Adobe has intensified its push to grab market share from Australia’s Canva with a major AI update to Adobe Express to be accessible through the Google Bard generative AI engine.
Adobe will be punting on its coming positioning in Bard will give it access to billions of new users and make it the default choice for generating designs using text on the internet.
It’s part of a marketing battle in the multibillion dollar all-in-one application design solutions market.
Canva has gained massive market share by providing an almost effortless way to create posters, resumes, graphic designs, videos, social media posts and presentations, with an array of written and video how-to guides.
Like Canva, Adobe Express combines a range of content creation applications rolled into one. Adobe says its new Beta version will make it easy to designs and share social media posts, videos, images, PDFs, flyers and logos through the addition of generative AI within the application.
Users can specify a design in words by using the Adobe Firefly generative AI engine from Express. Once created, they can work on their design in Photoshop, Illustrator and other Creative Cloud applications.
“The new release of Adobe Express brings together technology from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Acrobat with our Firefly generative AI models into a fun and easy web application experience,” says Adobe.
News of the Express Beta update follows last month’s announcement of Adobe’s partnership with Google, allowing users to make their written requests for images through Google Bard’s generate AI system. It says the capability will be available “in coming months”.
The initiative could place requests for Adobe images on the front page of Google where Bard is likely to find its home. That would be a major coup for Adobe given the traffic to Google’s home page.
“With the new Bard by Google integration, users at all skill levels will be able to describe their vision to Bard in their own words to create Firefly generated images directly in Bard, and then modify them using Express.”
Express began life as Adobe Spark and is a major departure from Adobe Creative Cloud which offers a long list of separate apps to manage different content creation tasks. Canva’s methodology is to offer all its creation tools in one application, which is what Express does.
Adobe also offers a similar Fremium pricing model to Canva, with a free and a paid version of Express, along with availability in Creative Cloud.
It’s evidence that Adobe is directly responding to the rise of Canva and its model in the consumer space. Over the years, Adobe prioritised the prosumer and professional design markets for its products, where it saw billions to be made.
However, since its launch in 2013, Canva proved the consumer market for content creation is a multi-billion dollar proposition in its own right. It also has served as an entrée for it to enter the enterprise market with Canva for Teams.
And in 2022-2023 it launched its own generative AI tools – a text to image generator, a text generator called Magic Write and other AI tools as part of the design workflow within the Canva application.
It is available in 190+ countries in more than 100 languages, claiming 150+ million monthly active users, says its website.
Adobe additionally is integrating Express and Firefly into its business applications.
“Businesses will be able to custom train Firefly with their own branded assets, embedding the power of Firefly into their own ecosystem and generating content in the brand’s unique style and brand language using APIs to increase automation.”
It says Firefly is safe for commercial use. Enterprises can obtain an IP indemnity from Adobe when they use it across their organisation, although this would be available only for “certain” Firefly workflows.
“Hundreds of brands including Dentsu, IBM, Qualcomm and Mattel are already working with Adobe to explore how Firefly can help drive efficiencies, reduce costs and accelerate their content supply chains,” says Adobe.