Adobe Launches AI Foundry: Custom Generative AI Models for Enterprises

Adobe launches a foundry service that builds custom generative AI models for enteprises | TechCrunch

Creative design giant Adobe is beefing up the products it offers businesses to include custom generative AI models. Adobe launched Adobe AI Foundry on Monday, a new offering that allows enterprises to work with the company to build custom generative AI models trained on their branding and intellectual property. The foundry's custom models, which can produce text, images, video, and other mediums like 3D scenes, are built off Adobe's Firefly family of AI models. These Firefly models were launched in 2023 and have been trained entirely on licensed data. Adobe's foundry service then fine tunes these models for each customer using their intellectual property. The foundry service pricing is based on usage, as opposed to by seat like many of Adobe's other products. Hannah Elsakr, a vice president of generative AI new business ventures at Adobe, told TechCrunch the foundry service was a natural expansion of the company's enterprise AI products -- and customers were asking for more customization. "This is elevating a lot of the capabilities we already had," Elsakr said. "The enterprise has asked us to come in and advise us, help us, partner with us, be our premier creative marketing AI partner on this." Since Adobe released its Firefly models in 2023, enterprises have used them to create more than 25 billion assets. Elsakr said these custom models will help brands be able to better keep up with their advertising campaigns. A customer could create an ad campaign for a product once and use a custom Adobe model to help generate the same ad for different seasons, languages, or formats. "It's highly personalized," Elsakr said. "We've been talking about personalized commerce for so long, but generative AI and Firefly make it possible to put the brand in the hand of the consumer in an on-brand way." Despite the capabilities of the new tools, Esakr said Adobe is not trying to replace human creatives by any means and rather just give them better versions of the tools they were already using to create their content. "Our stance is humanity is at the center of creativity and that can't be replaced," Elsakr said. "We have been for decades in the business of providing creative tooling that helps uplift narrative, telling storytelling, your ability to envision and execute your creative vision. Firefly and foundry are just the next evolution of giving you tools in the toolkit that elevate your ability to tell a story."

Adobe might've just solved one of generative AI's biggest legal risks

Tech companies are racing to deliver personalizable AI tools. In the age of generative AI, quantity has become a lot easier than quality. New AI tools have made it easier than ever to generate virtually every kind of content at scale, but much of it is generic, low-grade, and fraught with copyright hazards and hallucinatory nonsense. Adobe is betting that businesses will be willing to pay more for AI services that are able to deliver both quantity and quality, responsibly. Also: I've tested free vs. paid AI coding tools - here's which one I'd actually use On Monday, the tech giant announced the launch of Adobe AI Foundry, a new program through which enterprise customers can access Adobe experts for help creating their own generative AI models, custom-made to adhere to their particular brand guidelines. The Foundry is built upon Firefly, Adobe's suite of flagship generative AI models, meaning brand partners can build AI tools that can generate text, image, audio, video, and more. By training bespoke Foundry models on a brand's IP, Adobe is positioning its new service offering -- and its brand more generally -- as a safer alternative to mainstream AI tools, such as OpenAI's Sora. That's because it assures its models are guaranteed commercially safe, meaning their training data has been properly sourced from creators, as opposed to just scraped up off the open internet. "The only unlock to localization and personalization is responsible AI," Hannah Elaskr, vice president of genAI new business ventures at Adobe, told ZDNET in a briefing on Thursday. Adobe is positioning AI Foundry as a way for brands to stand out within (and keep abreast of) a rising tide of AI-generated marketing content. On Thursday, the company published the results of a study which found that close to three-quarters (71%) of marketers surveyed said that the demand for content will grow more than fivefold between now and 2027. Also: You can try Google's viral image editing tool right in Search now - here's how The idea is to provide marketers and designers with the means to quickly and cheaply generate all kinds of content at a pace that keeps up with this surging demand, while also doing so in a way that's consistent with their brands' unique identities. "Teams need to ensure every new asset preserves the look and feel of their product portfolio, creative direction and design aesthetic," Adobe wrote in a press release. Last week, Adobe also announced the general release of its LLM Optimizer tool, which helps brands track and measure their visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI chatbots. Pricing for the Foundry will vary depending on the customer and type of service provided, an Adobe spokesperson told ZDNET. Want more stories about AI? Sign up for AI Leaderboard, our weekly newsletter. AI Foundry is part of a broader effort throughout the tech industry to build AI tools whose outputs are tailored to the unique preferences of individual users or businesses. That's especially crucial as more AI image and video tools hit the market and brands want to keep their content unique while still scaling production with AI tools. Also: You're reading more AI-generated content than you think But personalization isn't just for AI content, of course. On Thursday, for example, Anthropic introduced Skills for Claude, which gives users an extra measure of control over how the chatbot executes certain tasks. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that his company will focus more on delivering personalized AI tools. The news from Adobe also arrives in the wake of multiple studies which have found that the vast majority of businesses' internal AI efforts have not delivered measurable results.