Adobe MAX Kicks Off This Week as Company Shares Stats on Accelerating AI Use
Adobe MAX, the company's annual creativity conference, opens this week in Miami with AI again at the center of the agenda. In the lead-up to the event, Adobe published its 2026 Creators' Toolkit Report - a survey of more than 2,000 US creators designed to capture how the creator economy is shifting and how AI-powered tools are influencing day-to-day production work. The report offers a snapshot of sentiment and self-reported productivity changes, ahead of what are expected to be significant product announcements across the Creative Cloud suite.
The headline figure from the report is that 78% of creators who currently use creative AI say it has accelerated the growth of their business or following. Among full-time creators, 89% say they feel confident they can learn the AI skills needed to continue growing. Those numbers suggest that, at least among active adopters, the tools are being absorbed into professional practice rather than treated as novelties. The report frames AI not as a replacement for creative judgment but as an addition to the toolkit - a framing echoed by creators quoted in the data, who describe using AI to explore ideas and handle time-consuming steps while retaining control over final decisions.
Video production is a particular area of focus. The report finds that 38% of creators say they are producing more video than a year ago, and 65% say increasing their video output is important to hitting their goals. When asked where AI assistance would be most useful in video work, respondents pointed to three areas above others: adding visual effects or removing unwanted elements (21%), editing and arranging clips into a cohesive story (19%), and cleaning up dialogue or removing unwanted audio (18%). These are tasks that have traditionally required either significant technical skill or considerable time, and they map closely to features Adobe has been developing within Premiere Pro and other video-focused tools.
The report is, of course, a document produced by Adobe about Adobe's own user base, so it should be read with that context in mind. Still, the specific breakdowns around video workflow and skill confidence provide a useful reference point as the company prepares to announce new features this week. Coverage of the actual MAX announcements - and on-the-ground reporting from filmmakers and editors attending the conference - will follow as the event gets underway.
