Hey friends,
Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.
I recorded this week's episode at Creator Beach during Cannes Lions with Govind Balakrishnan. Govind is the SVP and General Manager of Adobe Express at Adobe, and this conversation touched on the tension between using AI to go faster and using it to actually say something worth hearing.
Govind has been at Adobe for a long time, building tools across the .com era through the AI era, and his perspective on what creators are getting right and getting wrong right now is eye opening. If you would rather watch the full conversation, it is on YouTube and Spotify.
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Govind’s Career Advice
Govind said what has kept him at Adobe through so many different chapters of the company was about seeking out the challenges that other people were avoiding.
He said that throughout his career, he has consistently picked projects where people internally were not sure it was going to work. Things with the odds stacked against them. His move was to pull in the right people, build the right energy around the problem, and see what happened. That philosophy carried him through Flash, through Creative Cloud, and now through Express.
For creators and founders building their own thing, Govind advised that you need to have self-belief, the willingness to persevere through the inevitable down periods without letting them knock you off course, and the willingness to pivot when the signals are telling you that your current direction is not what it needs to be.
86% of Creators Are Using AI. Most of Them Are Using It Wrong.
Adobe's Creator Toolkit report just dropped, and one of the biggest numbers in it is this: 86% of global creators are using generative AI. Of those, 76% say they are using it to help grow their business. Those are enormous numbers. And Govind's concern is not that creators are using AI, it is what they are doing with the time AI gives back to them.
AI gets you to eighty percent of the work very quickly. The question is what you do with the remaining twenty. Most creators are using that time to make more content at the same speed, rather than slowing down to make that last twenty percent truly theirs. They’re not adding back their voice, their brand, their perspective, the thing that makes someone want to follow you rather than the ten other people posting the same AI-generated content this week.
He called it the sea of sameness, and it is a real problem. The barrier to creating content has never been lower. But the bar for what audiences are willing to engage with has never been higher. Those two things moving in opposite directions at the same time is exactly where the opportunity lives for the creators who actually take the time to close the gap.
In short, use generative AI, absolutely, but bring your human judgment back into the process deliberately. The tools in Firefly and Adobe Express have the capability to accommodate your creative identity, however most people just are not taking the time to use them that way.
As an Adobe Acrobat Ambassador, I am partnering with Adobe to share tools I genuinely use in my business workflows. Everything below is from my own experience.
The Tool That Is Changing How I Collaborate With Brands
I brought this up with Govind directly because it is something I have been doing for a while now. One of the most frustrating things about brand deals is the chaos of the back-and-forth. The brief comes in over email, the contract comes in as a PDF in a separate thread, the concept you pitched is sitting in a Google Doc, the feedback gets scattered across three different threads, and by the time you are trying to find something specific someone said three weeks ago, you are spending twenty minutes searching rather than creating.
Adobe Acrobat's PDF Spaces is what I use to fix that. When a brand deal is in motion, I create a PDF Space and bring everything into one place. I can add the brief, the contract, my writing samples, past content examples, even a document that describes my tone of voice and how I talk to my audience. Then I train Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant on those documents. Now, instead of rereading the entire brief or hunting through email threads, I can just ask the AI Assistant "what are the usage rights for this campaign?" or "what was the brand's primary CTA again?" and it pulls the answer directly from the documents I have already uploaded.
Govind told me that PDF Spaces was designed specifically for this kind of collaboration. The vision is a conversational knowledge hub that lets you and a brand partner actually work inside the same space, leave comments, ask questions of the AI together, and eventually turn those documents into outputs. Presentations, briefs, even a podcast summarizing the documents. He said they are actively building toward making that consumption layer feed directly into a creation layer, so the workflow from intake to output becomes one continuous process rather than a series of handoffs across different platforms.
If you want to try it, click the link to explore PDF Spaces!
Firefly and Creator IP
I asked Govind about Adobe's commitment to creator IP, because it is a real and ongoing concern in the creator economy.
His answer was that Adobe's stance is not shifting. Firefly is trained on licensed content and Adobe Stock, which means when you use it to generate imagery, you are not accidentally pulling from someone else's protected work. And the next evolution they are building toward (training AI models on your own creative identity, your own content, your own voice) will keep that content private to you. Your personal model would not be accessible to anyone else, and theirs would not be accessible to you.
For creators who are thinking carefully about where their work goes and who can learn from it, that matters enormously.
The Claude Integration!
Adobe Express just launched a connector for Claude, the same AI I use every day for everything from scripting to drafting to research. The integration means you can prompt Claude to help you with writing or strategy or ideation, and then move directly from that conversation into Adobe Express to bring it to life visually without ever leaving the workflow you were already in. It also has integrations in ChatGPT and Windows Copilot.
Govind's point about this was that creators are already living in chat platforms. Instead of pulling them out of those environments and into a different tool, Adobe is meeting them where they already are.
Make sure to check out Govind on LinkedIn and explore all of Adobe’s products! I use Adobe Express and Firefly every day and they make my life so easy!
Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.
Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾
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