From being a single-room feature-development centre in 1997 to a global enterprise and the second-largest arm of Adobe, Adobe India, now with over 7,000 employees, has come a long way.
“India is one of the fastest growing markets for Adobe right now. The growth rate of the enterprise business, which is enabling businesses to be digital, is utterly massive,” Prativa Mohapatra, VP and MD of Adobe India, told AIM in an exclusive interaction last week.
The company has positioned itself as a key player in India, assisting numerous businesses across various sectors – BFSI, automotive, retail, and aviation – in adopting digital solutions. This includes major financial institutions such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Lombard, and Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, as well as prominent retail brands like Tata Cliq, Unilever, Titan, and Aditya Birla Fashion.
Two days ago, the company announced its plans to launch a data centre in India later this year, hosting applications like Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Adobe Journey Optimiser.
This initiative, aimed at meeting local data residency laws and improving performance, will enable Indian enterprises to offer real-time, personalised customer experiences more efficiently.
According to the recent Intel-IDC report, India is on track to become a major global AI hub, with AI investment projected to grow faster than in any of the seven other markets analysed, including Australia, Japan, and Korea.
By 2027, India’s AI market is expected to reach $5.1 billion.
Mohapatra shared that Tata Capital’s monthly website visitors have increased from 250,000 to 2.5 million,thanks to Adobe Experience Cloud. It has also reduced the time required to launch new digital content by as much as 90%.
Similarly, by leveraging Adobe Campaign, ICICI Lombard has been able to deliver targeted marketing messages and customised service scripts. “This approach has paid dividends, with digital strategies driving approximately a 20% increase in online retention and influencing about 55% of renewals in offline business verticals,” she added.
Tackling Copyright Issues
Since the beginning of text-to-image models, there has been ongoing debate over the legality of scraping personal data to train AI models without a licence. Many artists have filed lawsuits against Stability AI, Midjourney, and Runway for using their copyrighted works without permission to train these AI models, but Adobe has remained unaffected.
Along with its own stock images, Adobe used exclusive fully-licensed images, making up the dataset used to train the model behind Firefly, absolving it of any legal or ethical issues. While introducing Generative Fill, it also added metadata to its images and is trained on its own Adobe Stock images, protecting creators’ rights.
Meanwhile, Adobe is also a part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) along with major organisations like OpenAI, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Publicis Groupe, Sony, and Truepic.
However, when it first released the NVIDIA Picasso-based Firefly, the user feedback was largely negative from the community.
Dr Jim Fan from NVIDIA highlighted that Adobe’s strict approach to avoiding copyrighted content may have led to inferior outputs compared to Midjourney, which has access to a vast and diverse dataset from scraping over five billion images online.
Why Adobe Firefly looks bad compared to Midjourney
-Adobe trained on stock, public domain and licensed images
Mj is trained on
-Artists art
-Photographers photos
-Models and Actors faces
-Public and private social media data (Probably)
-Everything it gets its grubby hands on https://t.co/i5BcQUMBbL— Eric Bourdages (@EZE3D) April 3, 2023
“We want to use AI responsibly and prioritise the protection of intellectual property,” said Mohapatra. “We employ measures like content credentials, which have become the industry standard for digital content provenance.”
Another controversy along similar lines was whether AI-powered tools like those provided by Adobe or Canva would replace human jobs. Short answer: No.
“Fortunately, individuals serve as the primary impetus behind generative AI innovation,” Mohapatra told AIM. This allows Adobe to ensure that its AI deployments are accessible, safe, and well-regulated, leading to equitable and impactful outcomes.
Sharing a similar stance is the Australian design studio Canva. When we spoke to Canva’s head of AI products Danny Wu earlier this year, he said:
“We believe that human creativity is at the core of the design. AI will take it to new heights, not replace it.”
Adobe Barely Made it Out Alive in the GenAI Race
Adobe arrived a little late to the generative AI party, as 2022 saw the rise of generative AI models like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL.E, which had already disrupted several creative fields.
The same year, Adobe faced major challenges, including the cancellation of its $20 billion Figma deal, pressures to adapt its business model, artist copyright issues, and more.
Cut to the present, Adobe has become synonymous with generative AI.
The tech giant behind popular products like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere saw its market value rise from $271.63 billion in January 2023 to $276 billion in January 2024, making it the 34th most valuable public company globally. This growth aligned with Adobe surpassing $5 billion in revenue for the first time in Q4 2023.
Apart from profits, the company diversified its portfolio and positioned itself as an all-round generative AI powered enterprise software platform. So, it began with bringing Firefly to Photoshop.
Adobe entered the generative AI race in March 2023 with Adobe Firefly in collaboration with NVIDIA.
In February 2023, it changed the game by introducing Generative Fill, which allows users to add, remove, or modify image elements based on text prompts.
“Traditionally, creating content assets like visually appealing product descriptions for websites, social media posts, or ad copy can be time-consuming and requires human intervention at large.
“Generative AI automates these tasks, allowing marketers to bring variation in content, personalise at scale, and automate repetitive tasks,” Mohapatra said.
She told AIM that Adobe’s integration of generative AI focuses on three primary areas within its cloud products: Adobe Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud, and Document Cloud to address the need for faster and more effective content workflows, directly benefiting enterprise customers by reducing time-to-market and enabling personalised customer interactions on a large scale.
The company wants to democratise generative AI-powered content creation with product integrations. Its strategy for the same involves a careful blend of user feedback and gradual deployments, focusing on integrating AI into existing workflows to improve user productivity and creativity.
“We focus on looping in user feedback and progressive rollouts over large-scale deployments,” said Mohapatra, adding that it is to make sure that the introduction of AI enhances rather than disrupts current practices.
To facilitate this, the company has also partnered with additional tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and for their LLMs. In the second half of last year, it acquired Bengaluru-based AI startup Rephrase AI to bolster its AI ambitions.
Now, Adobe will integrate third-party AI tools, including OpenAI’s Sora, into Premiere Pro. Partnering with AI providers like OpenAI, RunwayML, and Pika, it aims to offer users flexibility in choosing AI models for their workflows.
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