What If? So What?
What If? So What? is the podcast where we discover what’s possible with digital and figure out how to make it real in your business. Join host Jim Hertzfeld, Vice President Strategy, as he interviews industry experts and veterans to dissect the buzz, challenge the status quo, and translate grand visions into tangible actions. Because it's not just about dreaming big, it's about asking the right questions: 'What If?' 'So What?’, and most importantly, “Now What?”
What If? So What?
Chris Duffey from Adobe on Generative AI
What if GenAI Could Turn Anyone Into a Creative Director?
In this episode of “What If? So What?” host Jim Hertzfeld is joined by Chris Duffey, head of Global Partnerships, GenAI at Adobe, to discuss the transformative power of Generative AI and Adobe’s innovative product, Firefly.
Chris shares his insights on how GenAI revolutionizes creativity across industries, enabling marketers, creatives, and businesses to unlock infinite possibilities. They explore Adobe Firefly's groundbreaking features, including text-to-image, text-to-video, custom content models, and APIs that empower scalability.
The conversation delves into the evolving role of CMOs in an AI-native world, the importance of responsible AI practices, and how technology is driving a renaissance in creativity.
Don’t miss this thought-provoking discussion that redefines the future of marketing and innovation.
Chris Duffey Chris Duffey is a leading AI and digital innovation expert, spearheading Adobe's Global Partnerships for AI Solutions. With 25+ years shaping the future of digital experiences, his work has captured the attention of over 300+ global media outlets, and he serves on industry boards, including the ANA, AdCouncil, CTA, and the UN AI Council. An award-winning author, Chris wrote Superhuman Innovation, the first book co-authored by AI about AI in 2019, which BOOKAUTHORITY named one of the best product innovation books of all time. In 2023, Chris published Decoding the Metaverse: Expand Your Business. He has been named to Ad Age's Tech Power List and CIO’s 10 Business Leaders Transforming Industries. A sought-after keynote speaker, his insights have reached millions worldwide, with coverage in Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, and Access Hollywood.
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My hope and hypothesis is the CMO the marketer, is going to be the central source of truth for a business. Agentic AI we have the capability to create faster, more insightful and have a faster round trip of in-marketplace performance and have that data come back to not only inform marketing disciplines but also the product, the sales and so on, and so I think we're going to see increased value of marketers going forward because of generative AI and agentic AI.
Jim Hertzfeld:Welcome to what If so what, the podcast where we explore what's possible with digital and discover how to make it real in your business. I'm your host, jim Hertzfeld, and we get shit done by asking digital leaders the right questions what, if so what? And, most importantly now, what? So I'm very excited today to have Chris Duffy on the podcast. Chris leads global partnerships for Gen AI for Adobe. Chris, welcome to what If so what Great to be here, jim, great to reconnect.
Jim Hertzfeld:So, chris, give us a background on your focus at Adobe. I know you've done a lot in your career, so what is your focus now and what brought you to this role within?
Chris Duffey:Adobe An exciting journey from a long-term perspective, but even more so from the last 12 months or so. It's been a wonderful journey in terms of the adoption of generative AI specifically into the marketing realm, and we're seeing that it truly is unleashing, unlocking infinite possibilities for everyone across the entire content supply chain Everyone from the marketers to the agencies, to the media suppliers, and it's really I don't say too gently, but it's quite exciting to see the transformation that is happening across the industry. So, specifically, my focus is on a newer offering at Adobe called Adobe Firefly, and if you haven't played with it, I know you and your team have, but if some of the listeners haven't really encourage everyone to take it for a spin, I was on it last night with one of our new beta products, adobe Firefly Video, and so it's really a text prompt that you can generate video out of, and it really is quite exciting. I don't think I've been that excited since I first got introduced to Photoshop 25 years or so ago, and so Firefly you can think of in terms of three or four pillars, the first being a product in of itself. If you go to fireflyadobecom, you can go there and do some text prompting for image generation, video generation We've got some beta products in terms of 3D generation.
Chris Duffey:The next one is an extension of that. We call it Firefly custom models, and that allows customers to upload their own private library of content or data, and so then the system trains off that data in a firewall environment, so the outputs are very customized. And then thirdly, more recently, is Firefly services, and essentially you can think of it as APIs for that last mile in terms of production capabilities, and now you can create in the hundreds of thousands of variations with these APIs. We have about 25 to 30 in market right now and those really unlock the possibility of scalability. In addition to that, the fourth pillar would be something we call content credentials. It's part of a broader industry-wide initiative which is the CAI, the Content Authenticity Initiative, and so that is comprised with hardware companies, software companies and media companies, maybe 3,000 or so. You can think of it in terms of almost a digital nutritional label where you can see, embedded into the content that's getting generated, how it was trained, how it was augmented, how it was distributed, and we're getting very close to how it performed as well.
