Adobe enters AI fray with Firefly

By Jon Swartz

The company unveiled the artificial-intelligence technology at its user conference in Las Vegas

Adobe Inc. is plunging into generative AI with Firefly, "co-pilot" technology that leverages the company's software tools to create original content.

The digital-imagery software pioneer (ADBE) on Tuesday unveiled the technology at its user conference in Las Vegas. It comes amid an explosion of content produced by generative artificial-intelligence tools with the goal of helping companies manage and streamline their content-supply chains. And, like OpenAI's DALL-e app, Firefly will create images based on its training model from text requests.

In one example of Firefly, Adobe demonstrated how one might take a picture of a summer scene and type "change scene to winter day" to alter the image without any editing by the user.

Content demand more than doubled over the last two years and is expected to grow five times over the next two years, according to a vast majority of marketing and customer-experience leaders recently polled by Adobe.

"Generative AI is going to fuel incredible innovation," Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen said during a keynote speech Tuesday morning. "It will redefine creativity and life experience."

"Adobe is the only company with the expertise and portfolio to optimize both content process and performance," Amit Ahuja, senior vice president of Adobe Experience Cloud platform and products, told MarketWatch.

As far as the impact of new AI tools and ethical concerns, Adobe said Firefly is designed to give creators "opportunities to benefit from your skills and creativity and protect your work."

Adobe said Firefly will initially let content creators use their own words to generate images, to be followed by 3-D images, video, audio and illustrations. In September 2022, Adobe bought design tool Figma for $20 billion, and said then it would integrate features from other products into Figma.

"Adobe is approaching generative AI in a thoughtful way, incorporating both its own experience and the collective wisdom of the broader creative community to deliver something that's distinctive and valuable for all customer segments," IDC analyst Ritu Jyoti said.

Adobe's news came on the same day Nvidia Corp.'s (NVDA) developer conference kicked off with generative artificial intelligence expected to be the focus. In fact, Adobe announced separate partnerships with Nvidia and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) over generative AI development.

Separately, Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL)(GOOGL) Google announced Tuesday it is opening access to Bard, its AI chatbot.

"With data becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and spread across organizations, organizations need to simplify their data landscape no matter where their data resides," SAP Chief Technology Officer Juergen Mueller told MarketWatch. "When data is valid, accurate, complete, consistent and uniform across the entire enterprise, customers can unlock entirely new insights and knowledge."

Shares of Adobe rose 3% in trading Tuesday.

-Jon Swartz

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

03-22-23 0839ET

Copyright (c) 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.