This post proposes a framework for thinking about AI and its impact on the creative industry. I work at Adobe, but these views are my own. Over the past three years, the conversation around AI in the creative community has centered almost entirely on generative AI (specifically image and video generation). For many creators, generative AI feels threatening because it appears to automate work that was once theirs alone. At the same time, many models are trained on unlicensed content, raising ethical, legal, and fairness concerns.

Adobe has been doing a lot of work over the past year and a half, integrating generative AI functionality inside their tools, with things like Generative Fill in Photoshop, Generative Remove in Lightroom and Generative Extend in Premiere Pro. However, the world of AI is much larger than just Generative AI and video/image generation. Specifically, agentic AI and more general-purpose AI with MCP (such as Claude / ChatGPT) provide a much larger opportunity to help creatives across their entire workflow.

One of the advantages of working on the community team at Adobe is I get to help solve real world problems for super creative people (inside and outside Adobe). Chatting with my team this week, we had a discussion about how big of a hassle it is managing and searching screenshots. I thought this might be a fun project to tackle over the weekend. My first thought was to just throw the image and the search at AI and have it give me the results, but that would be slow, and would not work at all if you are searching lots of screenshots.

As I expect most people in the tech industry have been doing, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about AI and its impact. As I work with the community for Adobe, I’ve specifically been thinking about how it will affect the creative industry, and its implications for Adobe and Adobe’s creative tools. Adobe makes industry leading creative tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, and I have been curious about exploring how / if these tools fit in within an AI first world.