In every creative project there’s a moment when your instinct takes hold: a bold edit, a new scene, a wild direction you never thought of. Having the right tools helps you follow that instinct and go further than you planned.
At Adobe, that’s what excites us about creative AI: its potential to remove barriers between having an idea and bringing it to life. It can give you more ways to explore, build new skills and push the boundaries of what you can create, while keeping your own voice and creative direction at the center.
The creator economy is evolving rapidly, and so are the ways you work, grow and embrace new technologies. Through our "Creators’ Toolkit Report", we’ve been taking the pulse of these shifts to better understand your evolving needs and ambitions.
Our latest survey of more than 2,000 U.S. creators shows how creative AI is helping creators grow their audiences and businesses, while revealing what you want next: greater precision and control, new skills to pursue opportunities in video, and ways to take on more complex projects with agents.
Creators are growing with AI, and most are confident they can build the skills to keep up
For creators already using creative AI, the benefits are showing up in something tangible: growth. More than three-quarters (78 percent) of creators who currently use creative AI say it has accelerated the growth of their business or following. That number goes up to 89 percent for full-time creators. As AI becomes a bigger part of their toolkit, creators also recognize the importance of developing their AI skills to stay competitive and pursue new opportunities.
- 60 percent of creators say they believe creators with advanced AI skills are getting opportunities they aren’t, and 51 percent expect the gap between AI-skilled creators and everyone else to widen.
- Among creators who currently use creative AI, 89 percent are confident they can learn the AI skills they need to keep growing.
Creators recognize that AI skills can open doors, and most believe they can develop the skills they need. As these tools evolve, curiosity, a strong point of view and a willingness to keep learning remain essential. AI can help remove technical barriers, but creators bring the ideas, voice and judgment that shape the work.
Creators have bigger ideas, but sometimes settle for “close enough”
The more ambitious the idea, the more the details matter. And as creators incorporate creative AI into their workflows, they want greater control over the results, so the finished work matches their creative vision.
- 60 percent of creators using AI say the use of creative AI has made it at least somewhat easier to create content that stands out from other creators’ work.
- 68 percent of creators who use creative AI say they at least sometimes settle for a result that doesn’t quite match what they had in mind.
- In the past three months, 47 percent of creators who have used AI gave up on it in the middle of a project because the result they had in mind took too much effort, with 27 percent of those being frustrated that they couldn’t change one part of their work without redoing the rest.
Creative work is rarely a single decision. Creators need to adjust details, rethink edits and refine their work as ideas evolve. Creative AI becomes more useful when creators can make those changes without losing what's already working.
Video ambitions are growing, but skills can stand in the way of opportunity
That desire to do more is especially apparent with video, where creators see new opportunities but also face challenges developing the skills to pursue them.
Creators recognize that video is an important way to grow their audiences and businesses, develop their skills and pursue new opportunities. More than a third (38 percent) of creators say they’re making more video than a year ago, and nearly two-thirds (65 percent) say making more video assets is important to achieving their goals.
But wanting to make more videos and having the skills to produce them aren't always the same thing. For some creators, that gap is already affecting their ability to pursue paid work: 34 percent of full-time creators say they’ve turned down a paid video opportunity in the past three months because they didn’t feel they had the skills to deliver it.
That's where creators see value in AI assistance that extends beyond brainstorming. When creators were asked to select up to three areas of video creation and editing where they wanted AI assistance, the most commonly selected were:
- 21 percent selected adding visual effects or removing unwanted details
- 19 percent selected editing and arranging clips into a complete story
- 18 percent selected cleaning up speech or fixing unwanted sound
For creators looking to expand into video, that assistance can help them overcome technical barriers and focus more on storytelling. And as AI becomes capable of handling more complex tasks at their direction, creators are exploring how it can help them pursue work that once felt out of reach.
Early adopters of agentic AI are taking on bigger projects on their own terms
Agents are still an emerging technology for creators, but early adopters are finding they can take on more complex projects and pursue paid opportunities that previously felt out of reach.
Among creators who have used an agent for creative work:
- 36 percent say agents have let them complete a project that was too complex for them before
- 26 percent say they could accept a type of paid project they couldn’t take before
- 59 percent say agents save them time overall, even after they have given instructions, checked and refined results, and made creative decisions.
But greater assistance doesn't mean creators want to give up creative authority. More than three-quarters (77 percent) of creators surveyed say the final creative decision should always remain with the human creator, even when using agents.
Creators have the ideas, ambitions and creative vision. What they need are ways to overcome the barriers between imagining something and bringing it to life.
Take your creativity further at Adobe MAX 2026
As Adobe MAX kicks off tomorrow, we’re excited to dig into the challenges we can help you tackle: getting exactly the result you pictured, building the skills for video and taking on bigger projects, all with your perspective, voice and taste at the center of everything you make. Join us at max.adobe.com to watch the keynotes and see what we’ve been working on!
Methodology: Adobe partnered with The Harris Poll to survey more than 2,000 U.S. creators in October 2026. For this survey, creators were defined as individuals who create and publish digital content several times per month to inform, entertain or engage an audience across digital platforms, with respondents comprising emerging and full-time creators. Creative AI refers to AI models and tools designed to support creative expression by helping creators ideate, generate and edit content across images, video, audio and design.
