The Total Economic Impact™ Of Adobe Creative Solutions For Enterprise Powered By Firefly Generative AI

Adobe’s Creative Solutions for Enterprise powered by Firefly genAI helps organizations accelerate core creation and ideation, automate scaled production of asset variations, streamline reviews and collaboration, customize genAI models to match a brand’s own styles and products, and enable all business teams to easily create standout content while staying on brand. Key applications include:

• Adobe Creative Cloud for Enterprise powered by Firefly
• Full access to the Firefly web app
• Frame.io
• Adobe Firefly Custom Models
• Adobe Firefly Services
• Adobe Express

Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying these solutions.¹ The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the technology on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed 11 representatives from six organizations with experience using these solutions. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that earns $10 billion in annual revenue. The global organization runs 300 marketing campaigns per year that require more than 550,000 hero and variant assets. The financial results modeled for the composite organization are conservative and risk-adjusted.

Interviewees at enterprise-sized brands said that prior to using Adobe’s Firefly-enabled technology, their organizations had reached a plateau in scaling content production without increasing costs or sacrificing quality. Similarly, interviewees at large agencies received requests from clients to incorporate new technology, like genAI, into content creation to close content gaps in their marketing.

Interviewees’ teams had previously struggled with content production inefficiencies due to time-consuming manual work, such as asset editing and retouching, and inadequate collaboration tools. These challenges prevented them from scaling content creation and limited their ability to deliver relevant and engaging campaigns to customers. While interviewees were interested in using genAI solutions, they had concerns over technology governance and copyright infringement risk.

Interviewees gained confidence in using Firefly due to Adobe’s approach to genAI model training (e.g., it only uses licensed or public domain content where copyright has expired) and its support for indemnification, which further mitigates legal risk. Since using Firefly in Adobe’s creative solutions, interviewees’ organizations addressed their production inefficiencies and experienced several benefits, including greater productivity and efficiency in their content creation and production processes.

With Firefly within Creative Cloud, for example, creative teams were able to increase the breadth of ideas and concepts used to inspire asset creation and produce hero assets faster. By training Firefly Custom Models with their own assets, they were able to generate content that reflected their brand’s identity safely and privately, further scaling creation and reducing time-consuming reviews and rework.

Similarly, with Firefly Services, interviewees noted that their teams significantly scaled content production without having to take on additional costs or bandwidth for support. Frame.io enabled greater collaboration and streamlined reviews and feedback among creative teams and key stakeholders to unlock the production process. And for organizations leveraging Adobe Express, non-creative teams were empowered to create on-brand content easily, enabling the “last mile” of content creation.

The cumulative effect of these solutions also led to top-line benefits. By scaling content production, interviewees’ organizations reached and engaged customers with more timely, localized, and personalized content that drove revenue growth.

Quantified benefits. Forrester’s conservative, three-year, risk-adjusted quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• Boosts productivity of creative ideation by 30% to 70%. Firefly’s genAI capabilities in Adobe Creative Cloud’s applications and on Firefly Web help creative teams at the composite organization by accelerating ideation and amplifying the breadth of new creative concepts. Features like Firefly text to image, style and composition reference, and text-to-vector graphics accelerate the creation of high-quality creative concepts with simple prompts. Meanwhile, Custom Models, trained on a brand’s own assets, enable teams to generate on-brand concepts of products, characters, or campaign content in a fraction of previous time spent.
• Accelerates hero asset creation by up to 60%. Creatives at the composite organization streamline hero asset creation with Firefly capabilities like Generative Fill in Photoshop (to expand and fill in gaps in images) and Generative Recolor in Illustrator (to swap out colors and streamline hero asset creation). Custom Models also enable teams to automatically generate on-brand content, reducing time spent searching or creating similar assets. In addition, Frame.io helps streamline creative collaboration as part of this process.
• Scales asset variant production by 70% to 80%. Firefly Services helps the composite organization significantly scale variant production for each hero asset. The solutions automate creative and generative workflows for teams to produce asset variations across channels, customer segments, and markets (e.g., localized backdrops and seasonal elements), maximizing output delivery.
• Reduces time spent reviewing and fixing assets by as much as 75%. Frame.io drives collaboration between colleagues involved in creating, reviewing, and approving content, and simplifies feedback and peer review processes. Furthermore, with the composite organization leveraging Custom Models, its AI-generated content is consistently on brand and does not require much rework.
• Improves efficiency on photography expenditure by 50%. The composite organization uses Firefly embedded in Adobe’s Creative Solutions to create and adjust assets that span different locations, geographies, and marketing moments without having to commission additional shoots. The composite also becomes more efficient with its photoshoots to capture what is needed for content, and it can edit this content in real time via capabilities such as Frame.io’s Camera to Cloud.
• Grows revenue from increased engagement. End-customers of the composite organization receive content that is more targeted, localized, and relevant, resulting in more personalized experiences. Customers engage more with the content, which creates a greater likelihood of conversion.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Adobe’s commercially safe genAI training approach and IP indemnification mitigate risk. Adobe Firefly is the first commercially-safe genAI solution in the market, as it is trained in content it has rights to or where copyrights have expired. Adobe Firefly’s training approach prevents the creation of content that infringes on copyright or intellectual property. In addition, Adobe’s indemnity further protects organizations against copyright infringement claims. These precautions enable the composite organization to generate assets with confidence that that it is not using materials that could expose it to legal risk.
• Firefly Video Models and recent innovations bolster video production. Adobe’s new Firefly Video Model helps further drive productivity for creative and marketing teams. Integration with existing video editing tools, such as Premiere Pro, for example, helps editors generate video to fill footage gaps, extend shot lengths, and smooth transitions. Text- and image-to-video capabilities enable users automatically generate video within minutes. As for video localization and personalization, new capabilities in Firefly Services, such as Dubbing and Lip Sync, enable organizations to automatically generate dozens of video variations across markets, languages and products.
• Adobe Express enables self-service for non-creatives that is brand-safe. Adobe Express helps the organization offload its design team’s tedious tasks by templatizing asset creation for marketers and other business teams, such as sales, HR, and finance. Simplifying this process frees bandwidth for creatives to focus on critical work items and enables other team members to quickly edit and leverage content to meet their needs, while staying on brand.
• Comprehensive Adobe Professional Services support. Deployment of Adobe’s Creative Solutions for Enterprise comes with Adobe Professional Services support, which helps accelerate use case definition, adoption, and value realization. Adobe consultants provide organizations with guidance on incorporating its solutions into creative and marketing workflows and producing high-quality, on-brand genAI content at scale.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

• Adobe licensing and professional services costs, alongside internal training costs. The composite organization upgrades its existing Creative Cloud licenses to expand Firefly-related use and pays additional fees for Custom Models, Firefly Services, and Frame.io. Some of these values increase as the composite expands its adoption and use of Adobe solutions on content volumes. In addition, teams at the composite spend time learning and developing best practices to utilize Adobe’s solutions effectively.

Forrester modeled a range of projected low-, medium-, and high-impact outcomes based on evaluated risk. This financial analysis projects that the composite organization accrues the following three-year net present value (NPV) for each scenario by enabling Adobe Creative Solutions for Enterprise:

• High impact of an $13.7 million NPV and net ROI of 577%.
• Medium impact of an $11.0 million NPV and net ROI of 461%.
• Low impact of an $8.0 million NPV and net ROI of 335%.

Appendix C: Endnotes