Throughout his career, Scott Belsky has been an entrepreneur, creator, author, investor and business advisor. He’s currently the chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design & emerging products at Adobe. I talked with him late last year about how AI has changed strategies for businesses and creators, as well as what is to come in the technology in 2025.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CEO newsletter.

Tell me a bit about your role at Adobe.

Belsky: My responsibility is overseeing our emerging product groups. These are the groups that include 3D & Immersive. They include the AI-first products, like Project Concept and a whole roadmap of others. They include the Adobe Stock business, which is going through a re-imagination in the world of AI, and is also responsible for sourcing the data that we train our models on.

Then, of course, design. The design organization spans all of our products and services across the company, and it’s an important part of my role to make sure that the designers are aligned around the experiences we’re delivering to our customers. Upgrading our design system, ensuring that we don’t reinvent the wheel across different products when it relates to a particular component or function.

The Strategy & Corporate Development Group also is in my organization. That’s a group that plots the strategy for Adobe going forward, and explores the edges that may someday become the center for the company, then also takes action on some of the inorganic opportunities that we have on the M&A side.

When you’re looking forward, how large of a role does AI play in corporate strategy?

Artificial intelligence to me is reimagining and refactoring every function of an organization. Whether it be finance and accounting, or HR, or legal, or creative, or marketing, these functions are being re-imagined based on these tools. These tools are also collapsing the boundaries between some of these functions, which allow stakeholders who ordinarily were never able to access the power of these functions to be able to do stuff on their behalf.

When you look at the world of creativity and marketing, a few things become clear. First of all, you have a lot of marketers at the edge, like these social media marketers, and people who are engaging in real-time on behalf of the brand on social platforms, where a lot of the spend goes these days for marketing. Those folks need to be outfitted to be able to create in real time. They need to be able to create variations of marketing campaigns. They need to be able to create content that responds to the moment. So in some ways, the lines are blurry. These marketers are acting more like creators.

Adobe Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Design & Emerging Products Scott Belsky.

Similarly on the creator side, creators are starting to act as if they’re art directors and creative directors when they have the ability to assign tasks to AI. Instead of the three or five options that they have the time to explore, now they can explore 300 options leveraging the superpowers of AI. In some cases, that makes them more tastemakers, creative directors and art directors when they’re at that stage of the process.

When it comes to using tools to get exactly what’s in their mind’s eye reflected in some sort of content or creative asset, they have these new tools at their disposal. That’s one of the things that we’re most excited about at Adobe: Taking our creative pros from the prompt era of AI creativity to the controls era. Right now, the creative pros that I talk to are still tinkering with these models. They have fun putting in prompts and stuff like that. It’s a cool concepting and ideation process, but none of it is commercially ready for them to use for putting out something. They want to make all these........

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