Adobe Built the Right AI Product. Will Anyone Trust Them?
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
It’s a tale as old as business itself.
A company gains near-monopoly mindshare and a huge chunk of the market through disruptive innovation and scrappy execution. Then it gets lazy: advancements slow down, quality craters, customer service becomes a nightmare, and culture moves on. Some companies manage to climb back to the top, like Microsoft. Some just keep limping on, living in the shadow of past glory like Victoria’s Secret or Harley Davidson.
The AI Foundry is Adobe’s best attempt to survive.
Believe it or not, Adobe actually built something legitimately useful this time. The AI Foundry is not a feature, rather a managed service: it lets enterprises work directly with Adobe’s team to create custom generative AI models trained on their own intellectual property. The company’s scientists surgically reopen the base Firefly model and retrain it with your brand’s footage, design language, product catalogs, and creative guidelines. The result is a multimodal system that can generate text, images, video, and 3D content that actually looks and sounds like your brand, not like every other company using the same generic foundation model.
This matters because prompting has limits. Yes, you can craft elaborate system prompts and feed in style guides and reference images. But custom models trained on your IP don’t just mimic your brand, they internalize it.
The difference between prompting a generic model and deploying a custom-trained one is the difference between hiring a contractor who reads your brand book once and hiring someone who’s worked at your company for five years.
One will give you something that checks the boxes.
The other will give you something that feels native.
The commercially safe positioning is smart too. Adobe trained Firefly exclusively on licensed data, which means using their Foundry service genuinely reduces copyright exposure compared to scraping-based alternatives.
This approach is absolutely the right one. The technology is genuinely good. Custom models trained on brand IP are the future of creative automation. All of that is true.
But.
The real question is whether companies will trust Adobe after years of subscription price hikes, predatory licensing changes, and customer support that, frankly, makes the DMV look efficient.
Because while Adobe was busy alienating its user base, Canva was building an empire. Canva isn’t just cheaper—it’s actually more innovative in the ways that matter to modern marketing teams. Collaborative workflows that don’t require a PhD to understand. Templates that don’t feel like they’re from 2012. Integrations that just work. And yes, they’re coming for AI too.
Adobe has the technical sophistication, but competitors have something arguably more valuable: trust and momentum. You can build the best custom model service in the world, but if your target customers spent the last five years learning to hate doing business with you, even a legitimately great product might not be enough.
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