mean, this is a very competitive space.

5:07How do you think about competition in a feature like that, for example? I think for, you know, when you're really close to your customers and when like Adobe has an amazing customer breadth, you know, if you I'm sure if you walk around here today, you're going to see some amazing customers. If you watch the keynote that happened, it's just amazing customers that are with us. So, you know, folks like Coca-Cola, Newell Brands is here, Estee Lauder, all of these amazing companies. And so as we work with them, we're really able to understand, you know, what are they seeing? What do they want to do for their customers?

5:42How do they want to provide great customer experience? But also that rich data of, you know, we've helped build their MarTech infrastructure. So we're really in a great position to help them leverage kind of all of the investment and the understanding they have in partnership with us to help really help them show up like an LLM. And I think that is a powerful competitive advantage. So that's the competitive advantage against the startups. What about the, you know, ad tech for as dynamic a space as ad tech and advertising is? You know, we've written stories with the information about Salesforce, about Amazon, about Microsoft.

6:20I mean, big tech companies are charging full steam ahead into the space. How do you think about competition there against those big giants? What is amazing about Adobe and the reason why, you know, I love the company, I love the job, I love all the innovation, is that Adobe uniquely can bring together creativity, marketing, and AI. No one else can do that. I mean, there's just look around here and see all of the innovation that's happening in the creative space. But then that intersection with bringing that creativity to life, personalizing it and scaling it for your customers and using AI to just be able to move faster, to innovate faster.

6:57That's powerful. And there's no other company that can do that. You know, it's funny. When I have thought about Adobe, and I think a lot of other people too, you know, we don't think too much about marketing software right off the bat. We think more of the creative tools. And we're going to have conversations later today with your colleagues about GenStudio and about the foundry offerings that the company is coming to life with. But, you know, is this part of a broader shift for Adobe diving deeper into MarTech marketing software? You know, can we expect the enterprise segment of the business to really be the future of the company?

7:37I think if you look at, you know, Adobe's history in this space, it's a pretty strong history. If you think about Adobe Analytics, if you think about email, Marketo, if you think about campaign optimizer, So much of what marketers do when they look at data, when they analyze data, when they analyze what their customers are doing, and then they build campaigns around them, so much of it is built on Adobe's foundation. So I think that telling that story and being loud and proud with that story is the great opportunity. And I think the way that I think about, hey, how do we talk about creativity?

8:14You know, we do a very similar event to this in April in Las Vegas. Where is that one? So I definitely think Adobe has a strong and a rich history here. And now just how do we make sure that we're bringing it to life and we're telling that story and we're loud and proud about it. And so with that enterprise story, talk to me about how that shows up in the financial results. Because people might look at the results, they might say, OK, I sort of think of the digital experience segment as the enterprise segment. That's not growing as fast as the digital media segment, which is sort of what we think about as the consumer segment.

8:47So how does that come through in the financial results then? I think the thing that's been really exciting is when we look at our AI first product. So like when you think about GenStudio, this has been a huge growth driver, 25 % year on year growth, because it's really speaking to the needs of marketers. So I mentioned the need for content and personalization at scale. So more and more marketers are thinking about how are they building the right content supply chain to really make personalization at scale a reality for their business? And it comes down to how are they using Adobe Gen Studio? And that's the great growth we've seen.

9:20We had Vinod Khosla on the show last week. And one of the things that he mentioned was, I asked him the question, what is the hurdle right now to enterprises really embracing AI? And he made the comment that they don't have the right people on the ground to work with the tools right now. And I was struck by those comments because more and more we see companies that are sending their people into enterprises and saying, hey, look, you might not have the right talent. Take our people. And that's kind of what you're doing today with Foundry. Do you see that happen? You know, did you see enterprises sort of struggling with, hey, the software isn't enough.

10:01We don't have the right talent. Is that something you're seeing with the customers that you work with? I think that it's, for a lot of companies, looking not just at your talent, but really looking at where can you encourage as a leader, like how you encourage experimentation with AI, how are you getting people AI literate, how are you really encouraging people to learn more, to embrace it. I think a lot of the conversations that I've been having with CMOs around reskilling or upskilling, I think, would be a better term. Like for a lot of CMOs, they're looking at their teams and they're like, okay, how do we help people learn more, apply their skills, you know, take AI into their jobs and not feel like, I don't know how to use this or I don't know what to do.

10:45You know, it's interesting what Vinod said, but I still do think there's a huge opportunity for people just to get comfortable with experimentation. Themselves. Yes. Get excited about learning and get skilled and get trained on this. I think that is a huge opportunity. I want to ask you this because you're a marketer and so much of marketing is messaging. And, you know, so much has been said about AI. And yet I still think there are probably some misconceptions about how to work with AI, what AI can do. What do you think the biggest misconception is around AI right now with respect to how enterprises can or should be using it?

