Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick, Nick Patience
Publication Date: November 3, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- Adobe MAX 2025 marked a shift toward enterprise-grade creativity, with new tools and integrations uniting content creation, management, and delivery across the full lifecycle on the Adobe Platform.
- Enhancements to Firefly include AI models from Google and OpenAI, while the Firefly Foundry service enables global enterprises such as Disney and Home Depot to build brand-specific AI models through managed, multi-year engagements.
- Adobe launched Project Moonlight (an AI assistant for planning and social analytics) and Project Graph (a node-based creative workflow builder), alongside Premiere Pro Mobile with Firefly features and a Google/YouTube partnership.
- Adobe expanded its Content Authenticity Initiative to meet AI transparency laws, introduced generative credit–based pricing for AI features, and is optimizing AI performance through both cloud and on-device model architectures with partners such as Qualcomm and NVIDIA.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: Adobe brought together more than 10,000 content creators, marketers, and partners to its annual MAX conference, which has traditionally served as a celebration of creatives and the work they bring to life using Adobe products and services. However, this year’s MAX event was marked by a plethora of announcements focused on a more enterprise-oriented message, aimed at enabling creatives, marketers, and other stakeholders to work seamlessly on the Adobe Platform across the whole content lifecycle, from ideation to archive.
Major Product Launches and AI Integration
Adobe unveiled major AI enhancements across Creative Cloud, highlighted by enhancements to the Firefly platform, which integrates leading AI models from partners such as Google and OpenAI, establishing Adobe as a central hub for AI-powered creativity. Adobe Express also received a significant upgrade with a new AI assistant enabling conversational editing and content creation, allowing users to “prompt anything and edit everything” with AI context understanding and creative control.
Enterprise Solutions and Custom Models
Adobe introduced Firefly Foundry, a fully managed service for large enterprises to build custom AI models. This goes beyond the existing custom models by providing dedicated teams of PhD experts and multi-year engagements for complex brand-specific AI implementations that will be priced on a use-case basis. Companies such as Disney and Home Depot are already using this service, according to Adobe. Adobe GenStudio, Adobe’s enterprise-focused content-management solution, was expanded to include comprehensive enterprise content supply chain capabilities, connecting workflow planning, creation, production, asset management, and delivery at scale.
New Workflow Tools
Two new workflow tools were announced, including Project Moonlight and Project Graph. Project Moonlight is an AI assistant that helps creators brainstorm, organize, and plan content while connecting directly to social media platforms such as Instagram for performance analytics. It can apply Lightroom presets automatically and integrate seamlessly across Adobe’s ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Project Graph is a node-based workflow builder that allows users to create, share, and remix composable creative workflows. This tool enables mixing various creative tools and AI models into reusable “capsules” that can be shared across teams.
Mobile and Partnership Expansions
Adobe announced Premiere Pro Mobile for both iOS and Android, each of which features full desktop capabilities with Firefly’s generative features. A new partnership with Google/YouTube provides exclusive templates and transitions for content creators.
Content Authenticity and Governance
Adobe expanded its Content Authenticity Initiative with a conformance program involving 50+ products to ensure interoperability of content provenance standards. This addresses growing regulatory requirements like the EU AI Act and California laws around AI transparency.
Pricing and Business Model Evolution
Adobe is transitioning to a consumption-based model with generative credits as the “currency” for AI features. Every Creative Cloud subscription includes base-level generative rights, with additional credit packs available for purchase. The company is still refining pricing for more complex video and audio generation.
Technical Infrastructure
Adobe is also investing heavily in both cloud-based large models and on-device small models, working in tandem with hardware vendors including Qualcomm and NVIDIA to optimize AI inference on devices while maintaining their cloud infrastructure for complex operations.
Adobe MAX 2025: Will Adobe’s Platform Approach Resonate with Enterprises?
Analyst Take: Adobe has long positioned itself as the “commercially safe AI vendor,” for enterprises, highlighting its robust and scalable infrastructure, long experience working with top, global brands, and, more recently, spotlighting its commercially safe generative AI models that are only trained on licensed content or content that is in the public domain, thereby eliminating the generation of content that may infringe on copyrights or owned IP. This has been a significant point of differentiation for Adobe, and the announcements made at MAX significantly shore up this messaging and positioning.
