Generative AI is fundamentally (and quickly) shaping how information is discovered and acted on, forcing enterprises to rethink how they engage with both humans and machines.

Adobe is responding to this shift, introducing new tools that keep up with evolving branding, surface campaign insights, and speed up content creation. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the company introduced a new Brand Intelligence system and expansions to its GenStudio platform, as well as launching products that use agentic AI to reshape customer experience.

And last week, Adobe announced one of its most significant AI rollouts, the new Firefly AI Assistant, interestingly on the same day rival Canva introduced its own new agentic platform, Canva 2.0.

“Brand visibility is going to shift toward what agents see, and what is picked up, understood, and returned by those agents,” said  Terra Higginson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. “Adobe is well-positioned for this shift.”

Helping teams stay on brand

Adobe describes Brand Intelligence as a “continuously-learning engine” that provides context to AI agents so teams can quickly create content that aligns with evolving branding. Instead of basic, static brand guidelines, the platform can gain from more nuanced insights like customer feedback, rejections, and approvals.

The system is based on a collection of small language models (SLMs) tailor-made to have a much deeper understanding of how a brand shows itself, in a multi-modal fashion, Adobe VP Sundeep Parsa explained to Computerworld. Enterprises can tweak the content along the way.

Brand Intelligence essentially reshapes the content supply chain so that teams can measure, plan, create, and manage brand-specific materials. Such customization is critical, because, he pointed out, “Coca Cola’s brand intelligence system is going to look very different from Nike’s.”

Info-Tech’s Higginson pointed out that an interesting use case for this would be when a brand wants to capitalize on a trend quickly. Back in the day, “instant” still meant a lot of planning and rework, but new Brand Intelligence capabilities can personalize agentic content immediately while still adhering to brand guidelines and localization requirements in real time.

“It’s taking personalized content to another level,” she said.

Ultimately, with LLMs in the mix, brand visibility is “twice as hard” as it used to be, and marketers’ jobs have gotten significantly more complex, Higginson noted.

“They don’t just need to convince humans to buy their products; they now need to convince agents, too,” she said. That means content must be instantly accessible, structured properly, and governed by brand guidelines.

New GenStudio enhancements

Along with Brand Intelligence, Adobe has rolled out new offerings within its GenStudio content creation platform. Notably, this includes a ‘Workflow Optimization Agent’ in Adobe Workfront, its workflow management platform.

The agent automates actions across workflows such as planning, execution, review, and approval. This can help teams build projects, speed up reviews, and pull out insights on demand, without the need for manual reporting. Teams can also involve AI agents in project planning and assign them tasks, such as resolving simple issues or performing reviews based on specific instructions and context.

Additionally, new creative production capabilities in Adobe Firefly for Enterprise Workflow Builder help developers build reusable workflows, link generative actions, and run batch production. Teams can also launch AI agents that interpret campaign briefs, compile supporting assets, and build templates and workflows.

Adobe is also rolling out a new dedicated ‘canvas’ interface to help teams pull together inputs and performance data to build better campaign briefs. Here, too, they can kick off an AI assistant.

Further, Adobe is announcing a new GenStudio module for marketing that turns long-form documents and videos into tailored campaigns, builds customer case studies, and writes web content. Marketers can quickly pull out performance insights (such as leads generated or follower statistics) and ask AI for recommendations to expand audience reach. And a new agency system of record will preserve enterprise context as it moves across content flows, supporting governance, accountability, and a shared understanding of branding.

“End users are seeing an exponential increase in the amount of content that needs to be created,” Higginson noted, adding that the benefits of a tool like Adobe GenStudio are not just generation of more content, but faster iteration, and less manual rework.

“It’s necessary because humans can basically no longer keep up with the demand for creation, iteration, testing, optimization, localization, and related workflows,” she emphasized.

Firefly AI Assistant speeds up creation

Adobe also announced a new Firefly AI Assistant (available soon) that users can interact with in natural language. Based on human instructions, agents can build workflows, ask contextual follow-up questions, offer suggestions, and report on results. They can also organize and share work in the Frame.io collaboration platform, interpret feedback, and automatically apply changes.

Agents have access to pre-built skills purpose-built for specific workflows, such as retouching portraits. They learn from creators over time, determining their preferred tools, workflows, and aesthetics, and maintain persistent memory across sessions. This carries over to other Adobe apps, too, so developers don’t have to start from scratch with each one.

A primary use case for the Firefly AI assistant is that of a creative team requesting input from the division owner, Higginson explained, including questions about color and brand consistency. In a demo at the event, Adobe illustrated this with a campaign for a major travel company. Feedback was folded in “almost in real time,” then localized across languages and countries.

“Work that would have taken months was reduced to minutes,” Higginson said. The platform makes creative workflows “more conversational and easier to manage across teams, which gets users to optimization much faster.”

Competition launches the same day

In an interesting development, Adobe announced its new Firefly AI Assistant on the same day that Canva introduced its next-gen agentic platform, Canva 2.0. Available now in research preview, Canva 2.0 also features brand intelligence tools and AI agents. Canva calls it its “most significant product evolution” since the company launched in 2013.

The platform upgrade reflects a broader move, beyond design “into more unified, AI-driven workflows,” Higginson said. Canva’s recent acquisitions of Simtheory and Ortto reinforce that push: They suggest the company is building toward a “wider marketing platform,” with content-centric workflow, stronger measurement, and lighter customer data platform (CDP) and lifecycle marketing capabilities that overlap with entry-level customer relationship management (CRM) territory.

That makes Canva more competitive, particularly with broader user groups and small to medium businesses (SMBs).

“Canva’s strength is accessibility, while Adobe’s strength is enterprise workflow depth,” said Higginson. “Adobe, though, still appears better positioned in complex enterprise environments where governance, scale, and established workflows matter more.”