Hannah Elsakr

Adobe has unveiled new AI video innovations in Premiere Pro and motion graphics upgrades in After Effects, aiming to transform post-production workflows for more seamless storytelling. B&T sat down with Hannah Elsakr, Adobe’s vice president of GenAI new business ventures, who said the new capabilities are levelling the playing field for indie filmmakers and agencies to find out more.

These upgrades include new typography, materials, and 3D features that expand motion design and visual storytelling. It follows Adobe’s unveiling of Adobe Firefly Foundry back in October 2025, which enables businesses to create tailored generative AI models that are unique to their brand. Adobe’s new tools build on these proprietary models.

Trained on entire catalogues of existing IP, these proprietary Adobe Firefly Foundry models can be built on top of commercially safe Adobe Firefly models. This helps teams scale on-brand content production, create new customer experiences and extend their IP.

With Adobe’s GenAI model Firefly as the anchor, Adobe Firefly Foundry models can support all major asset types including image, video, audio, vector and 3D—accelerating content delivery for brand campaigns, performance marketing, media production workflows and more.

But while many have opined on generative AI’s transformative effects, Elsakr believes it is simply the next tool in a long line of creative technologies—one that should enhance human vision, not replace it, though with significant ramifications for the business of creativity. That framing has resonated with some of the most IP-conscious brands in the world, including Walt Disney, which is working with Adobe to build private, custom AI models tuned to its own visual DNA.

“They don’t want their IP floating out in some unknown world. Enterprise security, brand integrity and authorship really matter at that level,” Elsakr said.

Elsakr told B&T how Home Depot leveraged Adobe’s new AI capabilities, a retailer that needed AI-generated imagery that wasn’t just on-brand, but accurate down to product usage.

“If someone’s holding a saw, they need to be holding it the right way for safety. That kind of precision doesn’t exist in general-purpose models. But when you tune a model with your brand, your products and your rules, it does”.

That same logic applies whether you’re producing a $100 million theatrical release or a 42-second ad spot. Elsakr said the process—ideation, production, post-production and endless variations—is largely the same. AI is simply there to reduce workload and boost seamlessness.

“You still need a creative brief. You ideate. You get it greenlit. You produce. Then you go into post-production. That process is pretty much the same,” she said.

What has changed is scale.

“We consume so much content that we get fatigued if we don’t see freshness,” she said.

Faster production, fewer gatekeepers

For film studios, the economics are becoming increasingly unforgiving. With audiences fragmenting across platforms, every delay in release can translate to lost revenue. Adobe’s focus on simplifying workflows by leveraging AI aims to cut costs and time.

“If a film costs $1 million a minute to produce, anything that speeds up time-to-release or lowers cost matters,” Elsakr said.

Adobe’s AI-assisted pre-visualisation is already helping directors align stakeholders faster, while post-production tools in Photoshop and Premiere Pro are cutting down hours of manual work, from removing background extras to cleaning up shots frame by frame.

But the most profound shift may be happening at the independent end of the market.

“Some smaller filmmakers are saying, ‘I could never have been greenlit before’. Now they can make something, get it seen, and bypass a lot of traditional gatekeepers”.

The same benefits apply to indie agencies, too.

Variant creation—tailoring content for different audiences, platforms and formats—is one of the clearest AI wins so far in Elsakr’s mind. Where brands once shot a single asset and hoped it resonated broadly, they can now create multiple contextually relevant versions without reshooting.

“We’ve seen ROIs north of 60 per cent on this. Brands already have the data; they just don’t have enough content,” Elsakr said.

“Smaller agencies that are not the agency of record for large brands are getting work now. Why? Because they have a unique point of view–they’re getting their stuff seen. These agencies are pitching decks that look like finished work. They can move faster, come in under budget, and compete on ideas rather than resources”.

“It’s interesting from a ‘levelling the playing field’ perspective, or democratising the industry,” she added.

Letting consumers into the brand story

Another area that Adobe’s new AI capabilities are focusing is user-generated content—and the brand’s role in enabling it.

Elsakr cites work with the NFL, which provided AI-powered Adobe Express templates to thousands of fans, influencers and partners.

“Instead of shutting content down, they said: ‘Here are the guardrails — logo here, font here, vertical video.’ Suddenly you have 2,000 brand ambassadors”.

“The new definition of personalisation is that consumers want to drive the narrative of the brand,” Elsakr said, quoting former Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey.

“This is the beauty of AI. I think it’s unlocking new experiences that we couldn’t have done before”.

Trust & AI

For Elsakr, the conversation always starts and ends with trust.

Adobe has relationships with studios and agencies spanning decades. “When you’re the one they have trusted in the industry for 40 years to edit Academy Award-winning films, they feel like they can trust us with our use of AI,” she said.

Trust is also inherently tied to Adobe’s AI standards: “Clean pixels in means clean pixels out. That matters to enterprises, to brands, and to creators”.

It’s a phrase Elsakr returns to often, and it underpins Adobe’s Firefly family of generative AI models, which are trained exclusively on licensed data. For Adobe, responsible AI isn’t just a legal safeguard — it’s part and parcel of their approach to creativity.

“Adobe is about the human creator and visionary at the centre; it always has been”.

She’s quick to point out that when Photoshop first showed up on the scene, people genuinely believed it would destroy the craft. “Now we use ‘Photoshop’ as a verb”.

Adobe’s push into AI signals that the big players are driving small but transformational changes, and that soon, ‘AI’ might become a verb, just as Photoshop did. As indie agencies and filmmakers look to reach audiences with their creative visions, there’s potentially more room for big ideas.

Both in film and advertising, Adobe is positioning itself as something of a steady hand in a rapidly shifting industry.

By Fredrika Stigell B&T

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