Adobe AI Foundry Builds Custom Generative Models for Brands

Adobe is launching a new service called the Adobe AI Foundry, designed to help businesses build their own custom generative AI models. Much like Intel’s chip foundry, Adobe’s version aims to do the same for AI, offering companies a framework to design and train models on their own data. These LLMs will be built on top of Adobe’s commercially safe Firefly models and trained using a company’s existing intellectual property. The result: brand-specific models capable of generating text, images, video, audio, vectors, and even 3D content.

Home Depot and The Walt Disney Company are among the initial brands testing this new service.

In addition, Adobe is announcing the acquisition of Invoke, a generative media solution for creative production. The startup’s team will join the AI Foundry to build out AI-powered creative workflows for businesses.

“AI Foundry unites years of Adobe innovation and expertise, spanning our generative AI models and modalities, to help businesses solve today’s most complex content and media production challenges,” Hannah Elsakr, Adobe’s vice president for GenAI new business ventures, says in a release. “Our expert team and enterprise-grade, bespoke models provide a secure creative foundation that enables companies to scale on-brand content and stay competitive in the attention economy.”

Doing the Heavy Lifting for Businesses

Building custom AI models isn’t easy, and few companies have the expertise to do it—particularly with the kind of transparency, safety, and creator protections that Adobe is emphasizing. For those firms that admire that approach, they can ask Adobe to help them out. By using tailored models, companies can be assured that prompt responses will be more relevant to their business and return fewer hallucinations.

By leveraging their existing IP in training their ad hoc model, brands can ensure that AI-generated content stays true to their creative vision and design standards, eliminating the need to constantly fine-tune generic foundation models.

That said, Adobe isn’t the only tech platform offering an AI Foundry. Microsoft has long operated its Azure AI Foundry, also aimed at enterprises. However, its focus is on accelerating the development of AI apps and agents, rather than building custom models. Adobe’s approach, by contrast, emphasizes model creation and is squarely centered on content production for digital channels, making it a distinct option for brands looking to generate content across text, images, video, and more.

Adobe highlights that its AI Foundry has several distinguishing capabilities:

First, all models it creates will be safely trained on existing IP, support multimodal outputs, and be commercially safe. All Foundry models are also grounded in Adobe’s responsible AI principles.

Next, businesses will have a centralized place from which they can manage and deploy their custom Foundry model(s). Adobe provides teams with an application to supervise the implementation process.

Lastly, Adobe will have its applied AI/ML scientists and forward-deployed engineers work with companies to design and implement high-impact use cases that produce real results.

Acquiring Invoke AI

To assist brands in developing AI-powered creative workflows, Adobe is bringing on board the team from Invoke, a startup providing AI tools for professional artists. Unfortunately, this is all Adobe is disclosing right now—no financial terms, if there will be layoffs, or when the deal might close.

Launched in 2022 as an open-source project by Kent Keirsey, Invoke sought to reshape professional creativity. It services both independent creators and the enterprise and previously raised $3.8 million in seed funding from SignalFire, Storm Ventures, and Universe Software (Keirsey was its former product chief). In 2024, Invoke launched its enterprise platform, enabling brands to deploy AI image generation models trained on their IP.

“To date, creative teams have largely used AI image generation for inspiration because they have not felt comfortable sharing or uploading proprietary content into proprietary consumer products,” Keirsey remarked in a release at the time. “Our platform and open source foundation ensure that companies and creative teams can begin to securely deploy generative AI to their most valuable and sensitive production workflows while maintaining complete ownership over the models and anything that they produce. We’re focused on showing that generative AI can drive measurable ROI for companies putting out creative products.”

Most recently, the startup made history by securing copyright protection from the U.S. Copyright Office for an image made entirely from material generated by an AI model.

Indeed, there are similarities between Invoke and Adobe’s approaches that seem to show how the two will work together.

By bringing Keirsey’s team on board, Adobe likely aims to leverage the startup’s expertise in AI-assisted creative production, developing prebuilt methods that help brands generate content at scale. Invoke’s experience in generative AI for professional creators will also complement Adobe’s Firefly strategy, shaping the LLMs the AI Foundry produces so brands can achieve better results more quickly.

Featured Image: An AI-generated image depicting a factory making AI models. Credit: Adobe Firefly