11:24I think it's the thinking about replacement, thinking of it as replacement rather than augmentation. And I think of it as amplification and augmentation. I think that when I watch my teams and we're working through a problem and we are thinking about, okay, how are we doing our research? How are we figuring this out? but also how are we then using it to scale our creativity or scale our campaigns? I think that's powerful. If I think about the agents that we have, for a good example, what's our site optimization agent that we use? And we use that all the time, our audience agents. How can we just be better, move faster, and kind of amplify the impact of the team?

12:04That's what I think is powerful about AI. Great. Well, Rachel, thank you for having us. We appreciate it, and we'll see more of you later on. Thank you. Thank you.

12:17All right. I am here with Varun Parmar, the GM for Adobe Gen Studio and Firefly Enterprise. Varun, it's great to have you here. Yeah, nice to be here, Akash. Yeah. So tell us about what Gen Studio actually is. Yeah. So every brand and agency has a content supply chain. That content supply chain has multiple sort of steps in the process. You start off with a creative brief, then you go into creation and production, then you go and activate that content, and then you look at the insights of what's working versus not to feed it back into the content, right? And at the heart of this is asset management.

12:46That's your digital asset management repository. So GenStudio is Adobe solution to the content supply chain for every single brand and agency. So this is a software that companies can use to basically end-to-end create a marketing campaign, an advertising campaign, whether it's creating the assets and then also distributing them to all of these social media platforms, stuff like that. Exactly, exactly. It brings the best together in terms of the marketing workflows along with the creative workflows into a single unified solution. That is now turbocharged with a lot of AI innovation. And so I want to focus on both sides of this.

13:20One is the content creation and one is kind of the content distribution for marketers. On the creation side, you guys have been announcing a lot of stuff this week and we're going to talk about that, but I'm actually very interested in the distribution side. Tell us about some of the ad integration products and services that you're launching this week. Yeah, so we have Adobe Gen Studio for Performance Marketing, where a performance marketer can self-serve themselves in terms of activation and then looking at the insights of what's working across all of these channels. So what the product or the solution allows you to do is essentially one click, take all of the content that you've produced, and then activate it omnichannel across different ad networks.

13:57And when you say activate, what does activate mean for us who aren't marketers? Exactly, exactly. Exactly. So once you have this content, you need to create like an ad unit and then you need to actually take that content, load it into whatever the platform is, be it meta, be it Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, you know, so on and so forth. So all of these are different platforms. So instead of going and uploading all of that content into the platform, you can use Adobe Gen Studio to one click, take all of the content that was produced in the solution and then, you know, publish it over to this platform.

14:25Right. So that you can then do all of the things around like how much money you want to spend on this campaign and then actually serve it to your audiences. And was this something that customers said that they wanted from you? Why create this new integration? So one of the big pain points in this activation on publishing flow is that there's this thing called tracking ID, which is essentially looking at a campaign and saying, hey, there's a set of content I'm going to use for a certain audience. So there's this really long sort of name of the campaign that's actually put together. That is the way you actually track the performance of the campaign.

14:54So usually what you have is a bunch of these marketers have these spreadsheets that they maintain. These are hundreds and hundreds of rows that they create in order to track every single variant of this asset that was produced against the campaign that you're running and the amount of money that you're spending and the audience that's there. With Adobe Gen Studio, we are fully automating this end-to-end, this entire process of creating the tracking ID. So never, ever you'll actually run into the process of where you see some of these errors in terms of either activation or reporting back. So streamlining that actually has a huge benefit for these performance marketers.

15:26And you can think about, you know, they have hundreds of campaigns running at a given time across multiple products, and there's a lot of spend associated with that. So small errors in this workflow can actually mean big impact. I want to talk a little bit about the business that Adobe is known for, which is the front half of that story, which is the content creation side of it. And we were just talking earlier, I mean, you are a boomerang to Adobe. You came back to the company after 15 years. You know, all of these AI tools that are getting created to help people generate all this content. I wonder how you think about that as a product person, building that in a way that doesn't cannibalize the business that Adobe has built its foundation on.

16:06Because a lot of people, I mean, use all these tools, Premiere, Photoshop, to edit and create stuff by hand. It's a very, it's a carefully curated process. Now we can do it all with AI. And so how do you think about that? issue from a product design perspective? Yeah. So I think there are two things I would say. One is that you have to be deeply embedded into the workflow that an organization has. So if you think about a typical marketing campaign, the number of steps that are involved in terms of looking at the creative brief. In the creative brief, it talks about the audience that you're going after.

16:40There's certain messages that are going to resonate. There's certain creatives that are going to resonate. And there's an entire orchestration of workflow that happens. So while it's really, really easy to just create an image or a video that's 15 or 30 second long, it is still very hard to actually create something that's actually going to perform, is going to give you the ROI, is going to actually resonate with your customers so that they click on that button and that's going to actually drive some conversions for you. So from Adobe's perspective, we have AI models that we've created. You're going to hear about a lot of exciting news in terms of the third party model integration and stuff.

