The news: Hannah Elsakr, VP of new genAI business ventures at Adobe, framed AI-enabled tools not as a job disruptor but as “an exponential amplifier to our own humanity and creativity,” at LWT’s TechFutures 2025 in New York City this week.

She outlined three frontiers reshaping brand storytelling: AI companions, personalized marketing at scale, and world-building around IP.

Why it matters: For creatives, the AI leap is already here. Nearly all (93%) of North American marketers now use generative AI (genAI) tools, and 79% have automated campaign workflows, per WBR.

Elsakr said this shift removes bottlenecks that once defined the creative process: “AI agents aren’t replacing creators—they’re creative helpers. They remove the drudgery so you can focus on what’s truly imaginative.”

From tagging hours of footage to resizing designs for dozens of platforms, AI now performs in minutes what once consumed entire teams.

• Adobe’s Firefly models can interpret abstract prompts (“make this pop”), generate multilingual assets for various regions, and tailor visuals to context.
• Tools like Adobe Express translate loose ideas into polished branded content—turning AI into an accessible copilot for every marketer, not just designers.

GenAI, Elsakr said, has matured from novelty to necessity: “Human taste and ingenuity become even more paramount. AI simply widens the canvas.”

Personalized marketing, solved by scale: The data backs her urgency. While most marketers now use AI, only 44% deploy AI-driven assistants to personalize creative output.

True one-to-one marketing demands millions of localized assets, and responsible AI makes that achievable. Brands can safely produce “10 times the content on flat budgets” without losing fidelity, nuance, or tone, per Elsakr.

Building brand universes: Elsakr described world building as the next creative frontier—where brands, media, and entertainment companies train custom AI models on their proprietary IP. The goal—to create self-contained “brand universes” that understand their visual language, storylines, and design logic.

Our take: AI’s most immediate unlock is scale. Generative tools allow marketers to personalize across products and audiences and localize for regions at a pace no human team could match.

Brands should prioritize scalable AI pilots, adopt commercially safe AI models, and lead internal change from the top. Provenance, licensing, and IP protection must be built in—not bolted on—if AI is to expand creativity without eroding trust.