Gen AI will supercharge creativity, says Adobe

Adobe VP Loni Stark tells The Growth Agenda why creatives need to push past the AI-for-AI’s-sake projects to find the valuable use cases.

Generative AI will supercharge creativity in business, Adobe experience manager and commerce vice-president Loni Stark says

Adobe experience manager and commerce vice-president Loni Stark believes generative artificial intelligence will supercharge creativity by releasing creatives from mundane areas of their roles and unleashing their imaginations.

The 25-year Adobe veteran, who is also an artist, spoke to The Growth Agenda while in Sydney this month about how Adobe is working with its customers to adopt new generative AI tools to help improve customer experiences.

Ms Stark believes one of the most important starting points for creatives and marketers working with gen AI is to abandon their preconceived ideas around what is possible and embrace the agility of a test and learn approach.

“One of the key things that I have observed is that people put assumptions on what they can do and how long it will take based on what we know today about how problems are solved without this technology,” she said.

“We have to be very candid about what we do know and what we don’t know. And we don’t know what this technology could potentially do. It’s like trying to ascertain how fast a car would go before you’ve invented the car, and all you have is the horse.

“And you can start to debate what kind of road you need, but rather than debate how much time we think we need, let’s just run really quickly and see where we get to.”

The San Jose-based executive said she had found from her own experiences creating tools within Adobe that creating a culture for prototyping was crucial.

“As a leader in an organisation, write down an idea or a problem that you observe and how AI or gen AI or any new technology as a hypothesis would solve that, and then say, ‘what is the fastest, smallest thing that could be done that could garner me a signal in this way? And how will I measurably know that?’

“This prototyping culture is really important and then it’s just a matter of testing it out and doing that in two-week cycles. Often people will scoff, but it’s important to experiment and just see what happens in two-week sprints.

“What was interesting for us was that after two weeks, we were further along than we thought we would be and that gave everyone a certain level of confidence to move forward again.”

Ms Stark said businesses ­needed to create a culture for experiential play with AI in order to help drive knowledge and experience among its staff as the industry ­accelerated towards the adoption stage.

“It’s important for companies to really sandbox play with this stuff, so the different ideas are ones that we can start to really learn about. And that part is important, because it’s not just the technology, it’s also the change management and getting people familiar with it and learning about what they can do with this new technology,” she said.

However, she warned that creatives and marketers needed to manage their expectations when it came to gen AI and not get ­carried away by the hype of early use cases.

“I always believe that whether technology is useful or not useful is based in the context of why or how you’re doing it. It’s always in the application of it and you have to look for the use cases,” she said.

“Mobile apps are a great example of this. There was a period of great experimentation when mobile apps first arrived and the first use cases were these fun apps, but now in retrospect they’re all distractions. The mobile app was something else you could do besides the thing you actually wanted to do in your life. And then it was utilitarian where it can actually help you change music, so that you didn’t have to stand up and walk across the room, so that’s valuable. But now it’s about how does the mobile app when you’re sitting on a bus or you’re somewhere else, it’s a form of entertainment, and you get to discover new products, or new findings that help you with your wellbeing or pay a bill or fix a lamp in your home.

“And that’s the same with AI, do I believe there’s a bunch of use cases that will turn out, in hindsight, to be just shiny AI for AI sake of AI and gen AI for the sake of it? Absolutely.

“And so I think this is where it challenges our us to go. What does it free us up to do?”

Ms Stark rejected the doomsayers because she believed this was part of every technology cycle, and she used art history to illustrate the typical human response to new technology.

“Back when paints used to be created by actual artists, who would mill their own paints, and then they were produced, and people were saying, ‘Well, this is horrible’. There were people that were concerned, and it opened up a whole new era of impressionism, etc, and plein air, because you can now bring your tubes out into the world and put paint in place,” she said.

“And that’s why we put our gen AI things into the tools we have …”