I had one eye on Miami last week.

This year’s Adobe Max conference was the biggest they’d ever hosted, with major announcements, workshops and just enough AI talk to break your average designer out in a sweat. It is the event of the year for industry creatives using Adobe Creative Cloud in their day-to-day (which, to be honest, is most of us). So, what stood out, what can we look forward to, and what does this all mean for creatives and our corporate clients?

Harnessing AI is a high priority for Adobe

Unsurprisingly, AI featured in many of the talks and demonstrations, with many boasting some form of AI capability. What I was impressed by was their focus on problem solving. The new features are an example of what AI should be: a tool to support the user by cutting out cumbersome or time consuming repetitive activities which inhibit process and cause frustration. Forgot to move a wire out of the background of an event photoshoot? No need to spend an age removing it manually – one click and it’s gone.

Professional tools are taking a backseat

While these new flashy tools are being developed, some of the tools which professionals have been using for years have been neglected. The image trace feature in illustrator is crying out for an AI enhancement. This signals that Adobe may be shifting their priorities away from the creative professionals that have spent years training themselves up in the software, and instead focusing on making Adobe accessible to professionals in many more sectors.

And in that same vein… New tools are all about growth

Adobe has historically been the go-to software for the creative industries – they pretty much have the market cornered. But they are limited in that respect. The increasing investment into one-click tools and Adobe Express makes Adobe more appealing to professionals outside of the creative industries, expanding their potential customer base.

Legal concerns are being addressed

One of the biggest matters causing hesitancy with AI is the intellectual property question, but Adobe has been exploring these new tools with legalese in mind. One example of this is the modestly described “most magical new editing tool ever”, Generative Extend – the first generative AI feature available in Premiere Pro. Generative Extend lengthens a video clip by generating new frames. This has a lot of potential uses, giving video editors the ability to time cuts to music or even hold a shot longer for greater emotional impact. Whilst the first iteration of the software is likely to produce uncanny looking results, the potential for this tool is enormous. Importantly, the Adobe Firefly Video Model is not trained on user-generated content thus avoiding potential proprietary issues.

So, how will this impact the creative industries?

As businesses look for cost-cutting measures, some may opt to use Adobe themselves instead of outsourcing to professional creatives. This may save them money in the short term, but it comes at a cost. By cutting out trained designers, videographers and creative strategists out of the process, we will end up with a flood of low-quality, visually and thematically similar content across businesses, sectors and services. We will lose the human touch, and businesses will quickly lose traction with their content and fade into obscurity.

This will be followed by a revitalisation of traditional creative processes as those businesses realise they simply cannot cut through the noise by using AI. There will be a return to traditional marketing. Creative strategy will always be important, but it will become more important than ever with a focus on the nuances of a particular client or service, and more and more how to stand out.

I look forward to next year’s Conference, which will be held in Tokyo – the first time the Conference will be outside of the US. Does this signal a brand new approach? Time will tell.