M+E Daily

The past year has been a “transformational” one in which we’ve seen advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) and several other areas, including new devices for immersive media such as the Apple Vision Pro, according to Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe.

“At the end of the day, AI will empower all businesses to rethink the customer engagement platforms that have vexed us for decades and to tackle them in more efficient ways,” he said March 25, during the opening keynote of the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.

Adobe also used its annual conference to tout its latest advancements in AI.

“Our approach to generative AI is built on more than a decade of experience integrating AI into our products,” Narayen told attendees and those viewing remotely. “To us, it’s about innovating across this framework of data, models and applications.”

Meanwhile, we have seen “incredible advances” in computing since the last Adobe Summit, he said. Those advances are “enabling users to accomplish things that we could only imagine,” he said.  That is especially true when “you think about what NVIDIA has done with … generative AI microservices that enable businesses to create and deploy custom applications.”

Meanwhile, it is clear that the “entire imagination of the community was captured by what’s happened with predictive AI,” the ChatGPT chatbot developed by OpenAI and the “entire era of regenerative as well as no code AI,” he said.

“As we started our own generative AI work, it was clear that understanding the state of the art of other large language models, or LLMs, was really important in how we built our own,” he told viewers.

The result of that, he said, was Adobe Firefly, the company’s “family of creative generative AI models, trained purely on licensed and public domain content, so that we can offer customers a commercially safe solution that doesn’t infringe on any third-party intellectual property rights.”

Adobe has been “really pleased with how the market has responded “to Adobe Firefly, he noted. “When we think about the magic and value of AI, we know that it actually comes only from the seamless integration Into the workflows that all of you as customers already know and love.”

The company also launched a beta of AI Assistant for Acrobat and Reader, which he pointed out, “combines the power of generative AI with our unique understanding of the PDF format so that we can transform the way people interact with as well as extract additional value from their most important documents.”

“Today, AI Assistant can instantly generate a summary, provide you insights from long documents, answer questions as you have a conversational interface with PDF and provide an on-ramp for generating things like emails, reports, as well as presentations,” he added.

Adobe is also “thrilled to be partnering with other generative AI partners, including IBM, Google, NVIDIA, OpenAI, as well as Microsoft,” he went on to say.

“While the world’s been captivated over the last year by generative AI, the reality is that every disruptive technology and every era of technology, from the PC, web and mobile,” has been impacted by cloud computing, which he said, “builds on the platforms of the past.”

He added: “When you think about the deep learning AI systems, they’re taking advantage of this exponential growth in computing to provide even more insight and to run on cloud infrastructure.”