Jim Hertzfeld:We'll get into some of that. This is a great time to be in this space and it's great to hear that you've landed here and especially given more of your history and the agency world and the media world, right, so you mentioned Photoshop 25 years ago. That was a great product back then. And with these opportunities come new concerns. You know, like I saw this quote not too recently, like the guy who invented the airplane also invented the airplane crash. You know it's kind of morbid but yeah, it does create some new responsibilities.
Jim Hertzfeld:I think we'll touch on that and that that lineage is kind of important.
Jim Hertzfeld:I didn't know that was part of the product suite, you know.
Jim Hertzfeld:It kind of brings me to this question and I was talking to an analyst the other day about digital native companies or becoming, you know, transforming or giving birth to AI native companies, or giving birth to AI native companies. So I think for a long time, you know, whether it's D2C, direct-to-consumer commerce, you know, and these sort of digital native companies that kind of sprung up or digital native banking, but that certainly affected the CMO's role right for a long time and I feel we're on, you know, over a decade into this sort of I don't know what we're up to now, but maybe a Web 2.0 or age of the customer or customer centricity and digital first is really dominated. I think a lot of CMO priorities way beyond just sort of the brand or brand marketing and evolved performance marketing as well. I'm intrigued by this idea of like an AI native business or an AI native company. Do you see kind of that same sort of transformation and how do you see that affecting the marketer's role or the CMO's role within a brand?
Chris Duffey:Yeah, it's a wonderful insight which I fully agree In many ways. We've been here before with the introduction of newer technologies over the last number of years, and there is a pattern every 10 or so years we get introduced to a new technology. We have the mobile revolution, we have the social revolution and, to your point, we are now already deep into the AI revolution. I would also offer. There's stages of AI. We started out with probabilistic or predictive AI, which quickly gave birth to generative.
Chris Duffey:Many are now identifying that we're even moving beyond generative or adding on to the generative area into agentic AI, which is a more proactive use case for AI. And so, with all that said, I think the implications on marketing and, more specifically, cmos is much like those previous technologies. They did slightly change the capabilities and the roles of the CMO and the marketer and the creatives and the agencies. Much like that. We are seeing an evolution of the CMO. Specifically, my hope and hypothesis is the CMO, the marketer, is going to be the central source of truth for a business, and so what I mean by that is it is now going to house all of the insights because with generative AI and agentic AI, we have the capability to create faster, more insightful and have a faster round trip of in marketplace performance and have that data come back to not only inform marketing disciplines but also the product, the sales and so on. And so I think we're going to see an increased value of marketers going forward because of generative AI and agentic AI.
Jim Hertzfeld:That's a great point. We've been kind of seeing the same thing as more products become connected. You know whether it's kind of an ambient computing or passive computing in a retailer, or it's a shop floor that's collecting all kinds of data, or it's the product itself that is phoning home. To kind of go back to a really old phrase, like it's more data about customer behavior, maybe customer intent, and so how we utilize that to personalize what consumers or what end users are looking for. I remember talking to other CMOs like, boy, you're going to have a real content problem because if you're going to personalize, you have to have a personalized message. And I think this solves a lot of those problems right In terms of production.
Chris Duffey:I think you raised it earlier with the introduction of new technologies, also introduces new considerations and contemplations. What is the optimal tech stack, which I'm heavily focused on? What are the implications of that technology on the current state and future state of processes? And then, how does that ultimately inform better go-to-market strategies, inform the product in of itself, the sales cycle and so on, and so it really is having a foundational impact on businesses globally. I've been almost evolving my terminology from transformation to reinvention, because it really is reinventing businesses from the ground up, going forward.
Jim Hertzfeld:Well, that's why I'm intrigued by this comment I heard the other day. You know, ai native, you know, I think, okay, I get to start thinking about it that way. I think I was sort of intuitively thinking about it, but you're right, it's sort of stopping starting over again. This content supply chain or this interaction could be AI driven, instead of we're guessing, we're putting teams together, doing research, hoping that it's going to pan out, you know, in a few months, and now we have an AI native company can automate those processes right In seconds, potentially.
Jim Hertzfeld:So the organizations you're talking to, the customers you're talking to, when you sort of rank maybe a couple of the problems that they're trying to solve, sort of in business terms, you know, are they trying to be better? Are they trying to be faster? Are they trying to be cheaper? There's more to life than better, faster, cheaper. But what are you hearing is sort of the reasons why this adoption is taking place. Are they there yet? Are they just still experimenting, or do you think there are specific business problems or marketing problems that you find customers are looking to solve with some of these solutions?
