Adobe has announced a new version of Adobe Express with developments designed to enable enterprises and SMEs to better scale on-brand content creation . The new updates are also firmly aimed at providing a better platform for collaboration between across teams, agencies and clients.
In short, Adobe Express has its sights firmly set on Canva.
Speaking exclusively today to the APAC media during Abobe MAX in Miami, SVP express product group and digital media services Govind Balakrishnan was asked what makes Adobe Express the ‘Canva killer’ it has been dubbed, and where the key differences lay. Balakrishnan said, “It’s our ability to lean heavily on 30-plus years of deep experience, expertise and legacy”, he said.
There are now new integrations with Adobe InDesign and Adobe Lightroom that allow Creative Cloud users to work and share seamlessly across applications. But Balakrishnan claims that Express also has taken the best of the other Adobe apps and now provides them in a digestible manner that is accessible to all, “When we started on this journey around two and a half years back, our goal was to bring the best of Adobe in a quick and easy way for everyone,” he said.
“So when I started on this journey and looked at applications like Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator… there was just so much to pick from. So the key for us was to make sure we picked the right components that would resonate and would be relevant for the audiences.”
Beyond the learnt knowledge that Adobe has from decades of experiences, which it now pours into Adobe Express, the lightweight offering is aimed at marketing, sales, HR, communications and other SME teams.
Balakrishnan believes Adobe’s generative AI features to be far in advance of any others offered by his competitors, “Rather than it being bolted on as something that we would use separately somewhere else outside and then have to bring it on in. We have the ability to contextually integrate the generative AI capabilities in the work space,” he said.
“When we talk about generative AI it’s not just about image generation. It’s about image generation, image editing, it’s video editing, video generation, it’s copy generation. There are a number of capabilities that come with the generative AI. But what makes it even better is that the generative AI that is generated within Express is safe for commercial use. And that is a key differentiator for us,” he said.
Then, there’s the final and somewhat obvious clincher, Adobe Express has deep integration across all other Adobe Creative Cloud programs allowing seamless workflow between the existing apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, on-platform file-sharing and manipulation, creative control and a whole gamut of accessibility that’s important to brand hygiene.
During Adobe MAX in Miami Adobe Express also announced improved third-party integrations with the likes of ChatGPT, Google, Slack, Wix and now Box, Hubspot and Webflow.
Reporting by Dan Uglow.
