Adobe is bringing generative AI to more of its products

Adobe (ADBE) is releasing a number of new AI features for its products.

For example, the Acrobat AI Assistant is available as an add-on feature to Acrobat for $4.99 a month. The company has also announced new generative AI tools for its Premiere Pro and exploring new partnerships with OpenAI. With so many new products and features, how are consumers expected to keep up and actually implement these features into their workflow?

Adobe Digital Media Business President David Wadhwani joins Market Domination to discuss the new slate of releases from Adobe, its impact on the company, and what consumers can expect going forward.

Wadhwani elaborates on how users of these new products have been directly interacting with Adobe's gen AI products to improve workflows: "They're generating more content and publishing more content to social as an example... We have incredible innovation that is really about generative AI and capabilities like text to video or text to document or text to image, but, more importantly, we're actually taking that capability and integrating it into your workflows that you're doing already every day. "

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.

This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video transcript

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JULIE HYMAN: Adobe making a big push in artificial intelligence. This week, the software giant releasing its AI assistant. And monthly subscriptions are going to cost $4.99 a month. It's also working on a generative AI video model for Firefly to bring new tools to Premiere Pro. And it's exploring third party partnerships, including with OpenAI. Joining us now is David Wadhwani. Adobe digital media business president. David, we just talked to you a little not too long ago and you guys have been busy obviously.

So of the various announcements you're making, what stands out to you as the most important, the most transformative when it comes to Adobe?

DAVID WADHWANI: Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me back, Julia. It's a remarkable time. I heard you talking to your previous guests as well. There's so much change happening in the market right now and the number one priority for us is AI. And staying ahead of the market, in fact helping catalyze what people do with AI. So we had a ton of innovation last year and FY23. And we're still on a tear, you going into FY24. Last, this week alone, we announced our own video model.

We announced integration into our video apps like premiere and we announced partnership work that we're doing with OpenAI around Sora with runway and with pica all on video. And really trying to streamline the entire end to end production flow. In terms of AI assistant in Acrobat, this is about enabling you to have conversations with your Acrobat documents. So you can not just read the documents. But you can consume them through conversation. And you can do that on web, on on mobile and on on desktop.

And then lastly, today, we just released the Adobe Express GA. All of this ladders up to a huge opportunity for us, which is about focusing on getting AI in the hands of billions of people. I think there's a lot of great research happening. But one of the things that's differentiated our approach is that we've been taking it, really commercializing it and getting it out to everyone.

- Yeah. David, I'm curious a little bit from your guys' perspective, how much, if at all, your product cadence cycle has changed. Are you releasing more things at a faster cadence? How do you think about that is it as a result of what you can do with these tools yourselves? Is it as a result of consumer demand and how this has maybe changed things operationally inside Adobe?

DAVID WADHWANI: Yeah. It's a really important question miles and about a year ago or so, as we saw the opportunity and the cadence of innovation that's been enabled with AI. And also the work that our teams were doing, we fundamentally changed the entire process for not just developing the products and getting it in market. But also how we actually engage the market around it. So we've been much more agile and if you look at the releases we've made frankly from the beginning of last year through today, that pace has been at a much higher rate.

So there's been a lot of operational change. We've very much embraced an agile development model and an agile marketing model. Luckily using all of the great marketing technology that we have, that we sell to the market. So it's really been a great virtuous cycle.

JULIE HYMAN: You guys also had put out a new survey on AI just asking people about trust in AI. But there was another sort of non trust related stat that stood out to me. Which is that 9% of the respondents said they used generative AI regularly today. 67% said they're interested in using it more in the next year. But I guess I'm focusing on the 9% because that seems low to me, given and granted more tools are rolling out every day. But there already are quite a number of tools out there. And they're pretty accessible as it is.

And so I wonder if it's not-- like when you say, I can have-- I can talk to my document or I can have a dialogue or when we were talking earlier about meta. I think part of maybe the reservations is what do I do with this. And I think people are struggling with how to use all of these tools that are supposed to be so helpful.

DAVID WADHWANI: Yeah. And this is really the point of differentiation that I think Adobe has been standing out with. So we've already talked about, if you look at people using generative AI in Photoshop, around half of our entire base of Photoshop users uses generative AI on a monthly basis. If you look at generative use in the app that that we just launched with express. We've been running a beta there for about a month, month and a half.

Already we're seeing half of those users using generative AI as part of the mobile application. And we've seen as part of that, that generative AI use. While it's already at half, it's continuing to rise. And we're actually seeing it have real impact. They're generating more content and they're publishing more content to social as an example. So one of the core differentiators we've done is we have incredible innovation that is really about generative AI and capabilities like text to video or text to to document or text to image.

But more importantly, we're actually taking that capability and we're integrating it into your workflows. That you're doing already every day. So we're making things more efficient while we're also looking at the longer term ways that we can disrupt the way things work in a productive way.

JULIE HYMAN: Of course, David, one of the other things that we know about these various generative AI systems is they're only as good as the training that they receive. There have been some reports that you all have been paying Adobe users for example for content in order to train these systems. Can you comment on that? Can you tell me how that's working?

DAVID WADHWANI: Yeah, this has been a huge point of differentiation in a positive point for us. From the very beginning, we said we were going to approach this differently. We have a team in the organization at Adobe called art which is about accountability, transparency and responsibility. And that organization looks at everything that we do from how we find the data that we're training on to how we actually train on that data, looking at it from a perspective of bias and safety.

And the capabilities we output. And then also looking at it from the perspective of have we been compensating our contributors appropriately. So that has been a really key part, the bulk of what we do in terms of bringing content in is through our Adobe Stock content infrastructure. That has been a very productive model. We have a great relationship with incredible set of contributors. And then beyond that, we are working with and looking at other organizations that have large amounts of content and data. And owned their IP, and that data.

And if they find it interesting and it's valuable to us. We'll certainly look at a way of a commercial terms with them to bring that in and continue to expand the capabilities of our training.

JULIE HYMAN: David, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

DAVID WADHWANI: Thank you so much for having me.