Adobe Express Isn’t a Creative Tool. It’s Connective Tissue.

At almost every Adobe announcement lately, something slips in near the end: a mention of how the latest AI innovation connects to Adobe Express. Not as a headline. As a footnote. The app—formerly known as Adobe Spark before Adobe rebranded it in 2021—keeps showing up at the edges of bigger news, whether it’s Acrobat, Firefly, or Creative Cloud. It’s always there. It’s just never the point.

But even though Express may appear to only be getting supporting cast credits, there’s a bigger story here that Adobe hasn’t fully told—one most of us have likely missed. So I went to Adobe Summit in Las Vegas to find out and spoke with the company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager for Adobe Express, Govind Balakrishnan.

Making Personalized Content Generation Easier

“Adobe’s mission for the longest time has been creativity for all,” he says, though he notes that it has since shifted to empowering everyone to create. Yet, even as the company has worked to make its flagship products, like Photoshop and Illustrator, more accessible, Balakrishnan acknowledges that these are power apps and are challenging for non-designers to use. “To truly deliver on that mission, we realized we needed to…step back and look for what’s best in every one of those tools and applications and put them all into this one single, easy-to-use application that could be accessed by anyone, regardless of where they are.”

Generative AI has unleashed an insatiable appetite for content. Businesses now expect it to be personalized, scalable, and delivered faster than ever. But democratizing content creation has come with an unintended consequence: the bar for what actually qualifies as good content has risen just as fast. For Adobe, the goal isn’t simply to make creation easier; it’s to ensure that what gets made is worth making. “The bar for what one considers to be good, meaningful content has actually gone up quite meaningfully,” Balakrishnan says.

Express is Adobe’s answer to that problem—tearing down the barriers that kept creative tools out of reach for everyday users while also providing guardrails to help ensure generated content stays true to a brand and doesn’t just become AI slop. In the generative AI era, that accessibility has taken on new urgency: Express is becoming the surface where AI-generated ideas become finished, on-brand content.

The ‘Connective Tissue’ of the Creative Workflow

Accessibility was only the beginning.

As Adobe has leaned deeper into AI, Express has intentionally grown from being a standalone app into something far more central. It’s no longer orbiting the Creative Cloud ecosystem, but sitting at the heart of it, with every major app and workflow now connecting back to it.

“Think of Express as the connective tissue that brings the entirety of this workflow together,” Balakrishnan says, referring to how the app is tightly integrated with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Experience Manager, Workfront, Gen Studio, and more. He elaborates:

“If you’re a creative and…you want your marketing department to create content, you can use Express. If you’re in Acrobat, you have PDF documents, and you want to generate content that stays on brand, you have Express. If you’re in [Adobe Experience Manager] and you want to access content or put content into AEM, you have Express…the entirety of that ecosystem is well connected by Express, sitting at the heart of it.”

The tie-up Express has to Creative Cloud and other Adobe apps is similar to the company’s Firefly platform. But where Firefly is the gateway for sparking ideas and generating raw assets, Express is what comes next: the layer where those ideas are shaped, refined, and made ready to share with the world, whether as a webpage, advertisement, report, presentation, or social media post. In other words, Firefly starts the creative journey. Express finishes it.

Turning Express Into a Virtual Designer

And while Adobe has made no secret of infusing AI into Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat, Express hasn’t been left behind. “AI is deeply embedded” into the app, according to Pierre Tapia, senior director of B2B product marketing for Adobe Express—it’s something the company is becoming more outspoken about. Features like image and video generation and Generative Expand—first introduced through Firefly and Photoshop—have already made their way over. “The goal—or the path we are on—is to contextually integrate those capabilities into Express,” Tapia says.

But Adobe’s ambitions for Express go beyond feature parity. The real objective is to fundamentally rethink the app experience itself, replacing the traditional search-and-select interface with something closer to a conversation, a shift that carries particular significance for those who aren’t designers by trade. It’s a trend being embraced by enterprises like Salesforce and ServiceNow, which recognize that the future of apps isn’t in clicking buttons but in natural language prompts.

“Very soon…in Express, you will be greeted with a prompt bar that you can start engaging with,” Balakrishnan reveals. “Not just with a prompt, but in a conversational experience similar to how you would speak to a designer who’s working for you, or on your behalf. You can literally just engage in a fully conversational experience to generate images, videos, designs, and presentations…That completely changes the paradigm for content creation.”

He’s referring to the Express AI Assistant that the company debuted in October 2025. Adobe plans to upgrade it with enterprise features, including integrations with its ecosystem of apps. This so-called Enterprise AI Assistant will act as a conversational layer that, like the Firefly AI Assistant, serves as a single creative surface across Adobe’s platform. But where Firefly is built for creatives generating images and videos, the Enterprise AI Assistant is designed for business professionals who need on-brand content without bouncing between multiple tools.

