AI Powers New Possibilities for Creative Ops

Meta tags. Documentation. Forms. These are words that sound like kryptonite to most creative super heroes. That’s why managing files, processes and workflows has been a longstanding cultural challenge for every big agency or brand that needs to manage more than a handful of assets.

And now, it’s more important than ever. Creating personalized marketing, delivering it across multiple devices and measuring its effectiveness requires unprecedented scale, collaboration and consistency.

It’s a need that’s spawned a brand new job category inside creative organizations everywhere—creative ops. It also requires new tools, technologies and capabilities to be successful.

The Need for Creative Ops

85% of our customers tell us that they feel under pressure to execute and design campaigns more quickly. As the need for personalization increases, they have to create ten times the number of assets they used to. The result? There’s a strong need for speed and scale.

Social media is another driving force because content shelf life drastically drops. In many cases it lives and dies in that first impression of about 5-8 seconds. There’s a clear need to increase production without reducing quality. It’s about managing hundreds of small interactions that culminate into a brand experience.

In this context, creative ops is all about finding and combining the right set of tools, technologies, processes and collaborative workflows. The goal is to speed up the process of design at scale, without getting in the way of creativity and innovation. When it’s done correctly, there’s a beautiful dance that emerges out of the tension of trying to apply a process to organic creativity.

The challenge is that many of the essential disciplines of creative ops—things like asset curation, rights management, workflow processes, collaboration tools and security—require specialized technical expertise and the kind of rote discipline that most creative teams do their best to avoid. The truth is that designers love to design, but they hate managing their assets.

The Future of AI and Creative Efficiency

Knowing this, one of the things we’ve always tried to do at Adobe is simplify the workflow across our products, so that all the different tools work together seamlessly and consistently. It’s a core benefit for design teams that have fully embraced the Creative Cloud.

We’ve also worked to automate tedious and repetitive design tasks that slow creative people down—the nuts and bolts work of creative efficiency.

The most exciting thing happening in creative ops right now, however, is the potential of artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, efficacy and empowerment for each individual designer.

The AI in Adobe Sensei is already being applied in products like Adobe Asset Manager to analyze digital images as they’re uploaded and automatically tag them. That’s a useful timesaver.

AI is very good at pattern recognition. It helps get the grunt work out of the way so that designers have the time to think and solve problems. But beyond that, we see a future where AI will be powerful enough to free-associate and help with the ideation process itself.

It won’t be long before AI is capable of powering personalized creative assistants, anticipating our needs or even offering advice and insight as a valued creative collaborator. There are already AIs that have composed songs and generated original artwork, so the idea that they can be used to help an artist generate variation or reinterpret their own work is not that far off.

Ultimately, we think AI is going to be like electricity—it’s going to power everything. There’s so much potential to not only increase efficiency, but also to enhance the entire process of creativity and innovation. And that’s the ultimate goal of creative ops.

Want to learn more about creative ops and AI? Adobe is a proud sponsor of theCreative Operations Exchange East Conference, September 25-26, 2017. Sign up with the discount code ADOBE15 to save 15% off your conference pass, and hear more from Chris Duffey as he explains the role Adobe Sensei and AI will play in future innovation and creativity.