17:15But what's really critical is that for a large brand or an agency to really realize value, all of that innovation has to be fully integrated into the workflow that these marketers and creatives have. And that's the unique sort of perspective that we bring in. You talked about some of the other models that Adobe is now moving to work with. I wonder from your perspective, we have all these different models. I wonder if maybe they're all going to converge at some point, because right now it feels like, well, this model is good for audio. This model is good for video. This model is good for this type of video, are they all going to converge in the long run, do you think?

17:50Or are we going to be in a world where we have to sort of live in this marketplace of 12, 13 different models and pick and choose? Yeah, I think one of the things that I do quite often is like, look at the history and see, is that a predictor of what's going to happen in the future? And Adobe has been a creative company for, you know, well over 40 years. And we have products, you know, that actually span all of the modalities. So what we've seen is that the persona for these products are very different. So we have Adobe Illustrator, which is a product for vector graphics. We have Adobe Photoshop, which is the best tool for imaging.

18:21We have Premiere Pro, which is for video. So our point of view is that there is no one model that's going to rule it all, that we will continue to see like models specialize in specific areas, focused on specific use cases and workflow integrations. And last question for you, going back to your point here on ROI, right? Because I love this idea that it's not enough just to create the content. and you have to be able to measure it. How good are these tools right now? I mean, can you just develop the video or does it still take as much time to edit the video, to edit the campaign, to find ways to measure the ROI?

18:55I mean, what can't the AI do right now for us? Yeah, so I think there's obviously the notion of like what does the brand stand for and any piece of content, does it actually meet the brand guidelines, right? So that's one aspect of it. I think the other aspect of it is that, in terms of looking at the performance of what's really working in that ad unit, you need to actually do some really deep analysis of what are the attributes in that image? What are the attributes in that video frame? What is it in terms of the music genre that actually works? To really understand that for that given spin and the audience that you're going after, what are the things, the attributes that actually are working?

19:32And then feed that back into the model so it understands what are these characteristics. So I would say there's still a whole lot of work that actually goes in to actually understand piece of the content, the activation channel, the performance insights, the audience characteristic that actually then needs to be fed back into the model. Great. Well, Varun, I know you've got a busy week, so we'll let you get back to it. Thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you.

19:58I am here with Hannah Elsocker, VP of Generative AI New Business Ventures. Hannah, it's great to have you here. Thanks for having me, Kash. So let's talk about Adobe Firefly. For those of us who know Firefly just as the model, it's actually much bigger than that. Tell us what Firefly is and tell us about what Firefly Foundry is, the new initiative that is being announced this week. Thank you. So Firefly began as models, as a family of models that were commercially safe because we care so much. You're here at Max with us. We care so much about the creative community. So lots of modalities, vector, audio, image, video, all tuned safely because we have license to every piece of data that goes into that model.

20:40So that's where we started. What we learned from the customers was that the models are not the end game. They're doing serious creative work in our tooling, and Firefly needed to adapt to do that as well. So we now consider Firefly also an app, a web app, and on mobile phone where you can do lots of creative tasks, whether you're doing text to video or images to video. You can really kind of take it to go all the way from the model on. You also asked me about Foundry. Foundry. The big news. The big news, Adobe Firefly Foundry, this is such an incredible addition to the enterprise suite. Actually, the origin story is that customers asked us to go there.

21:20We have customization already. The original models obviously don't know IP. We consider that a feature, not a bug. Then we introduced custom models last year, which is a self-serve, lighter tuning, single concept model. And now the customer said, that's not enough. We need world building. I need you to understand all my brand, all my guidelines, my characters, my mascots, creative styles. And that really requires deep tuning. And so Adobe Firefly Foundry is a deep tuning service. Along with it, we surgically reopen our base models. Basically to customize these models. To customize, exactly. To whatever the customer wants.

21:57They're commercially safe to start with. Then we take the customer's IP. We run the GPUs with really smart PhDs working on it, re-weighting and overfitting. And then we close it up and that becomes a private model to the enterprise. So that's really an entire world that is understood that's concerning your brand. So this is Adobe sending in these forward deployed engineers we've heard so much about in the land of AI. This is Adobe sending in their team to say, hey, we've heard you need help. take our people, we'll teach you how to use AI on the ground and actually make use of all the products that we're giving you.

22:34Yeah, the way I would think about it is these are forward deployed PhDs, right? These are not just full stack engineers. We have a whole team. Our purpose is around creativity and marketing. And so we also have workflow experts, creativity, workflow experts. And that's what the customers really appreciate. Models unto themselves are helpful, but if they're not in a workflow where I'm doing serious work, it's still friction-full. So our job is to make that friction less. So that added service where Adobe is sending in this team of PhDs, like you said, is the customer fronting the cost or is Adobe fronting the cost for that?

23:10We consider these very much a partnership with the customer. And it is a different model. So you're probably used to our seats-based model. Here, it's really use case-based. So we go in, we try to discover what are the customer's biggest problems that might involve complex media. We think about the use cases and then we band around that to deliver that service to them. So it's really a joint partnership that works with them. Of course, it's their IP that they're bringing to us and that we're tagging as well. So we work together on that. And is the idea that eventually the customer might not need people from Adobe to help them run these tools?