Adobe inspires TED2025 attendees to dream bigger in a new era of human potential

For the second year in a row, TED teamed up with Adobe in a visionary partnership to explore human capability at the intersection of AI and creativity.

Adobe’s role as TED’s exclusive strategic design partner for TED2025 made “perfect sense” to Jay Herratti, CEO & director at TED.

“‘Humanity Reimagined’ was our theme,” Herratti said. “We reflected on the rapid rise of AI and posed the question, ‘What are humans for?’ Adobe met us at that moment with a precise answer to this query. They envisioned a new era of human potential where AI tools enhance our creativity, inspiring TED attendees to dream even bigger for our collective future.”

Adobe was honored to continue its partnership with TED, said Amit Singh, senior director of Global Brand Partnerships at Adobe. “Our brands share a common belief that creativity propels human potential, and TED2025 is a powerful platform to showcase our commitment to the design community.”

The partnership between Adobe and TED is a natural one, according to Adobe’s principal product marketing manager Patricia Buffa: “For decades, both TED and Adobe have been reflecting on technology, entertainment, and design. We both share a creator-centric ethos and care deeply about the advancement of the future of creativity.”

While TED offers a platform for brilliant thinkers and pioneers to come together for meaningful conversations, Adobe empowers creativity by supplying the most advanced technology.

At the same time, generative AI has raised questions about how humans interact with these new models of machine intelligence, acknowledged Adobe’s chief technology officer Ely Greenfield. In fact, Greenfield said, generative AI is allowing people to unleash their inner creators.

“Creativity is an inherently human trait,” he said, “so AI is not going to replace you — it’s going to allow you to explore more ideas, edit and create much faster, and produce content you might never have been able to before.”

At TED2025, Greenfield spoke at two impactful sessions that brought together senior leaders across business, academia, media, and creative industries.

Adobe and TED hosted a Spotlight Conversation panel on “AI as a Creative Partner” involved a highly engaging discussion on how creators are already working in collaboration with generative AI to amplify imagination, accelerate workflows and discover new modes of storytelling. Futurist AC Coppens moderated the standing-room-only, interactive session that included Greenfield and Hugging Face’s Apolinário Passos.

“AI represents both an evolutionary and revolutionary shift,” Greenfield said. “There has been an evolution from forcing humans to speak machine language to making machines better understand human language — a shift from ‘do what I say’ to ‘do what I mean.’At the same time, AI represents such a leap in speed, capability, and performance — it’s transformative.”

While AI makes it possible for anyone to be a creator, it also elevates possibilities for trained professionals, allowing them to push creative boundaries even further, he added. “Our tools take away some of the toil, allowing the creator to focus on the conceptual piece up front.”

At a private event hosted by PwC, Greenfield joined other C-level executives for an informal discussion on AI and its implications. Attendees included Scott Likens, Chief AI Engineering Officer at PwC U.S., and Lili Cheng, VP of AI Research at Microsoft.

The conversation underscored Adobe’s leadership in generative AI and the value of Adobe’s Firefly tools as both creator-friendly and commercially safe. “Firefly is trained only on licensed content,” Greenfield said. “We know that Firefly content is commercially safe, and we know where all the data comes from so that we can ensure trust in digital content.”

Adobe and TED also hosted the Design Dinner, an exclusive dinner for fifty visionaries, artists, and change-makers. The Design Dinner celebrated creativity and design and allowed participants to share bold ideas and have meaningful conversations about the future of AI.

“These are interesting individuals with rich stories and creative backgrounds,” said Adobe’s senior director of Design, Firefly, Samantha Warren. “It was so inspiring to get to hear people’s stories — their backgrounds and their journeys as creatives.”

To emphasize and enhance the creator in all of us, Adobe encouraged all 1,600+ TED2025 attendees to take our new interactive quiz, “Creative Types Shape the Future.” Integrated with Firefly, the quiz reveals not just what kind of creative type you are, but your creative possibilities.

“The approach of the new quiz is to explore what kind of creative you can become to contribute towards our common future,” said Adobe’s senior creative director Kashka Pregowska-Czerw. “Everybody has a creative type, a creative side that they use, if not in their job, then perhaps in their passion project. We want to empower people to lean into their creative strengths as well as their potential.”

Attendees were able to take the quiz at Adobe’s Reimagination Lounge, where interactive exhibits show-cased the power of Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express, and Adobe Acrobat. After completing the quiz, they could transform their results into shareable content.

Try it yourself. Take the quiz at mycreativetype.com and bring your results to life with Adobe Acrobat, Firefly, and Express.