SINGAPORE – Extra fingers. Illegible text. Facial features that look eerily symmetrical. These are the telltale signs of AI-generated visuals that you may spot in an advertisement poster or social media post today.
These common mistakes are fuelling negative sentiment about AI among the creative community, with many perceiving the drastically increased accessibility to graphic design and content creation more as a bane than a boon.
Not only is AI taking away their jobs, many have said, but it is also destroying the intrinsic value of art.
But Adobe, the world’s largest provider of creative software, believes AI can play a dominant role in the future of content creation without harming the industry.
The flood of AI content will only make audiences more discerning, and that only increases demand for quality content, says Ben Goodman, president of Asia-Pacific and Japan (JAPAC) at Adobe, in an interview with The Straits Times.
Discerning quality in AI-generated content
“There was definitely a period of time when AI increased the volume of content and created a bifurcation in the market,” Goodman says.
“People very quickly began to understand content that was created by AI no longer met their standards, and that raised the bar for content.”
With more people now able to create content, audiences’ expectations and standards have also been raised.
They can now differentiate between a piece of content created by a skilled artist or a “well-curated” one with very high levels of prompting within an AI platform versus a poorly generated one, Goodman says.
This has also led to companies and brands executing better digital marketing campaigns, which ultimately benefit consumers.
The effectiveness of these campaigns lies not just in their quality, but also in their ability to personalise content beyond the typical demographic groups like age or location, to target the individual audience member.
Oftentimes, this results in audiences receiving different kinds of imagery that brands believe they would best engage with.
This, Goodman says, is one of the key benefits that AI brings to the table for digital marketing.
“If someone reaches out to me and they’re not personalising to my unique profile, I feel under-served by that brand. So my standards and expectations have all gone up.”
Beyond colours and shapes to data analytics
Adobe is known globally for its suite of creative software like Photoshop and Illustrator, which are now sold on a subscription-based model via its cloud.
While it has been a household name for graphic and editing software for decades, its business model today goes deeper than simply providing tools for artists and designers.
The company sets its sights on being a leading data analytics firm.
Data and insights have been integral to its enterprise business since 2009, when it acquired analytics firm Omniture for US$1.8 billion and rebranded it as Adobe Analytics.
In 2016, the company began to introduce AI into its software and services.
Adobe Sensei, an AI and machine-learning technology, learnt patterns from data to identify what the user wants to edit. This allowed Adobe software to automate and streamline creative tasks such as recognising objects in images, selecting subjects and removing backgrounds to make image-editing tasks easier.
Sensei later transitioned to Adobe’s wider AI offerings, which also encompass its enterprise software, allowing customers to generate insights for their marketing and advertising campaigns to help them better understand customer behaviour and preferences.
Adobe Firefly, which can not only generate images and videos but also sound effects and speech, was launched in March 2023 amid growing public interest in generative AI (GenAI). ChatGPT had gone viral months earlier with its text-to-image model DALL-E 2, while Midjourney also brought high-quality and artistic AI-generated images into the spotlight.
In April 2026, Adobe launched CX Enterprise Coworker, an agentic AI system for large businesses that coordinates and automates marketing tasks related to customer experience (CX) or how customers engage with a company or brand.
It runs across Adobe applications and third-party AI platforms, and can analyse customer data, identify target audiences, create marketing campaigns for human review and deliver real-time insights.
Goodman says its AI-powered tools not only help customers keep pace with the sheer volume of diversified content pieces required for their campaigns across multiple channels, but also enter new markets that would traditionally be difficult to access due to language barriers.
He cites the example of Japan, whose brands historically had trouble scaling internationally.
GenAI has helped significantly in localising their content for overseas markets. Likewise, international brands can also establish their presence in Japan more quickly and launch loyalty programmes, which are a key factor in international growth.
Speed is also of vital importance for digital marketers in today’s world.
Three years ago, it would have been a far-fetched dream to broadcast an ad with the World Cup winner within mere minutes of the final whistle.
Today, with AI, brands can react instantly to major sporting events with compelling and creative content, while planning entire campaigns that would have taken months of conceptualisation and design in the past has now been whittled to just days or even hours, Goodman notes.
AI boost for company earnings
For the third quarter of the 2026 financial year ended Aug 28, Adobe’s subscription revenue from creative and marketing professionals was US$4.7 billion (S$6 billion), up 13% year on year. Meanwhile, subscription revenue from business professionals and consumers also grew 16% year on year to US$1.9 billion.
But despite its strong earnings, the company has been caught up in negative market sentiment that has hit tech stocks, particularly software-as-a-service companies, amid the AI boom. Adobe shares are down about 25% year to date.
Goodman says the company is not deterred by its performance on Wall Street. Rather, it is focused on delivering healthy revenue, which will continue to be bolstered by an uptick in the adoption of its AI products.
“Growth in Adobe’s AI portfolio, and seeing great growth and adoption in lots of different areas are to me leading indicators of where we’re headed in the future.”
Adobe is also facing competition from online image editing and design tools that are available for free or at a fraction of the company’s subscription rates, which range from US$70 a month for individual users to a few hundred dollars for enterprise customers, depending on the size of their teams.
But Goodman says the strong earnings demonstrate that the company’s products are still the leading industry standard. Customers also place a high level of trust in the company’s brand and products.
He points to the recent acquisition of Topaz Labs, which specialises in photo and video enhancement, in September for US$340 million as how Adobe would continue to innovate its products to give its customers more options.
“Adobe has pioneered the creative space for the last 40-odd years across the industry, and it’s no longer just the bastion of specific digital artisans. We’re empowering every individual to create, and that continues to be a very strong growth engine for Adobe globally.”
Singapore an important hub
While Adobe did not disclose its figures for the JAPAC market, it says the strong momentum in the region presents a significant growth opportunity, as more organisations are moving quickly to adopt AI to transform their customer engagement models.
This is particularly so in Singapore, where companies “have consistently demonstrated a willingness to embrace new technologies and set a high bar for customer experience” using content, data and AI. Adobe says it sees strong opportunities across sectors like financial services, travel, retail and the public sector.
For instance, the Singapore Tourism Board modernised its Visit Singapore campaign website using Adobe’s cloud-native platform Experience Manager to deliver more personalised experiences for travellers across seven markets and reduced website maintenance costs by around 20%.
Hong Kong jewellery brand Chow Tai Fook also saw a 25% increase in average order value and 40% increase in repeat purchases after it used Adobe’s data and insights to create more connected customer experiences on its retail, e-commerce and loyalty platforms.
Goodman says Singapore, home to Adobe’s regional headquarters, is an important strategic hub as it often gives the company “a glimpse into where the rest of the region is heading”.
“Singapore combines a highly sophisticated enterprise ecosystem with world-class digital infrastructure, strong government-industry collaboration, and a clear ambition to lead in AI,” he says. “It is not simply adopting the next generation of technology, but also helping to shape how that technology can be deployed responsibly and at scale.”
He refers to Adobe’s memorandum of understanding signed in May with HTX, the Ministry of Home Affairs’ science and technology agency, to advance content-authenticity technologies that combat manipulated media and strengthen digital content verification.
This is an example of how Singapore has been particularly forward-thinking about content authenticity, as well as the need for greater transparency on how digital and AI-generated content is created, he says.
This will only become more important as GenAI becomes ubiquitous, he adds. Singapore can then serve as a launchpad for innovation and use cases that can be applied in Adobe’s other markets undergoing similar transformation.
“That gives us enormous confidence in Singapore. As AI moves from experimentation into enterprise-wide deployment, I believe Singapore will be one of the markets setting the pace.”
