Scott Belsky sold his company to Adobe in 2012, stayed on for a few years, and last year returned to Adobe in the midst of an AI upheaval that poses many risks for the company, but also carries big opportunities.

Bringing powerful new tools to marketing professionals is an important direction, Belsky said. He noted that marketing tends to have a lot of middle layers of agencies and contractors, but “every brand needs to act in real time.” The new tools also promise to let creators work outside their traditional categories.

Adobe has built its own models using only licensed data, which Belsky sees as a decisive competitive advantage–and all but essential for a company whose customers are creative professionals. “Customers are feeling the risk—they never want us to train on their data,” he said. And big brands are also very wary about what IP might sneak into their copyrighted materials.

The copyright issues are complicated and fascinating, he said, and current laws aren’t really up to the challenge. A prompt asking for work resembling a particular artist, for example, looks like a clear violation of the spirit of copyright. But more generic model training on internet data is a different case, he noted.

Belsky cautioned that ”teams take a lot of pride in having a declared strategy,” especially during a “Cambrian explosion” of upheaval, but that wasn’t the best approach. “When your platform shifts and the strategy is changing, you have to lead with adaptability,” he said. “And you have to merchandise that to the team.”

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