“AbracAdobe”: The jaw-dropping Adobe MAX keynote bringing magic to our creations

11 October 2023

As Adobe opened this year’s High Mass Adobe MAX 2023 with a 2 hours keynote, we discovered a Creative Cloud boosted on steroïds, packed with new features that will revolutionize the way content creation is done. Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems who opened the keynote rightfully said that “creativity fuels the digital economy” and got us hooked announcing that Adobe was “reshaping the landscape for all artistic endeavours […] with accountability, responsibility and transparency” making Adobe products “more powerful, creative and fun”. He also affirmed that [Adobe’s]mission is to change the world through personalised digital experience”. Let us be warned for what was about to come.

 Second speaker David Wadhwani, President of Digital Business for Adobe, acknowledged that this was “the biggest set of announcements ever” as a lot of things are changing in the creative world, notably due to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a game-changer in the process of content creation. He also announced that it was only the beginning and encouraged to “keep on pushing the boundaries”. Adobe speakers share the idea that AI will never replace human creation but, as David Wadhwani said “AI makes us more creative [and] more productive in content creation”. According to Adobe, not less than 3 billion images have been generated since the launch of Firefly in March 2023, proving interest among the creative community. From Firefly Vector Model, allowing an AI-generated image to be fully vectorized and customisable to Adobe Gen Studio with simplified creation tools for beginners, this year’s edition of Adobe MAX promises a feast of creation and massive cuts in tedious jobs, whether it is with images, as Anna McNaught, Artist & Senior Design Evangelist at Adobe, demonstrated with an AI-generated image that she resized, amongst other things, with the help of AI, generating extra content based on the current image. The result, done in a few minutes and a couple of clicks, is amazing. Same revolution on Premier Pro with Dacia Saenz, Senior Software Quality Engineer at Adobe, who showed us how to use text-based editing within a few clicks, saving long hours of content searching in Premier Pro. Danielle Morimoto, Senior Manager for Generative AI with the Machine Intelligence and New Technologies team at Adobe, also blew our minds with her demo in Illustrator, featuring a font identifier, an amazing convert-to-editable-text option together with generative recolour also re-editable. We also discovered “generative match to your work” by Kelly Hurlburt who started the “AbracAdobe” mantra as she was clicking and stunning us with amazing AI-generated creations. Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Chief Product Officer for Creative Cloud used the word combination “Agile Marketing” as an activity of content creation “on the stopwatch […] fun and [made in an] easier way” as opposed to what he called “Macro marketing” referring to big campaigns starting with a brief and demanding approval from other stakeholders. He praised the Adobe Gen Studio, launched one month ago, as a powerful tool to achieve Agile Marketing. He concluded by saying that whoever mastered Agile Marketing would dominate their industry” as this is the future of creative content for which demand will go up. David Wadhwani concluded that “it’s going to keep getting better” with more innovations to come regarding AI-generated work with video, audio and 3D model which we can’t wait to discover. The keynote ended with Tones&I’s providential tune “I Made It”, a well-chosen music illustration for this incredible keynote opening a new era of Design, creative content creation, digital marketing and AI support for the Adobe community of users.

The image illustrating this article has been generated by Adobe Firefly using the prompt “Adobe MAX keynote with a big screen on stage displaying various designs”