Inside Adobe MAX 2025: How agentic AI is redefining the future of creativity and marketing

When Adobe MAX returned to Los Angeles this October, it wasn’t just another product showcase. It was the tech company’s statement on where creativity and marketing are heading. The three-day festival at the LA Convention Center drew several designers, filmmakers, illustrators, and marketers eager to understand how Adobe plans to move from assistive to agentic AI. And the company played to the gallery, showing how this system can reason, plan and collaborate, not just execute.

Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI platform, dominated conversations across sessions and hallways. From AI-assisted editing in Premiere Pro to intelligent automation in Photoshop, the focus was clear: enabling creativity at scale without compromising originality. With the introduction of Firefly Boards — a shared space for visual brainstorming — Adobe wanted to position AI not as a shortcut, but as a true partner in the creative process.

Talking about Firefly Creative Production for Enterprise and an upcoming system called Project Graph, in a Linkedin post, Brian Brown, SVP and creative director at Razorfish, said, “Workflow design is the next language of creativity. This is the first time a major creative software company has fully embraced this approach and targeted it at the creative community… The baseline skill set for digital creatives is about to change. Those who can design automated, modular workflows will soon outpace those who can’t.”

Generative to agentic: The next phase of creative AI

The shift from automation to autonomy defined the tone of Adobe MAX 2025. For marketers and creative agencies, this distinction could be transformational. Generative AI can execute a brief; agentic AI can interpret it. It acts as a reasoning layer, by understanding intent, checking compliance and coordinating execution. At the same time, it keeps humans in control.

“At Adobe, we’re embedding agentic AI into Creative Cloud so marketers and creative teams can move faster without sacrificing control or brand integrity,” Anindita Veluri, director of marketing at Adobe India, told Campaign. “It’s about enabling human-led, AI-assisted workflows that manage complexity and free up more time for imagination.”

That philosophy is visible across Adobe’s flagship tools. The latest updates to Premiere Pro and After Effects automate clip searches, colour adjustments and shot extensions, allowing editors to focus on storytelling. Photoshop now features a redesigned Actions panel that connects to generative functions, enabling smooth transitions from manual edits to AI-driven refinements.

But agentic AI’s real promise lies in orchestrating end-to-end workflows. “What earlier needed multiple teams and rounds of review can now be completed in one flow,” Veluri explained. “The agentic layer checks for compliance, formats and brand rules — without losing creative intent.”

Building a shared AI ecosystem

Another major announcement at MAX was Adobe’s expanded partnership with Google Cloud, combining the company’s creative suite with the latter’s large language and vision models. Now, Google’s Gemini, Veo and Imagen will be embedded directly into Firefly, Photoshop, Adobe Express and Premiere Pro.

For enterprises, the collaboration promises a new level of personalisation and data security. Through Firefly Foundry, brands can train custom Firefly models using their proprietary data, hosted on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. The result: brand-specific content generation without data exposure — a critical factor in sensitive sectors like BFSI and healthcare.

Shantanu Narayen, chair and chief executive officer, Adobe, noted, “Our partnership with Google Cloud brings together Adobe’s creative DNA and Google’s AI models to empower creators and brands to push the boundaries of what’s possible—from Adobe Firefly and Creative Cloud to Adobe Firefly Foundry.”

Shantanu Narayen, chair and chief executive officer, Adobe.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described the partnership as a way to democratise creativity while safeguarding it. “By integrating Google’s models into Adobe’s ecosystem, we’re giving creators and brands tools to dramatically speed up content creation while maintaining trust,” Kurian said.

The collaboration extends to Adobe GenStudio, the enterprise platform designed to manage content supply chains with AI. GenStudio connects seamlessly with marketing ecosystems like Amazon Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok and Google Marketing Platform, aligning creation, activation and optimisation within a single intelligent pipeline.

Trust: The new competitive advantage

As AI adoption accelerates, trust has become the most valuable currency. Veluri emphasised that transparency is central to Adobe’s AI strategy. “Adobe Firefly is trained on high-quality, licensed content so brands can trust what they produce,” she said. “Accountability and transparency aren’t afterthoughts; they’re built into the system.”

This is embodied in Content Credentials, a digital ‘nutrition label’ for AI-generated assets. It details when and how a piece of content was created and whether AI was involved. Supported by over 5,000 members of the ‘Content Authenticity Initiative’, these credentials provide verifiable authenticity, which is a critical safeguard for regulated sectors.

“For Indian brands, this means adopting GenAI confidently. It means scaling creativity while protecting data, ethics and values,” Veluri said.

