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Adobe CEO and Chair Shantanu Narayen took to the stage at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit this morning – an event I was taken to by Qualcomm at its expense, I should add for transparency – to talk about the two companies’ partnership. There was one particular question the Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon asked that piqued my interest: how is AI changing Adobe?
“Well, you touched on this,” said Narayen. “If there’s an area that we have tremendous passion for, [it is] how do you democratise access to creativity? I like to say that everybody, whether you’re a… student or you’re the largest enterprise in the world, you want to be able to get your brand out there.”
He sees AI as being a way to not only make this easier to do but also speeds it up. “I haven’t ever met a creative person who says, ‘I would like to take an hour to do something that I can do in a second’,” he said, adding that Adobe is looking at what it can do with AI in different ways.
“The first is, we’ve invented our own models,” he explained. “It’s called the Firefly set of models. And I think what’s different about Firefly is it’s been designed to be commercially safe, and so every piece of data that we’ve used in Firefly, we know, you know, the provenance of that, and so we are able to tell our customers that you can use it while respecting intellectual property.”
The second item is using AI “with different modalities, whether it’s voice, whether it’s a different way of dealing with images, being able to do it in real-time. So across all our products, whether it’s Adobe Express, which is meant for creativity for all of us, or at the high end, the stuff that we’re doing together with Premiere Pro or with After Effects, where people want that inference, and how we can use [Qualcomm’s] NPUs to make that accelerated.”
Such as using an NPU to help render a video in real-time, he added.
“We have this broad set of customers, everybody from an individual to the largest creative production shop in the world,” said Narayen. “We just want AI to make that become faster, more intuitive, and then last but not least… how do we help them monetize their intellectual property? And creativity is their intellectual property. Every one of the folks who’s working on streaming platforms, they use our technology to be able to distribute it and make a living.”
Later in the discussion, the two men discussed the growing influence of local AI. Where the artificial intelligence is applied on a phone or computer rather than in the cloud.
“The first [example is that] all of us have so many documents on our computer, and you talked about PDF,” said Narayen. “Why can’t I create a model on the computer that has all my PDFs so that I can query with it, but I’m assured of the fact that it’s private to my device and that I can use it without fear of sending that anywhere.”
The other example was more creative. “I know what we’re working on together is to the ability to say, why can’t I create a Firefly client model that’s personalised based on my entire portfolio of work? So I can say, ‘Here’s all of my data. Create for me on the device a small model that has all of my portfolio of work with my style.’ And so when I start a next creation, I can say, ‘Show me what that might look like with my models’. That kind of power was just not available before.”
Adobe’s CEO and Chair added that this could be further extended to “a corpus of information in the entire enterprise” to create a corporate style. “And if you want to say, ‘Hey, does this serve the brand guidelines of what the enterprise wants?’ I think that integration is also going to be important.”