Tapia discloses that the Express Enterprise AI Assistant is expected to roll out in beta sometime within the next quarter.

In a demonstration, he showed how an enterprise user gets started by selecting a brand-safe template—one with locked elements that prevent unauthorized modifications. Then, using the chat box, the user can type out what changes they want, similar to how you might use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini (”Swap the hero image for another image from AEM assets,” for example).

Users can also get started by attaching a marketing brief and then prompting Express, “create an Instagram post for our [brand partnership].” The app will then examine the document for content and context, and then combine it with approved images from AEM. Finally, it will generate multiple Instagram post variations for review, all on brand and using the right assets.

Alternatively, content localization by prompt is possible. Within an Express project, ask it to update the copy and imagery to reflect each market you’re targeting, and the app will adjust the language and terminology for each region. It will also swap in geographically appropriate imagery from AEM.

“You don’t even need to actually know how to use the tools in Express,” Balakrishnan emphasizes. “You’re literally going to just go into experience and say, ‘this is what I want ot create,’ and then you can tweak it just through a conversational experience.”

Despite the shift toward conversational creation, Express isn’t abandoning its traditional interface. Adobe doesn’t plan to restrict how you edit your files. Instead, it’s embracing what Balakrishnan calls a “hybrid approach,” where you can start with a conversational experience but switch to the standard interface for deeper controls. “The hybrid approach that we have is…incredibly unique, one that we’re taking a lot of pride in,” he says.

One-Stop Creative Shop Across Any Surface

For Balakrishnan, Express represents something bigger than a Creative Cloud app. The opportunity, as he sees it, is “to be the creation arm for everyone”—and everyone means everyone, not just Adobe users. “We should be thinking billions of users…because that is the opportunity that we see, because the creative intent is there.” Indeed, the addressable market is in the billions, especially given how many people use generative AI tools daily, weekly, or monthly. And while he believes everyone has a story to tell, the lack of tooling or capability can be an obstacle. But not anymore with an app like Express.

Now, “everyone becomes a storyteller with a platform and a surface to actually tell their stories without necessarily having to go through decades of learning a new tool or an application. That’s the opportunity that my team is excited about, and we feel like we are well on our path to delivering on that.”

Because Adobe wants to meet customers where they are, expect Express to move beyond the Creative Cloud ecosystem and become integrated with more third-party apps. It’s already hooked up with ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Slack, and Miro. The company also provides an SDK for developers to build their own integrations. “We don’t believe that [customers] all have to come to Express or they all have to come to Adobe,” Balakrishnan admits, intimating that over the next year, we could start to see further expansions into other environments.

“We want to be the creative engine that powers the workflow wherever these business professionals live,” Tapia adds. “In the enterprise, [Express] is supercharged by the fact that it’s fully integrated into the ecosystem of marketing and creative tools that these businesses are already invested in, depend on every day.”

It’s worth noting that Adobe isn’t alone in capitalizing on the citizen designer market. Canva is making strides in this category, having recently released new AI tools that bring it more in line with what Express does. How similar are these two? Chief Executive Melanie Perkins describes Canva’s mission as “to empower the world to design.” Both are becoming core parts of the last mile of the generative AI content journey, so how do people make a decision on which to use?

Balakrishnan argues that Express stands apart through its deep integration across Adobe’s ecosystem—something Canva may not be able to replicate. “We’re not fighting a point battle,” he says. The advantage, as he sees it, comes from decades of Adobe’s expertise across creativity, productivity, and customer experience orchestration, combined with the scale of its existing user base. For citizen creators, that translates into something more tangible: the ability to meet them wherever they already work.

“If you’re an individual or a large enterprise, at the end of the day, everyone has a creative need,” Balakrishnan says. “We are doing everything we can to meet the customer where they are and give them the controls and the capabilities that they need to be successful.”

Express may have spent years as a footnote in Adobe’s announcements. But if Balakrishnan and Tapia’s vision holds, that’s about to change. Adobe isn’t just building a better design tool—it’s positioning Express as the creative layer underneath the agentic web, embedded in the tools people already use, powering content they may never know came from Adobe at all. The app that kept showing up as an afterthought may turn out to be the point all along.

Disclosure: I attended Adobe Summit as a guest of the company, with my flights and hotel stay paid for. The AI Economy’s coverage is editorially independent from those that it covers. These words are my own.

Featured Image: Adobe Summit attendees walk past Adobe signage at the Venetian Convention Center on April 20, 2026. Credit: Ken Yeung