I didn’t make it to Miami Beach this year for Adobe MAX. Instead, I watched it the way most of us experience everything now: through livestreams, clips, memes, hot takes, and threads written by people who may or may not have been there. It just might have been the most fitting way to experience a conference this focused on technology doing the heavy lifting for you.

But the push on AI is definitely not a new one, Adobe went all in on generative AI in 2023, and MAX has been heavily focused on it since. That first year, Adobe celebrated three billion Firefly images, and the audience was silent. While the Adobe team framed the numbers as unprecedented adoption, many working illustrators, photographers, and designers in that very room viewed the metrics with anxiety rather than excitement. For traditional creatives, massive AI generation volume represented potential job displacement and the rapid commoditization of visual art

A year later, vague terms-of-service language had designers panicking that their work was training Adobe’s models, and ever since, MAX has felt somewhat like damage control. However, Adobe reassures its most loyal users that AI is a helper, not a replacement.