Adobe is strengthening its capabilities in messaging, focusing on being the platform that supports the entire content supply chain, from ideation through production, asset management, activation, and reporting. Adobe’s continued embrace of third-party model support within the Adobe platform earlier in the year can be viewed as table stakes for any modern platform; the company will need to carefully balance the messaging around being the “commercially safe” provider against the obvious added benefit of providing creators (and enterprises) with the choice of using other models. Ultimately, Adobe scores a win for trying to establish itself as the platform upon which content can be created, activated, and leveraged, without needing to conduct work on other applications.
In addition, the enhancements within Adobe GenStudio are notable because they further connect the content generation and content activation sides of the business, enabling not only more streamlined workflows but also the ability of non-creatives to contribute to the content generation process while incorporating the necessary brand guidelines and controls to maintain brand integrity.
Most notably, the announcement of Firefly Foundry represents Adobe’s most significant enterprise play, a fully managed service that requires multi-year commitments and dedicated PhD expert teams. This isn’t just model customization; it is a dedicated, focused services offering for brands, enabling greater model understanding of elements, brand guidelines, creative direction, and audio elements. Adobe views Foundry as ideal for assisting organizations with the higher-cost and higher-friction elements of the creative pipeline, including helping creatives transform their workflows through the use of generative AI and building their own foundation models based on Adobe’s Firefly models. One customer we spoke with indicated that it intends to utilize Foundry to perform work that it would have generally relied on agencies to do. The pricing is use-case-based rather than per-seat, reflecting the complexity and strategic nature of these implementations. Adobe emphasizes they’re solving problems that enterprises “can’t hire 300 PhDs” to address internally.
Other Key Developments
Adobe continues to drive the adoption of the Content Authenticity Initiative, which is particularly important in light of upcoming regulations, such as the EU AI Act and various California laws, that require AI-modified or generated content to be identified. Adobe’s leadership within this space further underscores its messaging as the enterprise-safe choice for content creation and distribution.
Adobe is also highlighting its shift to a consumption-based pricing model, with generative credits offering more flexibility and value in support of enterprise usage patterns. In this model, enterprises can purchase capacity for entire organizations, allowing teams to tap into AI capabilities as needed, rather than purchasing blanket licenses that may not be optimized for AI activities.
Strategic Market Positioning
Adobe has positioned itself as uniquely able to understand and manage the entire “surface area of creativity and marketing” better than any of its competitors, by becoming more than a tools vendor, and, now through AI Foundry, a strategic partner for enterprises undergoing digital transformation in their creative and marketing operations.
Currently, Adobe’s enterprise platform approach is constrained by the need to purchase multiple applications to enjoy full functionality, which can be an expensive proposition for budget-constrained organizations or those not far along the digital transformation maturity curve. Adobe’s mission and challenge will be creating friction-free pathways to full platform adoption for these customers, while simultaneously highlighting the benefits of migrating fully to the Adobe platform.
What to Watch:
- Watch how Adobe balances its end-to-end platform strategy with growing enterprise demand for interoperability. Competitors offering open ecosystems and modular pricing could capitalize if Adobe’s suite approach becomes too rigid or costly for mid-market buyers.
- Expect an acceleration of standards and certifications around AI transparency and content provenance. Vendors that operationalize compliance—beyond messaging “safety”—may gain an edge with regulated or risk-sensitive industries.
- As content generation becomes commoditized, differentiation will shift to activation and measurable impact. Vendors that can unify content creation, distribution, and performance analytics within a single, brand-safe environment will set the new benchmark for enterprise value.
You can read the full complement of Adobe MAX press releases at the company’s website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum:
Adobe Q3 FY 2025 Results Beat Estimates, FY 2025 Outlook Raised on AI Demand
Accelerating Creativity and Productivity with Adobe Firefly
Adobe Brings AI to PDFs With the Launch of Acrobat Studio
Image Credit: Adobe
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
