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Hannah Elsakr says that Adobe’s top clientsthe owners of some of the most protected, most valuable brands and IP in the worldhad a stark message for the company regarding Firefly, its generative AI engine: They wanted more, and they wanted better. “They told us they actually needed models that understood all their products, all their brands, their creative direction,” says Elsakr, Adobe’s VP of GenAI New Business Ventures. “They have characters, they have particular motion styles, and they needed us to train on that.” Fireflywhich uses prompts to create assets across all Adobes vector, bitmap, and motion appscouldn’t do this because it doesnt understand brands at the IP level. “We consider that a feature, not a bug,” Alsark tells me. Firefly is a generic engine, but Adobes top clients need to create millions of assets for dozens of different platforms and marketing media, all of them conforming to their own strict IP rules and brand books. This is why the company has built a new consultancy arm for Fortune 2000 companies to develop bespoke AI models that could craft hundreds of thousands of images, illustrations, and videos that conform strictly to their IP and creative guidelines. Its name: Adobe AI Foundry. [Image: Adobe] The million-asset problem The move comes as a direct response to a mathematical nightmare facing every major brand. Alsark calls it the “combinatorics math problem”. A company with just eight products that wants to market them across 15 channels in 35 languages with a few refreshes a year is already looking at creating half a million individual assets. “With social, we know we’re doing probably three refreshes a week,” she explains. “So the real numbers are in the millions and millions and millions.” Before now, that scale was simply impossible. Time, budgets, and human resources are all finite. “The only unlock here is responsible AI,” Alsark insists. This crushing demand from the attention economy is precisely why Adobes biggest clients, companies like The Home Depot and Walt Disney Imagineering, came to them. They needed an industrial-scale solution, but one that respected their most valuable assettheir intellectual property. Adobes public Firefly model was a start, but it was designed to be IP-agnostic. While brands applauded this safety-first approach, they needed an AI that could learn their worldtheir characters, their color palettes, their unique aesthetic. Last year’s self-serve “Custom Models” were a step in that direction, allowing companies to train the AI on a single concept, like a specific style or shape. But clients wanted more. They wanted the whole kingdom, not just one castle. [Image: Adobe] A bespoke AI partnership Adobe AI Foundry isn’t a piece of software you buy off the shelf; it’s a deep, consultative partnership that feels more like hiring a boutique division of AI experts from Accenture or IBM than licensing a tool. Adobe targets the Fortune 2000, a customer base where it already has deep roots through its Creative Cloud and marketing software suites. “You actually get a team of allocated experts from Adobe,” Alsark says, listing “applied scientists, engineers, [and] creative workflow experts.” These teams work directly with a client to build a unique generative AI model from the ground up, trained exclusively on that company’s private data and assets. The process is intensive and can take a couple of months just to get the first results. It begins with use-case discovery, where Adobes team identifies the core business problem, whether its creating seasonal ad campaigns for a retailer like Amazon Fresh or generating limitless variations of a hero image for a beauty brand like MAC. Then comes the heavy lifting. Adobes engineers surgically reopen their foundational Firefly models to retrain them on the clients proprietary IP, a process involving billions of parameters. After months of training and untold GPU cycles and consumed watts, the final model inherits all the world knowledge of the base Firefly engine but is then overfitted to speak the client’s brand language fluently and exclusively. The output is locked down; it belongs to the client and will never be mixed with another company’s data. The trust factor The entire proposition hinges on two things Adobe believes it alone can offer at this scale: commercial safety and seamless integration. The company has been careful to build its foundational models on licensed Adobe Stock data, shielding its clients from the copyright nightmares that have plagued other AI models. Foundry extends that protection by creating a secure vault for a brands own IP. This focus on safety and its existing enterprise presence is Adobes strategic moat against competitors like Canva, which is also aggressively pursuing the corporate market. When I bring up the competition, Alsark doesn’t seem to be concerned. She claims that clients came to Adobe after experimenting with everything from startups to hyperscalers because they trust Adobe to understand the entire creativity landscape. “They are already deeply into our creative tools. We’re in their marketing stack, and we are enterprise-grade,” she says. The ability to plug a custom, brand-aware AI model directly into the Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects workflows that a company&8217;s creative teams already live in is a killer advantage. Molly Battin, the CMO at The Home Depot, an early Foundry customer, calls it “an exciting step forward in embracing cutting-edge technologies to deepen customer engagement.” For an old guy like me, tired of seeing Silicon Valley promising revolutions every other week, this feels different. The initial AI craze, as I called it in my chat with Alsark, is still about public-facing tools that felt like creative toys. For most of us, anyway. Adobe AI Foundry represents the next, far more serious phase: AI is being forged into a bespoke, industrial-grade weapon for the worlds biggest brands. Its no longer about a single person creating a wild image or helping with a creative roadblock; its about a corporation generating a million on-brand assets before lunch. Its less of a craze and more of a quiet, brutally efficient corporate takeover of the creative process.