From Adobe Max 2025 in Los Angeles, Corey and Grant sit down with Ely Greenfield, Adobe's Chief Technology Officer, to explore the philosophy behind Adobe's practical AI strategy. Discover why the crowd went wild over AI renaming layers, how Adobe thinks about "additive not subtractive" AI, and where creative tools are heading next. Ely shares Adobe's vision for making AI a creative partner that enhances rather than replaces human artistry, and explains why the best AI features are often the most boring ones.Topics covered include: the Photoshop AI Assistant, Harmonize for instant compositing, auto-masking in Premiere Pro, the Express conversational workflow, and Adobe's unique approach to balancing automation with creative control.Read our Adobe Max coverage:• Adobe Reinvents Creative Suite with AI• Day 2 Keynote Recap• NVIDIA's Beyond-GPUs StrategyThis episode was made possible by our sponsor, Clutch: https://clutch.co/resources/how-smbs-see-ai-crawlers?source=theneuron&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=newsletter_10-14-2025Related resources:• Adobe Max 2025 announcements: https://www.theneuron.ai/explainer-articles/adobe-goes-all-in-on-ai-max-2025-unleashes-creative-ai-arsenal-across-every-tool• Day 2 Keynote and Sneaks recap: https://www.theneuron.ai/explainer-articles/adobe-max-day-2-the-storyteller-is-still-king-but-ai-is-their-new-superpower• Check out Adobe Firefly: https://firefly.adobe.com/• Project Graph demo: https://www.youtube.com/live/wQza2t9Qs64?t=10409sMake sure to check out Clutch's new report on AI crawling for SMBS! https://clutch.co/resources/how-smbs-see-ai-crawlers?source=theneuron&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=newsletter_10-14-2025Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter for daily AI news: https://theneuron.aiOriginal article: https://www.theneuron.ai/explainer-articles/adobe-goes-all-in-on-ai-max-2025-unleashes-creative-ai-arsenal-across-every-tool
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to The Neuron. I'm Corey Knowles, joined as always by our trusty writer, Grant Harvey. Hello. We're coming to you today from Adobe MAX 2025 in beautiful downtown Los Angeles, and we have an extra special guest. We're joined today by Eli Greenfield.
He is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior VP of Adobe Creative Products, which puts him on top of the entire creative suite. And we're here to talk today about some of the great things they've had going and announced this week. Eli, welcome to The Neuron.
Thank you. Very excited to be here as a longtime subscriber. Excited to be here talking to you guys.
That's awesome. Well, you know, I noticed, I guess to start off, there was a real push, it seems like this week, toward practical AI and this idea that of maybe consolidation and interconnectedness a little bit between various tools, specifically with Firefly. How are you thinking of this kind of reimagination from a technological standpoint?
Yeah, it's funny. I think you're right that, you know, with what we showed on stage and what we announced this week, it really, you see that connection of all this coming together practically. For us, it's not a new push. I mean, it really is, you know, since we really turned our investments towards focusing on this new wave of Gen AI technology,
It has always for us been about, for our customers, for the creative industry, how do we take these amazing tech demos that everybody was seeing and make it actually something practical that they can use in their hands. The ability to type a prompt and generate an image or a video and have it appear out of thin air is amazing.
But for our customers, what they need to figure out is how do they put that in their workflow and how do they make sure they bring their creativity and their craft and their expertise to that and it becomes another tool in the tool chest. So that's what our investment has been all along.
But yeah, I think you're right that with what we showed and announced in the past few days, it really is turning a corner where the independent investments that we've made in AI are starting to work their way up into the rest of the platform and the tools and really starting to show up in workflows and use cases that make our customers go, I see how I can put that to work.
One of my favorite things yesterday was everybody was so excited about all the announcements, but the one that everyone just lost it over was when they talked into a chat agent and said, rename these labels for me, these layers for me.
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Chapter 2: How is Adobe integrating practical AI into its creative tools?
Yeah. And just no hours of rotoscoping. It's already in there.
Yeah, you know, it's funny if you look at the history of development in all of our flagship tools, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, all of them, you know, we have this well understood core set of tasks to be done for these people and for our customers and things like being able to accurately select something or being able to composite two pieces of an image.
Photoshop is a compositing tool. So how do you bring two things together and make them feel like they belong together? Right. They're new wizard-like technology we're constantly innovating on, but that idea of correctly select and mask an object, that's been a core problem statement for our customers for decades, right? Harmonizing two things, that is a core problem statement. And in many ways,
Again, the research and the technology we put out is always how do we improve that practice and reduce the time, make it more productive. Gen AI, I kind of like to talk about it as for 35 years now, the first version of Photoshop sort of invented digital technology. are digital images and it was black and white.
But other than that, you know, like any image you can make in Photoshop today, you can make back then with a pencil, right? Assuming it's black and white. But back then it was literally, you know, flipping individual bits on.
And everything we've done since then is how do we take creative productivity enhancing technology to sort of elevate that conversation so that the human can, you know, again, invest in their creative work, think about what they want to do, bring their expertise to the table. But the production aspect of it, It's more and more of asking this assistant to realize their vision.
And this is kind of another step in that. So all those examples you gave, I mean, I think the latest ways of AI give us more opportunities to improve that and again, help people save more time doing that. But yes, in some ways, the problem statements are not new.
