Adobe's AI Partnerships Team Now Closes Deals in Days, Not Months

Adobe's strategic partnerships team is now completing agreements in days and weeks instead of months, according to Shilpa Anand, the VP of Global Strategic Partnerships who leads the group. The compressed timeline reflects a structural change in how Adobe negotiates: senior executives at partner organisations are directly involved in detailed decisions, replacing a process that previously required months of planning. Anand joined Adobe less than a year ago, following roles at Google and Microsoft.

The stakes are straightforward. Adobe is simultaneously pulling external AI models into its own applications and pushing its creative and document tools out to services such as Claude, Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT. The pace of those integrations now determines whether Adobe remains the default creative environment as AI workflows migrate to general-purpose assistants. The partnerships remit also extends to chip suppliers, with the goal of improving application performance and supporting AI processing directly on users' devices.

What is Adobe building with Disney?

The highest-profile example of the team's work is a custom-model programme anchored by Disney. On 9 November, Adobe and Disney announced a multi-year strategic alliance that provides Disney early access to Adobe technology plus dedicated engineering and research support. The agreement covers collaboration with The Walt Disney Studios' StudioLAB, ESPN Edge and Imagineering, Disney's theme park design arm.

Anand framed Disney as the template Adobe intends to replicate with other enterprise customers. "We're in the early days of these custom models, and working with Disney is going to give us a strong foundation to go and replicate that with other customers. We would love to do that. I think that is the end vision: this availability of building these custom models," Anand said. "The scale of Disney is going to really enable us to set up a foundation to do this at a global scale."

According to Adobe, the partnership has already produced working tools at Imagineering:

• A sketch-to-image model that converts hand-drawn concepts into rendered two-dimensional artwork
• A custom image model that generates assets consistent with Disney franchises
• Exploratory work on theme park designs and on visualising intellectual property in three dimensions

The Disney models are developed through Firefly Foundry, Adobe's infrastructure for building custom models. Anand said the custom models could be built on Adobe's own models or on third-party models for which Adobe holds the necessary licences. In plain words: Disney gets bespoke AI, and Adobe gets a repeatable playbook it hopes to sell to other large enterprises.

Will Disney's models stay private?

Yes — and Adobe has drawn the boundaries explicitly. Disney's proprietary models will remain exclusive to the entertainment company and will not be available to the public through Adobe products or third-party AI connectors. Anand described the arrangement as an enterprise implementation rather than a model intended for general distribution. Adobe will not expose the models through Model Context Protocol endpoints, the standard interface that connects AI systems with external tools and data sources.

One question remains unaddressed. Anand declined to comment on Disney's copyright disputes with other AI companies, leaving untouched the litigation backdrop that shadows every custom-model deal involving a rights-heavy content library. That silence is notable given that Adobe positions customer ownership of data as a guiding principle elsewhere in its partnerships.

How far does Adobe's model ecosystem reach?

Anand said Adobe's wider AI ecosystem now includes more than 30 models. Within Adobe's applications, the goal is to give users access to those models without requiring them to switch services. On external platforms, Adobe wants its connectors to let users finish tasks inside those environments rather than bouncing between tools. Adobe's work on AI agents began with a presence on Claude before expanding to Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT.

Adobe is also negotiating a subtler question with platform partners: how an assistant decides between using its own native capabilities and calling an external connector such as Adobe's. Those discussions cover the mechanics of how Adobe's tools are reached from inside another provider's service — a routing decision that effectively determines how much traffic Adobe's connectors receive.

The Google partnership, expanded on 10 November, illustrates the two-way strategy:

• Acrobat becomes available through Google Drive and Gmail
• Adobe's Gemini connectors expand
• Creative tools arrive in AI Mode in Google Search
• Google's image and video models reach more Adobe applications

Adobe also works with specialist generative media providers including Luma and Runway. Anand said model selection involves balancing the breadth of Adobe's offering against the capabilities customers request, and she identified the combination of AI models with established software tools as a priority for further partnerships. In short, Adobe is betting that distribution breadth — one workflow, many models — matters more than any single model's benchmark performance.

What about local and regional models?

Anand signalled openness to models from India's AI ecosystem, framed entirely as demand-driven. "We're absolutely open to it. We are very much driven by what our customers want. So the way we are bringing in models is prioritised by the ask we're getting from customers," Anand said. "We announced Seedance yesterday, and I think Forrest talked about it in his keynote. These are models that our customers have been asking for on video, so we're happy to look at the India ecosystem of models and see what makes sense, especially as we go deeper into markets and those language optimisations, local optimisations that these models bring. We would love to bring them in on the Gen Media side."

Seedance, announced the day before the interview, also demonstrates Adobe's staged rollout pattern: the model was introduced outside the United States first and became available there later. Availability still depends on regulatory requirements and Adobe's own standards. The starting point is global availability, but Adobe will not bypass restrictions that prevent a model's use in a particular country.

One caveat tempers the customer-driven framing. Anand did not specify which Indian models are under consideration or give a timeline, so the openness reads as positioning for localised markets rather than a confirmed roadmap.

How does Adobe handle data?

External models are accessed through their providers' application programming interfaces when users select them. Anand said Adobe's contracts include requirements against data retention, with customer ownership of data guiding those arrangements. She did not give a general assurance on data sovereignty — the details depend on each implementation and would require follow-up. For enterprises weighing custom models built on proprietary IP, that unresolved question is the gap between Adobe's contractual posture and a full sovereignty guarantee.

What is happening on devices?

Adobe is expanding AI that runs on users' devices rather than in the cloud. Anand pointed to Apple's M-series chips, Nvidia hardware and Microsoft's work on local processing as relevant areas, and cited Topaz Labs' on-device models as another example in Adobe's local AI work.

The hardware partnerships have concrete deliverables:

• A collaboration with Nvidia, announced in March, applying capabilities from Nvidia's physical AI models to Adobe's video models
• Optimised versions of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and Substance 3D Painter for Arm-based Windows PCs under the Microsoft partnership
• Planned integration of Adobe Express creation tools into Microsoft Photos

The on-device push matters commercially: local processing addresses latency, cost and privacy concerns that cloud inference cannot, and it aligns Adobe with hardware vendors who want AI workloads running on their silicon.

Taken together, Anand's account describes a company rebuilt around partnership velocity — but the substance behind the speed, from Disney-scale custom models to sovereignty guarantees, will only be visible in what Adobe actually ships.