Adobe Summit 2025: Creativity for all as Shantanu Narayen hails ‘Golden Age’ of design

While the Adobe Summit 2025 wrapped up in Las Vegas last Friday, the standout moment came on Day 1 when CEO Shantanu Narayen framed the maturation of AI as the dawn of a "golden age of design." This isn't just about flashy tech; it's about democratising creativity. AI, Narayen argued, is the spark that empowers everyone from corporate marketers, to line-of-business teams, students, and even hobbyists, to craft compelling content, curate standout brand experiences, and unleash imagination at scale.

"We're expanding the creative aperture," Narayen proclaimed during his keynote, emphasising Adobe's mission to turn any flicker of inspiration into multimedia magic. It's a vision where brands elevate their look, forge deeper customer connections, and make creativity accessible beyond the pros.

In the words of Katrina Troughton, Adobe ANZ Managing Director, "The goal is to empower our customers to focus on what matters most. Creating engaging, authentic content that resonates with their audience, while our technology handles the complex logistics of content management and distribution."

This ethos of "creativity as the new productivity" pulsed through the Summit. Tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Express, are now charged with Firefly generative AI, accelerating digital asset creation while ditching repetitive grunt work.

The freshly launched Photoshop Mobile (February 2025, iPhone-only for now, with Android on the horizon) puts this power in your pocket, letting creators strike while inspiration's hot. Firefly itself transforms text prompts into images, vectors, and videos using a "commercially safe" model—trained on licensed and public assets, customizable with corporate data, and boosted by third-party Creative Plans. It's a creative powerhouse for the masses.

But Adobe's ambition goes beyond tools and extends to solving real-world challenges. Troughton noted "When we talk to customers about content supply chain, virtually everyone acknowledges they have challenges, and those challenges can be quite different. Some struggle at the front end of creation, others at the publishing stage, and some with content reuse."

Adobe's response? A flexible framework. "We need to start with an overall solution but then drill down to what's specifically relevant for each customer," Troughton added. "It's about building a roadmap that addresses their unique pain points."

That roadmap shines in Adobe's portfolio. Acrobat's AI Assistant turns static PDFs into interactive hubs, spitting out visuals and pairing seamlessly with Adobe Express for user-friendly design. 

Meanwhile, the Adobe Experience Platform ties creativity to marketing muscle, offering real-time insights to tweak campaigns on the fly. "Our customers want to create emotional connections, delight customers, and drive greater loyalty," Narayen said. Troughton echoes this: "Our portfolio is designed to help customers simplify and streamline their content processes. We're not just selling products; we're providing solutions that transform how businesses approach their content strategy."

The Summit unveiled a slew of enhancements to make this vision concrete:

• Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator: A new platform to build and manage AI agents across Adobe and third-party ecosystems, leveraging enterprise data and customer journeys for smarter interactions.
• Adobe Brand Concierge: An AI-driven agent delivering personalized, multimodal customer experiences rooted in first-party data.
• Adobe GenStudio Enhancements: An end-to-end content supply chain solution integrating planning, creation, and measurement across Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud. Troughton highlights its impact: "With tools like Workfront providing the backbone for managing workflows, and our AI-powered solutions like Gen Studio for performance marketing, we're enabling marketers to work at a pace and level of personalization that wasn't possible before."
• Firefly Services and Custom Models: Tools to scale personalized, on-brand content while slashing manual tasks.
• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites Optimizer: Automates website fixes to boost performance and user experience.
• Journey Optimizer Experimentation Accelerator: Scales experimentation across digital channels with AI-driven insights.
• B2B-Specific Offerings: New features in Journey Optimizer B2B Edition and Customer Journey Analytics target enterprise B2B teams with data-driven journey orchestration.

Narayen's big play is personalised conversations at global scale: "Right content, right customer, right time." Firefly's transparent, trustworthy AI, paired with "agentic AI" (autonomous bots enhancing daily workflows), forms Adobe's backbone. It's assistive, not replacive, amplifying human productivity from ideation to execution.

As Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey noted in his keynote, creatives must now elevate their game to stand out in an increasingly crowded digital landscape.

This isn't an elitist vision—Narayen's lens is wide. "Creativity for all," he insisted, spanning SMEs, digital agencies, and high-velocity marketing teams. Day 1 demos—Firefly's voice capabilities, Express's slick workflows—left attendees buzzing.

Whispers of deeper AI integrations hint at more to come. For now, Narayen's sold: this golden age is here, and Adobe's handing out the keys.