Adobe’s Resh Sidhu on the New Breed of Creative

In the age of AI, Resh Sidhu maintains that creative roles are not disappearing. But they are evolving.

The new Adobe vice president of creative says brands and agencies should be using AI not to simply produce more content but to create space for more inventive, original thinking. That means hiring ‘systems builders’ alongside a new breed of creative that is AI fluent but defined by exceptional taste.

“This era that we're in now, I've never seen anything like it,” says Resh. “No one starts out wanting to be a creative saying, 'Hey, I'm going to love making 4,500 assets in 25 different languages.' It was never what we intended it to be.”

Creatives now have tools capable of satisfying marketers' growing appetite for content across an ever-expanding mix of platforms. That's exciting, she says, but it raises a bigger question: is that kind of velocity actually a strategy?

“I don't think it is,” she says. “Yet we're being asked as creative teams, 'Well, now you have the tools, just make more.' I think we should actually be taking a moment [to stop and think].”

For Resh, it’s about better-quality output versus more. “If you speed up creatives just to make more and more, it's just more noise. I think that is really hitting a nerve across the creative community – and when I say 'creative', I mean all types of people creating. That's the tension we're sitting in right now. It's never been a better time to create, but it's never been more important to think about what we are creating.”

How brands get to ‘better’ versus ‘more’ in that context is by getting closer to their audience and truly understanding what they need, crave and desire. “AI tools can help us process vast amounts of information and research and truncate that down into five, 10 minutes – seconds even,” she ponders. “But AI doesn't have judgement. AI doesn't have taste. It can help you get somewhere, but you have to bring the judgment and the taste.”

This evolution is leading to a new breed of creative: makers, thinkers and strategists who are all, at heart, “tastemakers”.

It's also central to why Resh, who previously spent four years at Snap, joined Adobe. When the company’s chief marketing officer Lara Balazs first shared Adobe’s mission of ‘empowering everyone to create’, she says she immediately began thinking beyond marketing its products. If that was Adobe's purpose, how should creative teams evolve in this new era? What role should Adobe play as AI reshapes creativity? Those questions now sit at the heart of her remit as vice president of creative.

“I truly believe the old model is changing and that there's a new breed of creative,” she says.

That can mean “many things”, but she’s eager to stress one in particular. “Creative roles are not disappearing, they are changing.

“People are feeling a real sense of anxiety,” Resh adds. “They're asking, 'Is AI going to replace me? Everything I used to do in this creative team can now be done with AI, so where does that leave me?' Those are real fears and tensions that the community is feeling.”

She believes Adobe has an opportunity to prove her argument in practice. By making creative workflows "much better, much easier and much more connected", she says Adobe – and its AI tools – should give people more freedom to create, imagine and bring their ideas to life.

“The beauty is that the role is changing,” she adds. “The question for everybody is: how is your role changing? How are you embracing this time? What are you learning? What are you leaning into? How are you using your craft and judgment to think about what you bring to the creative team?

“This is an exciting time to think about the shape of teams, the type of work we'll be doing, the type of work we'll be leaning into, and the very nature of the roles themselves.”

Being a creative at a global brand today is a balancing act between long-term brand building and the relentless demand for always-on content. Adobe builds tools to help creatives navigate that challenge. But as the leader of the company's own in-house creative team, it's one Resh also has to solve herself.

Her answer is a “much more diverse creative team” and a “throwing out” of old titles. "We're bringing in system builders,” Resh says. “Everyone's talking about AI and Adobe has phenomenal tools, but what I'm bringing into the team are systems and operations builders who create the systems that make space for creative work. That's a completely different world.

“That's not a creative role,” she stresses. “You have to bring in people who build the infrastructure. We have a phenomenal team at Adobe focused on our AI tools and how we operationalise them for the creative team. They build the framework and we make the magic inside it.”

For Resh, content velocity and brand building are equally important. “But they operate at different speeds. You can't try to do both in the same way. You need different systems to create different kinds of work.”

Adobe is experimenting with “fast-moving pods”, supported by AI tools that can deliver content without the time or human resource traditionally required. “That frees up the majority of the creative team to focus on the brand,” Resh says. “You have content feeding the algorithm, but you're still being mindful of what you're putting out. That gives us more time to get closer to our audience, understand the strategy and come up with ideas.

“To be memorable, we have to cut through with groundbreaking thinking. We have to have original ideas. Where does originality come from? Not from AI.”

The same questions apply to agencies, too, as Resh sees an opportunity to reimagine the role they play for their clients. “I'd encourage agencies to become experts – to learn the tools and become fluent in them so they can guide their clients,” she says.

“What we're going to be looking for is ideas and thinking, agencies that are close to culture, understand our brand and are close to the audience. That's how we partner with agencies today, helping us stay close to what's happening, and I think that's only going to increase going forward.”

In this new landscape, two kinds of agencies will emerge: the relevant and irrelevant. “Relevance has always been the key,” says Resh, who has held senior positions at agencies such as AKQA and Barbarian. “Before the internet, agencies had to find ways to stay relevant. Then the internet came along and they brought in new skillsets. Then social arrived and they adapted again.

“Agencies that want to remain relevant will recognise this shift and bring in the capabilities they need. They have a huge opportunity to become even stronger partners, and how we work together is going to be critical.”

Despite all of this change and evolution, Resh is eager to emphasise one thing: Adobe is hiring. And she’s looking for exactly the kind of creative she's spent this conversation describing.

“People think we need AI experts, but there's no master of AI because it's changing at such a pace,” she says. “What I'm looking for is curious creatives who are embracing this next era. They absolutely want to make amazing things, but they're fluent in AI. I'm looking for fluency because you have to know what AI can do to be able to imagine amazing things.

“I want people to forget about titles and come back to the core: a group of tastemakers, makers, thinkers, strategists and creatives, building from the ground up and creating things where the AI disappears and it's just pure magic. That's the new breed of creative.”

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