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The Walt Disney Company and Adobe have announced a multi-year strategic alliance designating Adobe as Disney’s official “AI Innovation Partner”.
Disney-Adobe’s Partnership Scope:
Unveiled at the Adobe MAX creativity conference, the collaboration expands upon previous work with Walt Disney Imagineering—which designs Disney’s theme parks—to integrate Adobe’s suite of creative and generative AI technologies, including Photoshop, Premiere, and Firefly Foundry, across broader company segments.
Custom AI Models: Disney creative teams will collaborate directly with Adobe’s Firefly Foundry to co-develop “human-centered and artist-led” generative AI models custom-tailored to Disney’s iconic characters, intellectual properties, and distinct visual styles.
Cross-Company Integration:
The initiative expands past initial work with Walt Disney Imagineering and StudioLAB into broader territory, stretching into Disney’s entertainment studios, theme parks, cruise lines, and ESPN Edge to streamline production workflows and build interactive fan experiences.
Industry & Fan Engagement:
Beyond internal content production, the collaboration features joint marketing tie-ins and co-innovation showcases slated for major industry events like Adobe MAX and the Adobe Summit.
Adobe will also work with Disney to use AI tools to boost engagement with sports fans at ESPN and bring more of ESPN’s content archive to audiences.
Through Adobe’s Firefly Foundry, which lets enterprises build and deploy custom AI models, the two companies will work on gen-AI models trained on Disney’s intellectual properties that will generate production-ready outputs.
As reported, the models will be private and proprietary to Disney.
Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative, design, and research and development arm behind Disney Experiences, has deployed a custom image generation model and a sketch-to-image model that can turn hand-drawn sketches into fully-rendered concept art.
Disney’s senior vice president of R&D technology and engineering said in an interview, “We talk about the time frames in our projects in years — it’s years’ worth of development. And what Adobe Foundry has allowed us to do is compress the creative process that would have taken months to now being able to do that in hours and days,” Kyle Laughlin.
“We’re able to run through multiple iterations quickly with these tools. And that helps us reduce costly changes in the field once we get into the construction of these experiences,” Laughlin said, adding that the tools will help accelerate creative development at Disney and are “in no way meant to replace” roles at Imagineering