Chris Duffey:Absolutely, and obviously there's a spectrum across the industries, but I think things have evolved very quickly over the last 24 months. But I think things have evolved very quickly over the last 24 months. We almost took a page from the digital transformation, where we tried to apply it to existing frameworks and processes within the first few months a couple of years ago. That now has expanded and matured into a more fundamental consideration for the ingestion of AI, and so what we've seen over the last 12 months or so is the need to map out a three to five year AI vision and then reverse engineer to get to that vision across all aspects and layers of a business. So I would say that is probably first and foremost for industries currently. The second big vector of consideration is then, as you pointed out, the need for responsible AI, and that has multiple considerations in terms of how do you use, how do you build different models, whether it be LLMs, whether it be your own proprietary data, and so on, and so there's a continuous need to optimize for responsible AI.
Chris Duffey:In parallel, I've been very heartened to see that the public and private sector are converging in.
Chris Duffey:That gap, which has traditionally been a bit broad, is really coming closer together. There's some great work coming out of Utah. The senator there is building an incubator where unusual use cases that kind of color outside of the lines he's built an incubator where you can bring those challenges and work together to help create the policy. The senator from Texas has offered a safe space or a safe room almost, where you can showcase the use case to them and then he can give some guidance within a 30-day grace period, and so I think those are really wonderful indications of how the public and private sector are working together. The third aspect then is there's an element of I don't know what I don't know, or I can't imagine what I can't imagine, and so there is a need for continuous upskilling in terms of what are the current capabilities of the technology and then how do I apply that and absorb that within the organization. So I would say those are primarily the three things that we're seeing universally across use cases and industries.
Jim Hertzfeld:That's interesting. I mean, I think one of the things that we've done is we're building and we've seen a couple of instances it's just a prompt library. We found that that's just the kind of tier I don't know. What I don't know is kind of introducing people to just fundamental prompts. You know, the most simplistic things we found can really very quickly orient someone to what's possible with generative ad, because there's still this concept like, for example, choosing a headline. Right, so read this and tell me a good headline. I usually write the headline and then I write the copy, you know. So just turning that around sometimes is the only trigger people need to kind of get the thoughts going and we see that a lot and I love this idea behind responsible sort of I don't know what to call it, I'm going to call it a responsibility lab.
Jim Hertzfeld:But that's a great idea, kind of getting ahead of some of these problems. And I'm kind of drawn to like the trolley problem. Right, people aren't familiar with that. It's common among autonomous vehicles and robotics. How does the machine choose what to do next? Right, do they save the passengers or save the poor souls on the sidewalk or on the railroad track? So it sounds like that's a way to kind of get in front of those things. No pun intended, but that's interesting and kind of a novel way of doing things.
Chris Duffey:Jim, you bring up a number of wonderful points. The first one really I think touches on maybe one of the big concerns across the marketing and creative industry is the impact on the craft of creativity, and I think you highlighting the prompting is a wonderful example of how the skill set is being transformed from the craft traditionally over to a new form of creativity. I think, creatives, there's going to be a renaissance in terms of language, because adjectives can really have a profound effect. The adjectives that you use within the prompt can really dictate the outcome, and so I think artists are going to hopefully re-fall in love with the art of language on how it can impact creativity going forward.
Jim Hertzfeld:So if you're an English major, maybe you need to rethink your dream to write the great American novel. You just need to start drawing out films and imagery with Firefly. So that's a great point. It's not just thinking about the solution, it's thinking about how you approach the problem differently, so that's great. Any kind of final thought for folks? I have an idea on something, having listened to this. We love to give people one thing that they can go do when they get back to their phone or safely in front of a screen. What's one piece of advice? If you're in a creative role or you rely on a creative team, what's one piece of advice or one thing they could do today?
Chris Duffey:I'd really advocate for this creator mindset. In many ways, technology was still somewhat of a heavy lift in terms of adoption. The technology is there now. Really unleash your creativity, your creator mindset, and feel free to get out there and start creating new products, new marketing programs. It really frees up, ultimately, opportunities. So I think we're entering the golden age of creativity and invention going forward.
Jim Hertzfeld:That's great to hear. I love that sort of democratization of finding kind of the inner creator. So, chris, it's great, I really appreciate you joining us and one of the things, I'm going to go out and spend a little more time with Firefly, so I appreciate you joining. Thanks, chris, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:You've been listening to What if? So What? A digital strategy podcast from Perficient with Jim Hertzfeld. We want to thank our Perficient colleagues JD Norman and Rick Bauer for our music. Subscribe to the podcast and don't miss a single episode. You can find this season, along with show notes, at Perficient. com. Thanks for listening.
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