Featured in Adobe Firefly’s latest campaign, YouTube creator, Airrack shares how he uses AI to visualize, refine and stress-test creative concepts before committing production time and budget.
Photo Courtesy of Adobe
For decades, the biggest budgets won. Hollywood studios. Broadcast networks. Fortune 500 brands. Whoever could outspend the competition controlled production, distribution, and culture itself, but that era is ending.
A new survey from Adobe and The Harris Poll, Adobe’s 2026 Creators’ Toolkit Report, of more than 16,000 creators across eight countries, found that 58% say their ability to compete with larger teams or studios feels stronger since they started using creative AI. And it’s paying off: 75% of respondents describe creative AI as essential to how they work.
“Because of the democratization of publishing, whether you’re running your own YouTube channel, freelancing, or sitting inside a marketing department, you’re creating for the same pipes,” explains Stacy Martinet, Adobe’s Chief Communications and Creative Officer for Media & Technology. According to Martinet, the real moat now is a distinct point of view paired with the infrastructure to express it at scale.
When everyone is creating for the same feeds, the advantage shifts to the best stories.
Creative AI Has Become Core to Creator Workflows and How They Grow Their Businesses. Creative AI has crossed a threshold. Among creators who use or have tried it, creative AI is no longer a side experiment.
Courtesy of Adobe
Next week at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, that competition plays out with one question running beneath it all: how does creativity evolve in the age of AI?
Creators are exploring new ways to expand their output while staying true to the voice and perspective that built their audiences. Brands are pushing to tell more compelling stories. Both are circling the same goal: identifying how AI can unlock new forms of expression.
Adobe sits at the heart of that convergence as the first-ever headline partner for LIONS Creators, anchoring Creator Beach with programming that puts creator-led businesses and the future of AI-powered creativity front and center.
“Creators are one of, if not the most powerful forces in marketing right now, so Adobe had to be a key partner for that,” Martinet said.
Throughout the week, Adobe will run hands-on sessions where creators can experiment with its AI model, Firefly, as well as panels that bring together creators, brands, and agency leaders. Adobe will also host a flagship session titled “From Creator to CEO: Building Scalable Brands with AI,” featuring Adobe President of Creativity and Productivity David Wadhwani in conversation with Steven Bartlett, host of Diary of a CEO and founder of Steven.com.
Adobe is applying decades of experience with professional creatives to design solutions for the new needs of brands and creators. Adobe built Firefly, its generative AI system, specifically for creative work, trained it on ethically sourced, commercially safe content, and designed it to live inside the tools creators already know and trust.
Creators already see the benefit. The survey found that 87% say creative AI has accelerated the growth of their business or follower base.
“If you’re building AI for creatives, you have to let creatives help design it,” Martinet said. “The job is to make tools that work the way real teams work, not the other way around.” When Firefly launched in beta, Adobe brought creators in while the product was still in development. “The product was wet clay,” she said. “They got to shape the product in a longer-term way.” Creators flagged what wasn’t working and provided feedback that influenced features.
Martinet applies the same co-creation approach when Adobe partners with creators for its own campaigns. “It’s actually like a live brainstorm of the briefing,” she said. Adobe brings the messages it needs to land, leaving room for the creator’s instincts. “We’ve tried very prescriptive briefs. We don’t get the best work that way. When creators can bring their own ideas to the opportunity, the work is more creative, and it performs better.”
Adobe shaped its latest Firefly campaign around that same logic. The campaign featured a range of creators from micro voices to YouTube powerhouses, across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch, including Kinigra Deon and Airrack. Together, they show what it looks like when a single creator uses AI as infrastructure, compressing timelines and scaling their distinctive voice.
Featured in Adobe Firefly’s latest campaign, YouTube creator, Kinigra Deon shows how she uses AI to create missing shots, extend scenes and enhance storytelling without adding days to the production schedule.
Courtesy of Adobe
Kinigra Deon has built an audience of more than 6 million YouTube subscribers and millions more across TikTok and Instagram. She produces scripted digital series at a television-style pace, with recurring characters, cliffhangers, and multiple uploads a week. In the campaign, she used Firefly to fill gaps in a scene, a missing shot, an extra moment, coverage she didn’t capture on set, without adding days to the schedule or cost to the budget. The way she brought Firefly into her edit was especially engaging: you could see the “before,” watch her dial elements up and down, and understand exactly how each creative choice changed the final cut. It turned the full spectrum of Firefly’s capabilities into something visible in a single creator’s hands.
Airrack (Eric Decker), known for large-scale challenge videos and ambitious stunts, has a global following of more than 19 million YouTube subscribers. What started as a single channel has grown into a business built around tentpole content, brand partnerships with companies like Pizza Hut, Pepsi, Shopify, and Crocs, and Clip Farm, a clipping agency he runs to help other creators monetize more of their work. At that scale, speed matters, which is where AI comes in.
For the campaign, Airrack and his team shared how they use Firefly for brainstorming and planning. They use it to pre-visualize and stress-test big ideas at the concept stage, quickly mocking up concepts to see which are worth building before committing a crew or budget. By the time cameras rolled, they had already narrowed in on ideas that might otherwise have taken weeks of development.
Decker sees the business he’s building as part of a much longer arc for creators.
Today’s creators are standing on the shoulders of all the creators who came before us. Previously, YouTubers didn’t have all this access to monetization. The creators I looked up to as a kid did it just for the love of it. But slowly, they built the infrastructure for creators like me to build a real media company. Now when we work with brands, it’s not just as talent; it’s a real business-to-business collaboration, and I think that’s a win for everyone involved.”
Adobe’s own data points to the same conclusion. Among creators using AI, 85% say the work still reflects their unique voice, and 81% say human judgment remains essential to creative taste. Most of them are clear about what they want from AI: more room for ideas and craft, not a replacement for either.
“No one has all the answers yet,” Martinet said. “But the standard has to be AI that makes more room for ideas, judgment, and craft, not less.”
Success in this next era depends on a new pairing: human creativity and agentic AI systems that not only generate assets but help teams plan and execute creative work. Creators already know which half they want to keep. Eighty‑five percent say the final creative decision should always remain with the creator.
Together, that pairing lets a single voice operate at the scale of a media company, and a media company move with the precision of a single voice. The organizations that build that capability first will set the terms. Everyone else will work around them.
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