I chat a lot with creative professionals and am endlessly fascinated by the varying POVs and sentiments about AI and creativity. We’ve been building our creative agent around a clear premise: that creators want AI to help with the execution, not replace their judgment.
This morning we released Adobe’s 2026 Creators’ Toolkit Report — a survey of more than 16,000 creators globally on how they’re using creative AI and the findings reinforce that view.
87% of creators say creative AI has accelerated the growth of their business or audience. But what comes after that number is just as telling.
When we asked what would make creators most comfortable giving an AI agent more independence, the answers weren’t about more capabilities. They were about control: the ability to review and undo at any point, transparency into what the agent is doing and why. And 85% said the final creative decision should always remain theirs.
That’s creators telling us exactly how they want to work with agentic AI, and it describes precisely what we’ve been building with our creative agent, which powers the AI Assistant in Firefly. The agent handles orchestration and execution. You stay in the director’s chair. The goal isn’t to automate away creativity but to remove the friction that stands between a compelling idea and bringing it to life.
One more finding worth sitting with: 93% say creative AI helps them produce content faster, but 57% say outputs still need moderate or extensive editing before they’re ready to share. Faster to draft isn’t the same as ready to publish. The creators breaking through aren’t just producing more content, they’re the ones using creative AI to make the work actually theirs.
https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/creators-toolkit-report-2026
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