10 Questions for AI Leaders - Forest Key

Adobe’s Forest Key once spent tens of hours rotoscoping a three-second Star Wars shot by hand. Today, AI does the same job in under a minute.

The VP isn't nostalgic about that - he's using it as a blueprint for how AI should work: handle the execution, leave the creative direction to the human.

Forest Key: AI should shrink the distance between what you can imagine and what you can create, not shrink the role of the person doing the imagining.

The lens I use is whether a task is about execution or intent.

When I was working on the Star Wars film in the 90s, designing a VFX shot that included Jabba interacting with Han Solo, we spent hours “rotoscoping” elements of the shot by manually tracing shapes frame by frame.

A three-second shot could take tens of hours. AI tools in Adobe Premiere and After Effects can do that in under a minute today.

 Repetitive work, scaling production, multi-step tasks that follow established workflows — AI can be incredibly useful there. But when a task involves taste or creative direction, humans need to stay firmly in the loop. The goal is AI that fits naturally into workflows you already trust, not a black box asking you to hand over the process. 

It’s lowering the floor, but the ceiling for what's possible hasn't moved. Having a distinct point of view and something to say matters more than ever because saying it is getting easier.

A good example is ideation. We’re seeing creators start with a rough creative direction, then use AI almost like a conceptual partner as ideas evolve through back-and-forth conversation. Sometimes that leads directly to a finished asset. Other times, it produces a clearer brief or a visual direction to refine further in Photoshop, Lightroom or Premiere.

We built Firefly AI Assistant around the idea that AI should help with execution while leaving creative direction in your hands. Available in Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative AI studio, the assistant is powered by our creative agent and lets you describe what you want to create while it helps orchestrate workflows across Adobe’s pro-grade creative tools — all while keeping you in control.

You can see what it’s doing, redirect it or take over at any point. What excites me is who this opens the door to. People who’ve always had creative ideas but found professional tools intimidating can now bring those ideas to life much more easily.

Insisting that AI features needed to be integrated into existing workflows. Creators think in problems, not tools. If you have to fundamentally change how you work to access AI, adoption and trust break down. That’s why we’re bringing our creative agent into our Creative Cloud applications, as well as third-party AI experiences — wherever creative work actually happens.

We recently brought our creative agent to third-party AI surfaces, starting with the Adobe for creativity connector in Claude. It gives Claude users access to 50+ pro-grade tools across our creative suite directly inside Claude, so they can complete meaningful creative workflows without switching surfaces. We're bringing a similar experience to Google’s Gemini soon.

Creative direction. The ability to look at multiple outputs, know which one is right and articulate why. Your taste becomes a competitive advantage. The more AI helps handle execution, the more it matters that you know what you want to say and how you want people to feel when they encounter it.

I felt this while building a demo concept around a fictional food stand in my hometown of Zapallar, Chile using Firefly AI Assistant.

I started with a taco stand, built out the creative direction, then realized empanadas made far more cultural sense. The assistant helped me rebuild the entire concept from a single prompt. What struck me wasn’t that the AI could execute the change.

It was the lower cost of changing direction that made me more willing to follow the better idea. When the cost of changing your mind drops that low, you take creative risks you might never have taken otherwise.

I'm optimistic, and I think the skepticism that exists can be healthy, because it forces people to separate novelty from real capability. Technology that democratizes creative tools historically expands creative markets. For Adobe, the real test is whether our AI innovations help customers do meaningful creative work with more control, more speed and more room for judgment.

Agents represent a real shift from AI that responds to one prompt at a time toward AI that can move through a sequence of steps toward an outcome you want. I use a mental image: a pachinko machine. You drop the ball - say, a prompt to build a social media campaign - and it falls through, hitting different tools, taking unexpected paths.

Sometimes, where it lands is somewhere you wouldn't have thought to go on your own. That unpredictability isn't a bug - it's a feature. How many times have we heard a musician or filmmaker we love talk about the moment something clicked - an unexpected intersection of ideas, something they saw while looking for something else entirely, a context that sparked something new? And because you're steering toward an outcome instead of manually managing every step, the process becomes much more fluid.

But the best agentic experiences need more than a clever interface. They need deep workflow knowledge, reliable tools and a clear understanding of where human judgment belongs. That’s where Adobe’s decades of building creative tools that creative professionals rely on really matter.

The momentum around agentic AI made me rethink what a workflow can be. As systems become more capable, workflows become more fluid. The way tools connect and work together starts to matter as much as the tools themselves.

My son recently finished his first feature film, Kingston, which premiered at Tribeca Festival this year (not-so-humble dad brag). He spent months editing in Premiere and used After Effects extensively for visual effects.

When I visited him and his creative team, I watched closely, paying attention to the most time-consuming parts of their process, the places where I could see AI becoming a genuinely helpful assistant. What excites me isn't just the time it will save or the ability to make more films at lower cost. It's that the right AI tools will help him amplify his creative voice. 

It starts with an honest observation: creative work rarely begins inside a creative app. It starts in a chat window, a rough prompt, a shared brief or an idea someone drops into a message thread. If we want to be useful, we have to meet people where they already are.

That's the thinking behind the Adobe for creativity connector in Claude. It brings 50-plus of our pro-grade tools directly into Claude's interface so users can complete meaningful creative workflows without switching surfaces. Firefly AI Assistant is where the broader experience comes together: multi-step workflows, full visibility into how your work evolves and more. The connector is the on ramp. And we're building the same experience for Gemini. 

Empowered. AI takes on more of the execution, so the time you spend is on the part that only you can do.

Forest Key is Vice President of Agentic AI for Creativity & Productivity at Adobe, where he oversees Adobe's agentic strategy and the development of the Adobe creative agent.