Adobe now lets every company bring its own branding to Firefly models

Every company has a distinct brand; a look, a feel, and a messaging strategy that defines who that company is. The introduction of large language models to the creative process should have made it easier to incorporate all that branding into the model, but it has actually been a big challenge for companies until now. 

This week, at Adobe Max, the company introduced Firefly Foundry, which provides the ability to incorporate all those unique assets for each customer into the Firefly models.

Firefly was introduced at Max three years ago with the goal of bringing generative AI models to the creative process, helping create content with a natural language prompt, but it lacked knowledge of the company’s brand. "The base models don't understand brand or franchise, so if you try to prompt it for a particular brand, it doesn't understand that IP," Hannah Elsakr, vice president of Generative AI & new business ventures at Adobe told FastForward.

The new capability lets customers train the Firefly models on its own brand assets, so the model understands what new content needs to look like. Adobe’s Firefly models support multiple formats including image, video, vector, audio and 3D. It’s a natural evolution of what they’ve done to this point and Elsakr says customers were asking for models that could understand their entire brand profile.

While they were previously offering a couple of levels of customization, it wasn’t enough. “Custom models is a self-serve, single concept customization for images. Firefly Services is the API suite that lets you access the models via API. So that was really great, but most customers said, ‘I need more. I need you to understand my whole world,’” she said.

It’s important to understand that unlike these prior tools that offered light customization, Firefly Foundry involves a partnership with Adobe to make this work. “Embedded Adobe specialists—including applied AI/ML scientists and forward-deployed engineers—collaborate with businesses to identify critical challenges, co-design tailored models and deliver high-impact use cases that accelerate time-to-value and ROI,” she wrote in a blog post announcing Firefly Foundry.

Building private models

The product really takes advantage of all the Adobe creative tools, along with the generic Firefly models to give companies one that's customized and tuned to their specific requirements. "So they end up with a private, bespoke, IP-protected, for-your-enterprise-only model that supports their marketing and creative use cases, and can be integrated into the entire Adobe ecosystem," she said.

For companies, this approach ensures that their intellectual property is protected because it’s private and only accessible to them. Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, who is attending Adobe Max this week, says this tool gives Adobe a real advantage with creative professionals looking for a way to incorporate AI into their work process safely. 

“The main thing with Foundry is the multi-concept training. You train with multi-modal input and you can leverage your own IP — brands, styles and characters. Foundry does the heavy tuning which other models don’t do,” Wang said.

Enhancing humans, not replacing them

Elsakr says it’s about using AI to drive creativity, not replace creative pros. She uses what Gatorade has done with custom bottles using the Adobe toolset as an example of how this could work. You can go to the Gatorade site and create your own bottle with your choice of patterns, colors and text. 

“It's a Firefly-powered custom bottle, premium priced and launched for Christmas. It's over-performing for them,” she said. “But it respects the brand. It respects the Gatorade bolt, the design pattern. But you and I can design our own AI bottles that represent the things we like.”

Adobe also announced it has acquired Invoke, a startup that builds AI-powered tools for generating and editing custom images. Founder Kent Keirsey confirmed in a LinkedIn post that his team is joining Adobe to help further develop creative AI workflows. Founded in 2023 with $3.8 million in funding, Invoke brings specialized know-how in enterprise-grade image generation. 

By integrating Invoke’s technology with Firefly Foundry, Adobe aims to offer businesses a powerful way to produce brand-specific assets at scale.

This is an expanded version of a news brief that originally appeared in FastForward #43.

Featured photo courtesy of Ray Wang, Constellation Research.