A conversation between Aaron Finegold, Head of Product Marketing, Firefly Enterprise @ Adobe and Matt McCue, Report Guest Editor

As AI continues to reshape creative workflows, agency leaders are rethinking how their teams ideate, produce, and deliver work for clients. In this conversation, Aaron Finegold, Head of Product Marketing for Firefly Enterprise at Adobe, shares how agencies can turn AI from a buzzword into a business advantage and use it to scale creativity, accelerate production, and strengthen brand consistency.

by Sara Vienna, Chief Design Officer @ Metalab

We’ve all felt it. That low hum of disruption shaking the walls of creative work. AI has crashed into the industry, loud, fast, and full of promise. But behind the flashy demos and overnight feature launches, the real shift isn’t just technological. It’s philosophical.

by Zach Perkins, AI Creative Technologist @ Adobe

Adobe Firefly Services and Custom Models empower creative teams to scale creative production without sacrificing craft. By integrating automation into creative workflows, Firefly Services becomes your creative partner taking on the quick production of brand-safe, on-style, and on-demand assets for delivery across channels while significantly reducing manual effort, time to market, and production costs.

by Jesse Nasadowski, Strategist and Seth Akkerman, Sr. Creative Tech Lead @ Instrument

For too long, marketing has been split between performance focused on clicks, conversions, and short-term growth and brand focused on long-term equity and emotional resonance. The result is that many growth efforts either sacrifice brand or rely on generic best practices that fail to capture what makes a company unique.

by Sarah Crooks, Director of Growth @ HUSH

For decades, the promise of smart buildings has shaped how we think about architecture. With the help of technological progress, sensors, screens, and connected systems, spaces have become more automated, but rarely meaningful.

by Josh McClauss, SVP, Revenue & Marketing @ Monks

If you're an agency leader, your last two years have probably felt like one long, breathless conversation about AI. We've cycled through hype and panic, marveling at single-point solutions that promised to change everything overnight. But the novelty is wearing off.

by Jameson Proctor, Partner & CEO @ Athletics

“AI today doesn’t have true creativity… It can maybe prove something that you give it, but it’s not able to come up with a new idea or new theory itself.”

by Henry Daubrez, formerly Partner @ DEPT®

For most of my creative life, I’ve worked from the inside out. The work came from my hands, my thoughts, my vision: I was the engine, the filter, and the critic and I would pour myself into a concept, shape it, defend it, and often stick with it far longer than I should have. That’s the pattern many of us fall into. We grow too close to the work to truly see it.

by PJ Pereira, Co-Founder @ Pereira O'Dell & Silverside AI

The arrival of AI into marketing has generated exactly what you’d expect from any new and transformative force: excitement, fear, overpromises, and, at times, paralysis. Agencies and brands are racing to showcase proof-of-concept projects and AI-powered case studies, while others are frozen in hesitation, waiting for things to “settle.”

by Nikita D’souza, Assistant VP of Marketing @ Kulfi Collective

If you’ve ever opened Netflix and thought, “How do they know exactly what I want to watch tonight?” or scrolled Instagram and found a meme that felt like it was made just for you—you’ve felt the shift from scale to personalization at scale.

by Olivia Reid, Music Artist & Lead Strategist @ Journey

Imagine a stadium that breathes. As the Coldplay concert sweeps into the chorus of ‘Yellow,’ it almost feels like the audience is breathing life into the venue. This energy isn’t just from the music – but from thousands of golden wristbands – lit up and swaying together like a single field of wheat blowing in the wind. This is a simple, but effective example of venues and artists adding novelty to their live performance, by activating the audience as part of the show.