While explaining about the expansion of trust signals for content creators on LinkedIn with Adobe Content Authenticity, Oscar Rodriguez, Linkedin’s vice president-product noted that for creators and creative professionals, ensuring proper attribution and authenticity of their work is essential. This is the reason he felt that the professional networking platform is displaying Content Credentials on its feed and working with Adobe to show verified names associated with those credentials directly on the platform.

“Through the free Adobe Content Authenticity app, creators and creative professionals can attach Content Credentials to their work and use the ‘Verified on LinkedIn’ feature to add their name to their work. Starting with images, this integration provides verifiable attribution and promotes authenticity across the platform,” he said in what else but a LinkedIn post.

The creative efficiency dividend

Agentic AI is no longer experimental. Agencies in India like Schbang have already integrated Adobe Firefly into their workflows, achieving close to 20%-time savings and three times faster campaign versioning, without reportedly compromising design quality.

Globally, adoption is even broader. Adobe claimed that nearly 90% of its top 50 enterprise clients and 99% of Fortune 100 companies have adopted its AI-first tools, such as GenStudio for Performance Marketing and Firefly Services. Brands including The Coca-Cola Company, Estée Lauder, IBM, Henkel, Publicis Groupe and PepsiCo are leveraging them to streamline campaign lifecycles and maintain creative consistency across regions.

Adobe’s latest innovation, Firefly Design Intelligence, builds on its collaboration with Coca-Cola. The tool uses StyleIDs, which are codified visual systems that capture brand guidelines, to generate layouts, copy and compositions aligned with established design standards. As Veluri put it, “We’re moving beyond static brand manuals to dynamic, intelligent identity systems.”

From assistant to collaborator

Within Creative Cloud, AI has evolved from a passive assistant to an active collaborator. Adobe Express now features an AI assistant that automatically applies brand assets, suggests layouts and flags compliance issues. “It acts like a smart teammate — you spend less time fixing and more time creating,” Veluri noted.

This marks Adobe’s shift towards reasoning-driven AI. “We’re moving beyond prompt-based creation toward systems embedded in campaign workflows,” she added. “The next phase is AI that understands intent, not just input.”

A glimpse of that future is visible in GenStudio’s Content Production Agent, now in beta. It interprets briefs, generates multi-channel assets and aligns them with campaign goals and brand tone, all under human supervision. The groundwork of ideation, alignment and optimisation is automated, leaving humans to refine and approve.

For marketers, agentic AI brings undeniable efficiencies but also new tensions. Campaigns can now be executed faster than approval cycles. Yet, Veluri cautioned against prioritising speed over strategy. “To scale responsibly, agencies must blend technology with human judgment. Speed shouldn’t come at the cost of brand integrity or creative depth.”

That sentiment resonates across the marketing world. CMOs are no longer debating if they should use AI, but how to use it responsibly. The challenge lies in balancing agility with originality—ensuring that automation doesn’t dilute creativity’s emotional core.

“Creativity today lives at the intersection of emotion and algorithm,” said Rhea Mukundan, CMO of A.Reon. “AI isn’t competition; it’s amplification. While these tech tools evolve, human intent still drives meaning. The best campaigns start as imperfect sketches that gain strength through collaboration. When technology and imagination work in sync, creativity scales—not as noise, but as cultural momentum.”

Beyond automation: Toward creative reasoning

Looking ahead, Adobe envisions AI evolving from a task-based assistant to a fully agentic collaborator capable of reasoning, planning and co-creating with users.

“Future versions of our tools could interpret briefs, map dependencies, and coordinate execution across teams,” Veluri said. “The aim isn’t to replace human oversight but to amplify it, by allowing creators to focus on storytelling while AI handles logistics and consistency.”

That vision aligns with broader industry realities. As marketing becomes increasingly multi-channel and data-driven, the real differentiator will be the ability to bridge creativity with operational efficiency. Agentic AI could become that connective tissue, emerging as the silent strategist working behind every successful campaign.

If Adobe MAX 2025 proved anything, it’s that the creative process is no longer linear. It’s an evolving dialogue between humans and machines, between intuition and automation. Tools like Firefly and GenStudio aren’t emerging as replacements, but as scaffolding that helps creativity scale with accountability.

Yet, Veluri acknowledged the boundaries that AI can’t yet cross: cultural nuance, ethical reasoning and emotional intelligence. “These remain deeply human strengths,” she said. “AI can streamline workflows and interpret intent, but it can’t replicate the instinct that makes a campaign truly resonate.”

For agencies and brands, the task now is to master that hybrid model — one where creative strategy and intelligent systems work hand in hand. The future of marketing excellence, it seems, will not be defined by faster tools but by smarter partnerships. In this new era, creativity isn’t being replaced. It’s being redefined.