Welcome to Adobe Think
Tank, I'm Jeff Barrett
in what is, well, better
than any apartment
I could afford in Manhattan. With me is
Chris Duffey, Head of
AI Innovation Strategy
for Adobe Creative Cloud,
Chris thanks for joining us.
Hey! Thanks for having me.
Yeah, first interview of the day, so let's get right into it.
Talk to me a little bit about, you know, 
how AI is going to change creativity
Over the next 10 years, you know,
the deep big questions.
Right, and they are some
really fascinating questions,
we're coming off of the Think
Tank by Adobe yesterday,
can be viewed
And there's a lot of different
insights you were getting
It was really interesting, I think,
collectively, we all agreed on the power
and the possibilities with AI,
but within that there's a broad spectrum
of even what is AI and the
capabilities of AI, specifically,
Ranging from the mundane to, you know,
the scary terrifying west world.
(laughs) And what I
think we all agreed on
is the highest order
is customer experience
and underneath that is this notion
of human and machine are stronger together
than either alone, so when
we go at kind of that quest
to build this ultimate customer experience
it's that, if you have that framework of
human an machine together,
is really fascinating.
And they were driving home a lot that
the introduction to AI is going to be
at a kind of a base level, like you know
a first introduction, that there has to be
kind of a specific project
for an organization.
Maybe talk a little bit about, you know,
companies who aren't using AI,
how they can break in first
Yeah, and I think that the first step
is "what is AI?" and
it can be defined into
three general segments: narrow
AI, general AI, and super AI.
Super intelligence, the
west world scenario.
Today there is only narrow AI
and narrow doesn't do AI justice
in the term that it is task-focused.
We can kind of use it as a catch-all.
Yeah, exactly
But we have to kinda narrow that down,
where super AI sounds like
something that you get at
like a at a BP.
(laughs)
Like if you have a Land Rover
you can only get super AI
So in terms of creativity I
think it's a really exciting
moment in time for creatives and designers
in the sense that if you look at
what's happening in the
digital marketspace,
this need to create
the experience economy,
has never been more profound
in the history of marketing.
Now we've got this tool where we can marry
the artfulness of creativity
with the logic of science
and we bring those two together
so human creativity with kind of
the computational intelligence
and create some really
magical experiences.
Talk to me a little about, 
because you had a recent blog post 
talking about how
AI can foster collaboration,
like what can you do
with work teams that you
couldn't previously do before AI?
Yeah, I think a great first step
is to define the role of the
human and the machine, in this
case the creative, and you
can look at it in three ways:
One, the machine and the human
can be on an assistant level, right?
So the machine
can assist the creative
in getting the grunt work, the
search, in other capabilities.
The next layer up, the
creative collaborator,
and we're doing some
really exciting things on
the Adobe front where it's
being suggestive and predictive.
And the highest order is
almost a manager-level
where it can be there to set some rules
and it can now learn from
your habits over time
and create kind of these
guardrails and flag those
areas where you might be deviating
out of brand guidelines
or deviating out of, yeah–
What, and you talk a
lot about man plus machine
because AI is really limited on
what you program it to do,
what you intend for it to do.
Talk a little about how the human
behind AI can best kind of direct that.
We brought this up yesterday,
in the sense that technology
is neither bad nor good.
It's really a reflection of
the human that's creating it.
And so quite often you have to
consider these biases that are
inherent into the system as well,
so we chatted a lot about that.
Whether or not AI contributes
to bias or alleviates bias
We came to a collective conclusion that
it's a reflection of the
humans that are using it.
If you have humans that are
bias, then AI will have bias
It's just a reflection
If not... that's the theory
if you have people with bias
you're assuming that
the AI will take it away
but again those are the
people programming it.
So you almost have to
have like an AI for an AI
to like alleviate that
(laughs) To police the AI, exactly.
But back to your question, where to start,
I think that's kind of
where a lot of the questions
and here at the conference
a number of talks 
are going to be speaking
about that as well.
And we came to the conclusion that
the best place is starting
with the business strategy.
What is the business
problem, identifying that,
AI is of service to the overall business.
It's not assuming we have to use AI
now let's find a reason
Exactly
Let's find a reason
and then we'll go use it.
No that makes complete sense.
Honestly where do you see–
the other thing that I thought
was really interesting is
basically that by 2020 you'll start seeing
the next Blockbuster
happening because of AI
and I'd love to, you
know, hate on Blockbuster
it's an easy target and
they don't exist anymore,
but is there any specific
industries that really
need to be catching up faster?
Yeah, the 2020 we
had a couple 2020 stats
and then another one, prediction,
that stood out was by
2020 if an organization
is not using AI they will lose
marketplace competitive advantage
It might even be kind of tame. I mean–
You could almost see that
happening now to some extent.
So, to your question about what companies
are kind of going to pop up by 2020
it's almost as paradox where the
startups and the new organizations
that can build from the ground up
have some sort of a leg up on
some of the traditional legacy brands.
It could almost level
the playing field right?
Exactly. So you know,
I think it's a really
fascinating time within the business.
I'd like to think
like, going with your gut
versus going with your gut plus insight
is always going to win out right?
Um, but you still–
And that brings up an interesting notion
that we touched on as well is
how can you embed emotion into this very–
Because AI is not perfect. I mean,
if you look at with self-driving,
like it's still not going to figure out
where a pothole is yet.
But, so there are still pitfalls there.
So that's why you need that.
But being intentional about
where you're taking your AI
So there's this notion of IQ and EQ,
this really fascinating intersection,
I think there was some debate on
can you infuse emotion
from a technical standpoint
into an AI model, but we agreed on that
the output of an AI
model can provide emotion
and empathy, specifically empathy
and then back to your earlier point about
industries that can
really be transformative
in this new AI revolution, healthcare,
obviously is in a really ripe opportunity
From you know,
Telemedicine
From the systems to the diagnostics
Exactly. Zip line in Africa
is now delivering medication
to remote areas via
autonomous AI driven drones.
Really?
Profoundly exciting.
Yeah I was in Cincinnati last week
and they were using it to just
specifically deal with
like small diagnosis.
You know the kind of stuff, nothing crazy.
It's not like you're gonna be House
and you're gonna say,
"well this is definitely not Lupus"
Sure
But, you know, small things to kind of  
gear toward another thing
so that you can maybe save
cost, provide efficiency.
And that gets back to
the assistant, right?
So in that case, a medical assistant
bringing it back to creativity.
The opportunities are endless.
We were chatting the other day,
the only limitation of AI is
human imagination at this point.
Right
(laughs)
Which is a deep thought
But I love–
So I love like both the practical
use of AI and the deep thought.
So getting just, to kinda
close out on deep thought–
Does a world where, you
know, there's empathy and AI,
where do you see that world going
and does that excite you,
does that give you pause?
Just, how do you think about it all?
Maybe to define the end,
we can define it by using
the example from the start.
So around the age of two, infants have
this moment called the Other Mind,
this realization where their parents
or someone close to them
have different thoughts
or emotions other than themselves,
and I think the creative
community humanity
is going through this
similar moment in time
where we realize that there's this other
intelligence out there
that we can leverage
to create more creative experiences,
to have more emotional experiences.
It's a fun and wild time for us.
Yeah, exactly.
Well thanks for joining us.
Yeah, thanks, Thanks for having me.
Thanks for everybody
joining us in my new apartment.
(laughs)