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a critical-minerals deal at the White House on Monday as the U.S. eyes the continents rich rare-earth resources when China is imposing tougher rules on exporting its own critical minerals abroad. The two leaders described the agreement as an $8.5 billion deal between the allies. Trump said it had been negotiated over several months. Todays agreement on critical minerals and rare earths is just taking the U.S. and Australia’s relationship to the next level,” Albanese added. This month, Beijing announced that it will require foreign companies to get approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even trace amounts of rare-earth materials that originated from China or were produced with Chinese technology. Trump’s Republican administration says this gives China broad power over the global economy by controlling the tech supply chain. Australia is really, really going to be helpful in the effort to take the global economy and make it less risky, less exposed to the kind of rare earth extortion that were seeing from the Chinese, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White Houses National Economic Council, told reporters on Monday morning ahead of Trumps meeting with Albanese. Hassett noted that Australia has one of the best mining economies in the world, while praising its refiners and its abundance of rare earth resources. Among the Australian officials accompanying Albanese are ministers overseeing resources and industry and science, and Australia has dozens of critical minerals sought by the U.S. The prime minister’s visit comes just before Trump is planning to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea later this month. For Albanese’s part, the prime minister said ahead of his visit that the two leaders will have a chance to deepen their countries’ ties on trade and defense. Another expected topic of discussion is AUKUS, a security pact with Australia, the U.S., and the United Kingdom that was signed during U.S. President Joe Bidens Democratic administration. Trump has not indicated publicly whether he would want to keep AUKUS intact, and the Pentagon is reviewing the agreement. Australia and the United States have stood shoulder to shoulder in every major conflict for over a century, Albanese said ahead of the meeting. I look forward to a positive and constructive meeting with President Trump at the White House. The center-left Albanese was reelected in May and suggested shortly after his win that his party increased its majority by not modeling itself on Trumpism. Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian waylooking after each other while building for the future, Albanese told supporters during his victory speech. By Seung Min Kim and Aamer Madhani, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Get ready to hurry up and wait. As delays and cancellations continue to pile up at the nations busiest airports during the weeks-long government shutdown, some travelers who have been anticipating extra headaches are hedging their bets with extra insurance protections. According to data shared with Fast Company from the price comparison service InsureMyTrip, 10% of travel insurance policies purchased in September and into October have included cancel for any reason (CFAR) coverage. Thats the highest percentage of the year so far and above the average of 8% seen from January through August, InsureMyTrip says. The additional protection, which can increase your insurance costs by upwards of 50%, according to NerdWallet, can be a kind of safety net for travelers who are willing and able to spend the extra cash. Travel delays are among the most visible impacts of prolonged government shutdowns, adding increased uncertainty and chaos as air traffic controllers who are being forced to work for partial or no pay call in sick or take leave. Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that staffing shortages were causing delays at airports in Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Newark, according to Reuters. With no end in sight to the political impasse that led to the shutdown, the problem is likely to get worse as thousands of air traffic controllers are expected to miss their paychecks at the end of this month. A hedge against government dysfunction Travel disruptions caused by government regulations are not covered under standard insurance plans, according to InsureMyTrip. Additionally, travelers who had planned to visit one of Americas national parkswhich are only partially open or have reduced services during the shutdownmight find they have little recourse under a standard plan. CFAR coverage offers more protection against the unexpectedor against the expected, depending on your level of confidence in our governments ability to function the way its supposed to. The increased interest in CFAR coverage tracks with a recent report from the trade publication Insurance Business, which cited consumers seeking extra protections in a perpetually uncertain world. According to InsureMyTrip, travelers who opt for that extra coverage can be reimbursed up to 75% of their trips non-refundable costs, provided they cancel 48 hours before they actually leave. Would-be fliers may be considering doing just that. Data from flight tracking service FlightAware shows that delays and cancellations into, within, and out of U.S. airports spiked again this weekend, with some 7,806 delays on Sunday alone. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Americas tourism industry was already facing headwinds before the shutdown, with the U.S. Travel Association expecting total inbound spending to fall 3.2% to $173 billion in 2025, its first decline since 2020. Still, domestic leisure travel had been a bright spot. It’s expected to grow 1.9% to $895 billion this year, according to the associations fall travel update. Whether or not it hits that number might yet depend on a number of possible outcomes, including the most unlikely of all: elected officials doing their jobs.
Category:
E-Commerce
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