From tools to systems: The rise of the creative supply chain

For years, creativity has been powered by tools designed to make individual tasks faster or easier. Photoshop. Premiere. Figma. Each one crafted for a purpose and each defining a part of the creative process. 

But at Adobe MAX 2025, it became clear that the next era isn’t about better tools, but the systems that connect them.

Adobe’s keynote captured the moment: “We’ll be your familiar workflow, but connected to every model, every modality, and every stage of creation.” 

Firefly, once positioned as a product, is now a platform. It’s a connective layer linking AI models, data, and design environments into a single creative operating system. This signals a broader transformation in how creativity happens: less crafting inside isolated applications, more orchestrating creativity across them.

In this new environment, creativity functions more like infrastructure. The workflows that once lived in the minds of designers are becoming programmable, automated, and endlessly adaptive. And just as cloud computing redefined software, these connected creative systems are redefining how ideas move from concept to campaign.

Creative excellence has always depended on craft. It’s skill, taste, and intuition that separate the memorable from the forgettable. 
But as marketing ecosystems have expanded, creative work has become a balancing act between originality and output. Teams are expected to produce more assets, in more formats, for more platforms, all while maintaining quality and brand coherence. 

Adobe’s latest evolution speaks directly to that tension. With new capabilities like Firefly Creative Production and GenStudio, the company is moving beyond isolated tools toward fully integrated creative systems. These platforms allow teams to design repeatable workflows that automate the heavy lifting of production—resizing, localisation, versioning, and brand checks—without disrupting the creative process itself. Tasks that previously took days can now happen in minutes, directly within the creative ecosystem.

This change in production workflows doesn’t diminish the role of creative talent. Automation takes care of the scale, freeing designers, editors, and marketers to focus on the judgment and storytelling that make their work distinct. The result is a production model that’s both faster and more faithful to brand intent, able to scale creativity without diluting it.

For brands, this alignment between artistry and efficiency changes the equation. Content pipelines can finally operate with the same intelligence as the campaigns they fuel. When creativity and infrastructure work in sync, originality becomes something that can move at enterprise speed.

The evolution toward composable, orchestrated systems is fundamentally changing how creativity moves through an organisation. What used to be a linear process (brief to concept to production to delivery) is now becoming fluid and networked. Every stage, from ideation to optimisation, can connect through shared data, automation, and intelligence.

In this new phase of creative technology, flexibility is the defining feature. Rather than relying on rigid, one-size-fits-all workflows, teams can design, remix, and adapt creative processes as their needs evolve. 

This is the promise behind Adobe’s Project Graph: a node-based environment that allows creators to visually connect AI models, effects, and tools into custom workflows that can be reused or reconfigured at will.

Project Graph represents the beginning of what we see as the composable era of creativity. Just as software development moved from monolithic codebases to microservices, creative production is becoming modular and dynamic. Each function, from ideation and generation to editing and distribution, can now exist as an independent, interoperable component within a larger system.

Adobe isn’t alone in this shift, either. Tools like Figma’s Weave and Runway’s node-based pipelines are pursuing similar goals. The industry is converging on a shared vision: modular and interoperable creative systems, able to combine different models, data sources, and applications into a single connected workflow.

A video project might draw on Firefly for visual generation, Gemini for ideation, and Runway for motion enhancement, all within the same environment. In this model, the creative process starts to resemble a supply chain for ideas. Assets, prompts, and insights move through a sequence of human and machine inputs, each step refining rather than reinventing. The system learns what works and feeds it back into the process, turning every campaign into the foundation for the next.

For brands, this connected infrastructure unlocks a new kind of creative scale. Teams can orchestrate multiple models, automate versioning, and link creative output directly to performance data. Instead of producing content in isolation, they operate through a continuous creative loop in which design, distribution, and optimisation are part of the same ecosystem.

This is where creativity and operations finally converge. The creative supply chain supports, rather than diminishes, artistry. It ensures every piece of work, from a social asset to a global campaign, carries the same creative DNA.

As the tools behind creativity become more connected, the distinction between craft and infrastructure is fading. The most forward-thinking organisations understand that creativity isn’t just a discipline to protect, but a system to design. It’s a network of tools, data, and people that can move ideas faster without losing integrity.

What’s emerging is a new kind of creative architecture where originality and efficiency coexist and automation supports rather than replaces human judgment. It’s less about mastering every new tool and more about building the systems that allow creativity to flow: structured enough to scale, but flexible enough to stay unmistakably human.