How AI Will Impact the Next Era of Agency Creative Work
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.
When you think about AI adoption in creative work, what shifts are top of mind for you and Adobe right now?
I’m seeing a real focus on ROI. It’s not that ROI wasn’t important before, but for the last several years, there was more tolerance for experimentation. Now, most enterprises want to move beyond perpetual pilots and get real wins on the board.
The most successful organizations are realizing that enterprise context is key to ROI. AI systems do whatever we ask of them, but the quality of the result depends on how well the model can ingest up-to-date, nuanced information unique to our organization. When context becomes effortless and self-updating, relevance and ROI improve dramatically.
Another big shift is how enterprises are thinking about media generation versus generative editing. These are distinct capabilities, and many organizations are trying to understand how to use each and integrate both with their existing workflows. There’s a learning curve, so those who start now will be in the best position to capitalize as the technology advances.
How do you see AI changing the role of agencies and how they work with brands?
There will be two big changes. First, agencies will need to become more fluent in AI than their clients. That fluency will become a key source of value. Agencies have always thrived on pattern recognition by bringing lessons from one client to another. Now, being a credible insights hub in AI will be just as important as expertise in brand, creative, or culture.
Second, applied correctly, AI could raise the bar for quality. Agencies handle everything from the biggest brand campaigns to the smallest, most tactical creative assets. As AI increases efficiency in some areas, it will allow teams to direct more creative energy toward higher-value work. The overall standard for creativity will rise.
What excites you most about how creative professionals are using AI? And where do you think caution is warranted?
What excites me is how AI expands what’s possible. Netflix recently announced a project where generative AI was used in production (“El Eternauta”). It was not to replace people, but to make scenes possible that otherwise couldn’t have been shot at all due to budget constraints. AI isn’t replacing creativity; it’s enabling it.
The same is true in enterprise settings. A creative team can now generate high-quality visuals in seconds. Ideas that might once have died on the whiteboard can now come to life immediately.
As for caution, we need to be thoughtful about how we redeploy the time we save. It’s easy to assume that freed-up time will automatically go toward more creative work, but it’s not that simple. Organizations need to think carefully about which new skills and roles will be required to make the most of these tools.
How is Adobe thinking about AI as part of its creative ecosystem, especially for agencies?
AI is central to everything we’re doing at Adobe. If you look at the announcements from Adobe MAX, you’ll see AI-powered innovation across all products, modalities, and customer segments.
But we’re not chasing AI for its own sake. We only pursue projects where we can add tangible value, whether for a creative professional at an agency or for an enterprise as a whole.
Which AI new tools stand out as game changers for agencies?
Generative editing in Photoshop is a huge one. It’s deeply integrated into existing workflows and allows creatives to produce and refine visuals in ways that simply weren’t possible before.
Another is Firefly Creative Production for Enterprise, which introduces node-based workflow building. It allows agencies to build custom, automated workflows through a simple, self-service interface, including natural language prompting. You can ingest multiple images, apply a sequence of actions, and generate an even greater range of outputs automatically. It’s going to be a major leap in scale and efficiency.
What benefits will these tools unlock for agency teams day-to-day?
They’ll be able to move much faster, test creative options more freely, and maintain higher quality across deliverables. As an art director, for instance, you can see how your aesthetic judgment applies across dozens of versions instantly. At the enterprise level, the node-based workflows help teams meet client demand efficiently and consistently.
What advice would you give agency leaders who want to embrace AI without losing the creative spark that makes their work unique?
Focus on tools that enable the workflows you want to have in the future. One example is Firefly Design Intelligence, which we just announced. It lets a brand encode its design rules — everything from logos and typefaces to more nuanced relationships like spatial relationship, visual hierarchies, or layout balance — into a model called a “StyleID.”
That StyleID can then be shared globally, so creatives in any market can adapt and localize campaigns while still staying on-brand. It removes the guesswork from consistency while freeing people up to be creative where it really matters.
To close us out, tell us about one of the best ways you’ve been using AI outside of work.
I’ve vibe coded many apps and built agentic workflows. One particularly helpful use of an agentic browser, though, was for travel planning. I asked the agent to compare dollars and miles options for specific city pairs and date ranges as part of an optimization problem. It was able to reason through the options, surface the best routes, and actually place the itinerary in the checkout flow. I still had to complete the payment myself, but it essentially automated the legwork of finding and organizing the trips. It’s a great example of how AI can handle tedious, time-consuming tasks while freeing up mental bandwidth for higher-value decisions.
Aaron Mitchell Finegold, Adobe Firefly Enterprise