That's also true with the agentic workflows that you've basically integrated into express and Photoshop. Like the express demo was really impressive where basically you're chatting with the assistant, having the assistant do a lot of the editing for you. And then you can take over at any time and say like, Hey, I actually know I can do this faster than you, or that's not exactly what I want.
So let me just get in there, tweak it. And it's, you know, down to the layer level. Yeah. It was very impressive to the point where you can even generate custom UI elements, right? Like, yeah, that's really cool too. How do you do that? Magic, black magic.
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Chapter 3: What exciting AI features were announced at Adobe MAX 2025?
So the generative upscaling that's available with Topaz Labs now in Photoshop. That's so cool.
That is one of those things that a lot of people are using it already, so having it in there, it's just solving the problem that they have.
I keep joking that that is like, you know, I've been watching police procedurals for many, many years where they're like, enhance that image, and they zoom in, and they zoom in, and they zoom in, and you've got this thing that... Suddenly it's very clear and I'm like this is not how images work.
Yeah, that is not real at all, but it is now exactly No, although you know everybody whatever your domain or your industry is as soon as somebody puts it on TV You get immediately frustrated because they're like that's not real and those of us who've worked in technology and media Have been seeing those things for decades be like Oh, God.
And then all of a sudden, somebody's like, no, you're wrong. Actually, it's totally doable. And you're like, oh, my God.
That was my first reaction yesterday. You know, something else I think you guys called out really well and that you're doing that really sets Adobe apart and, in my opinion, shows that you understand your place in the design and artistic industries as a whole is is you promised three things yesterday. You promised to continue to develop your own models.
You promised to continue to explore good opportunities for partner models to have available in the tool. And you also promised the ability to do your own models and to train your own tools. And I'd love... to learn a little more about the thought process that went into that, because that feels like the right approach.
Yeah. So, I mean, that's been a journey we've been on. You know, I'll say when we first, again, rolling back to when we first started thinking about how do we bring generative AI in here, we looked at the models that were out in the world. We looked at other providers and we talked to our customers. And what we heard at first was,
basically none of our customers thought, you know, any of the stuff that was out there was something that they could use. And number one reason is for the reason that we've been talking about is control is okay. It doesn't, it's just not something that we can integrate into workflow as well.
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Chapter 4: How does Adobe's AI philosophy balance creativity and automation?
and it's wonderful to go down there and walk through that. And you'll see they, you know, each one of them will have a style and then a bunch of posters or artwork that they've created that follows that style. And then they've got to, they have three or four different looks they've developed and then explored what they can do with it.
And so that's exactly, you know, you could create a couple of those and then, you know, sort of take the investment you've made in coming up with this beautiful design design or style and run with it.
Are you now competing with OpenAI for GPUs to train all these? Where's the training happening?
We do our training. We have some of our own private cloud, but mostly we work on cloud providers. We're partners with GCP, AWS, Azure, you know, a bunch of the big cloud providers.
All of the biggies.
Yeah, we've been working with all those guys for a while. So, you know, GPUs are always scarce. But we also, you know, very good partners with those guys. So they're often, you know, good and responsive to us. When we need them, we figure out how to get them. But, you know, the good news is that a lot of these creative models, they are still on a smaller scale than the large LLMs.
Like the big Frontier models that are out on the front?
The Frontier LLM models. The word Frontier can be applied to the image generation models as well, but usually when we talk about these big language models, the ones that really do all the reasoning, those are typically, at least the Frontier ones, are an order of magnitude larger right now than a lot of the media models.
There's still a lot of training involved, there's still a lot of GPUs involved, and those are still hard to come by, but it's not quite at the scale that some of the guys who are building those big language models are looking for.
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Chapter 5: What role does Firefly play in Adobe's AI strategy?
And what are you most excited about that you're like, you know, you now so many features yesterday and over the past two days, like what are you personally most excited about? And then where do you see Firefly going like from this point on?
Yeah, so I'd say there's two things there, and it really gets back to the first question you asked, which is Firefly is now starting to turn that corner. It started back when we first built it as, like many other Gen AI offers out there, it was a playground, right? We built this technology, we put it out there for people to play with. You type in a prompt, get an image. That was great.
Where we've been going is that explosion out from that single piece to now a collection of useful pieces of the creative process, again, whether it's our models or other people's, that then starts to surface up into an integrated platform and into those tools. And so that idea of
I think generative AI, as it becomes an additive, non-subtractive, and atomized piece of the creative process that can be used in lots of ways, it is really evolving to become this platform of new things that is going to grow into, I think, a dramatic reshaping of the creative process for creative people.
As they and we together figure out what does that new creative process look like, that still is about executing on the creative person's vision. And so that investment in the platform and really kind of creating the infrastructure that these new creative workflows build out of, that's, I think, the really exciting sprint that is ahead of us. And out of that will grow new tools.
So that idea that anybody can come here and get access to the zero friction new tools that we're building,
And that is sitting on this underpinning of a platform that can really power the power users who want to move up to our creative cloud tools or move to build their own workflows and really figure out how do they create really unique content and unique styles by recombining these pieces with the sort of Lego building block underneath there. That's incredibly empowering.
We've seen it with the early adopters who are putting up with the pain to do this. But if we can get that into the hands of a much broader set of people, I think we'll get to this point where it's not so much, oh my God, this stuff is just going to replace me, but I can do so much more with this. So that's what I'm really excited about.
And again, I think we've built the infrastructure to really start to deliver on that going forward. Awesome.
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