Speed has become "the biggest non-negotiable" in marketing.
That is the warning from Scott King, Adobe's Principal Strategist – Growth & Innovation for Asia Pacific, who believes artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of marketing, content production and even education.
Speaking to TechDay, he said businesses across APAC are not only under pressure to deliver faster but to reimagine how they produce and personalise content in the first place.
"The lifetime of creative advertising assets in social is hours, if not days, before an asset becomes stale," he said. "That's a big use case for AI."
For Australian marketers, the same challenge looms large as consumers expect brands to respond instantly across TikTok, Instagram and emerging platforms. The race to stay relevant is accelerating, and companies that cannot adapt risk being left behind.
Adobe's acquisition of Workfront several years ago was one of its first major moves in that direction. King described it as a tool designed to streamline organisational processes and cut delays, making it easier to accelerate the delivery of campaigns and projects.
"It's really about streamlining processes within an organisation to be faster, more nimble, agile," he said. "Whether you're setting up a new brand campaign, a website, or just getting an email out the door, it's powerful."
Enterprises across APAC - from banks bound by regulatory change to retailers juggling campaigns across multiple markets - face similar pressures to remove bottlenecks and keep pace with consumer expectations.
One of the most powerful developments, King said, is the ability to take a single piece of content and instantly adapt it for multiple platforms.
"There's this concept of create once, distribute everywhere," he explained. "So it's all about having an author create something one time, and then templating or AI creates all the variations."
With tools that can resize, crop or even change the orientation of video content, companies can now ensure an asset is optimised for every screen and device.
"We have generated fill now," King said. "If it's shot on vertical portrait, you can fill it to landscape and have it optimised for every device and screen."
Translation and voice capabilities are also advancing. AI can take a single script and turn it into multiple languages or repurpose it for voice assistants and call centre systems.
King raised an example of a bank that had "only 24 hours" to update interest rates across all assets to avoid regulatory penalties.
"It's just another example of create once, manage once, distribute everywhere," he said.
For Australia's heavily regulated financial services sector, as well as banks across APAC with strict compliance rules, the ability to update at speed is just as critical.
King argued that these tools are not just about efficiency but about solving the scale problem at the heart of personalisation.
"Organisations want to scale personalisation so they want experiences that are more relevant for smaller and smaller segments, even one-to-one. They need more assets, faster. That's basically a time problem."
The broader uptake of generative AI mirrors this urgency. King said the past year has seen an extraordinary surge in traffic to platforms such as ChatGPT.
"The first time we started reporting on it was about 12 months ago," he said. "Then around November it hit about 900 per cent, December 1,400 per cent, and then it suddenly accelerated to 3,500 per cent. It's exponential, month on month."
While ChatGPT accounts for the largest share, King noted that rivals such as Gemini are carving out significant portions of traffic. Meanwhile, incumbents like Google are reshaping their services to integrate AI more directly in a bid to protect their dominance.
Adobe has also been looking outward, integrating external models into its own systems. King cited Moon Valley, a Canadian start-up whose Mari model has been incorporated into Adobe Firefly.
"There are so many models, it changes every week," he said, describing a fast-moving environment where flexibility and openness to multiple models is crucial.
Marketers are also pressing for clearer ways to understand the impact of their spending. King said the conversation is less about abandoning platforms like Google and Meta and more about measurement.
"The ability to have a third-party tool that can attribute independently and then produce media mix modelling is definitely something," he said.
Adobe's approach, he explained, is agnostic, pulling in both offline and online data to give brands a more independent picture of how campaigns are performing.
King also predicted that large language models will inevitably monetise through advertising, making attribution even more critical.
"Advertising on ChatGPT is assuming what's going to happen," he said.
Beyond marketing, King spends significant time with universities, where he sees AI driving disruption from both the student and institutional side.
"Students of tomorrow have new learning pathways, and AI is a valid learning pathway," he said.
Citing a McKinsey study from the US, he noted that high school students reported learning new skills primarily from TikTok, with teachers coming second.
For universities in Australia and across APAC, already grappling with AI-driven plagiarism detection and the shift to hybrid learning, the challenge is urgent.
King argued that institutions must integrate AI into teaching while also modernising their own back-end systems.
"Every dimension of the higher education sector is being transformed," he said. "AI is having big impacts all around industries."
Underlying this shift is what King described as the challenge of shrinking attention spans.
"Everyone's attention span – I've got a terrible attention span of a goldfish – is getting shorter and shorter, particularly on social media," he said.
For brands in Australia and across APAC, where ad spend is increasingly directed to short-form video and influencer content, the battle to capture attention is no less fierce.
The solution, he insisted, lies in speed, scale and the intelligent use of AI.
"The conversation now is how fast can organisations move to keep up with it," he said.