The Design + AI Summit 2026: Part 2

AI tools are evolving rapidly and opening new creative possibilities every day. Achieving consistent, repeatable AI-generated results still takes skill.

This session focuses on the communication strategies behind effective AI workflows. Learn how to guide AI tools with the same clarity, context, and creative direction you already use when working with clients, teammates, and collaborators.

Explore how different AI tools respond to prompts, references, tone, constraints, and feedback. As you learn to communicate your intent more effectively across text, image, and video generation tools, you'll begin to understand why vague requests often lead to generic output. From there, discover how iterative feedback and refinement help improve the quality and consistency of AI-generated results.

You'll leave with practical strategies for working with AI as a creative partner while maintaining consistency, quality, and creative control.

You will learn how to:

• Write clearer prompts that produce more consistent results
• Guide AI tools with references, context, and constraints
• Refine AI output through feedback and iteration
• Adjust prompting strategies for different AI models and tools

AI Assistants are changing how you interact with your Adobe tools. Instead of digging through menus and panels or memorizing complex workflows, you can now describe what you want in your own words. AI Assistants can execute multistep workflows, and together you can refine the results through a natural language conversation.

Join Howard Pinsky for a practical look at workflows in Adobe Firefly, Express, and Photoshop that leverage AI Assistants. This session will help you make sense of what that means for real-world creative work.

Learn how conversational creative tools can help you brainstorm ideas, refine designs, automate repetitive tasks, and move faster without giving up creative control. Howard will demonstrate approachable workflows that support the way designers already think and work. Discover how AI Assistants can help you stay focused on creative direction instead of technical steps.

You will learn how to:

• Use conversational prompts to guide creative workflows across Adobe tools
• Move between prompting and hands-on editing for greater creative control
• Speed up repetitive production tasks while staying focused on design decisions
• Build practical workflows that feel approachable and useful, not overwhelming

Successful social media marketing requires a full creative pipeline. You’re expected to brainstorm ideas, write captions, create graphics, edit video, and publish constantly. This session explores how AI can help you simplify that process and create stronger content in less time.

In this session, Brittney Megann shares her real-world approach to using AI to work faster, stay organized, and produce more content without sacrificing authenticity, creativity, or personality.

You’ll leave with actionable strategies for using AI as a creative assistant that supports your ideas instead of replacing them.

You will learn how to:

• Turn scattered ideas, voice notes, and rough “brain dumps” into polished social content with ChatGPT, Adobe Express, and Adobe Firefly
• Create reusable Adobe Express templates for faster, more consistent content creation
• Use tools like generate captions in Adobe Express to rewrite, lengthen, or shorten your social media captions
• Maintain an authentic brand voice while working with AI tools
• Streamline repetitive tasks so you can spend more time creating instead of getting stuck in production cycles

AI is disrupting creative workflows everywhere. Designers are no longer the only team members creating visual content, and your entire organization now has access to AI tools. Have you established clear standards for how those tools should be used?

Join Amy Balliett in conversation with creative leader Josh Miles for an honest discussion about what happens when AI becomes part of the day-to-day reality of managing a creative team.

Drawing from years of building and leading interdisciplinary creative teams, Josh shares practical lessons learned from implementing AI inside a large enterprise environment.

Together, Amy and Josh will explore the challenges organizations face right now, including workflow disruption, creative oversight, tool selection, quality control, and maintaining trust in the creative process.

Insights include:

• Maintaining quality and brand consistency across AI-assisted creative workflows
• Establishing practical standards and expectations for teams using AI tools
• Supporting designers and non-designers in creating content with AI
• Avoiding common workflow and implementation mistakes as AI adoption grows

AI tools in Photoshop look impressive in demos. Production work is a different story. In this session, Lisa Carney shows how she is using Photoshop AI right now in professional retouching and compositing workflows. These are real files. Real deadlines. Real client expectations. The work needs to hold up for screen, print, and ongoing revisions.

Lisa walks through practical, client-style scenarios drawn from high-end retouching work. She shows where AI genuinely saves time. She also shows where it falls short. You’ll see how and when to step in with traditional retouching skills to finish the job cleanly and confidently.

This session focuses on production-ready workflows. Not demo-pretty results. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of what Photoshop AI is good at today, what still requires human judgment, and how professionals are combining both to deliver reliable results.

You will learn how to:

• Speed up cleanup, selections, and background extensions with AI tools that actually hold up.
• Recognize where AI results break down and how to refine them manually.
• Manage resolution and quality for files headed to screen and print.
• See how high-end retouching decisions translate to demanding, client-driven work.

AI is very good at writing text that sounds like writing. That doesn’t mean it’s good.

If AI wrote this description, it might urge you to “unleash your inner writer,” “supercharge your text,” or some such nonsense. But this isn’t AI—I promise. It’s me, Sara, a longtime copywriter who wants to share some solid writing tips with you so you can build your very own sentences from scratch. Or, if needed, wash the smell from your AI text.

The goal isn’t to swear off AI. It’s to stop letting it do your thinking.

You’ll leave better at spotting bad writing, more confident in editing AI output, and more comfortable trusting your own words.

Key takeaways:

•    Fire up your empathy and connect with your reader
•    Stop prompting and start persuading 
•    Use your humanness to your advantage

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered companion built into the Microsoft ecosystem. If you work in a Microsoft environment, you likely already have access to Copilot tools. As a creative professional, it’s important to understand what these tools do well, where they fall short, and how to guide the quality of the final result.

In this session, Jess Stratton explores how Copilot can support creative work across the Microsoft ecosystem. Learn how to use Copilot as a workplace creative assistant to brainstorm ideas, organize information, develop branded content, generate infographics, and speed up presentation workflows. Jess will also demonstrate how brand packages and style guidance can help Copilot create more consistent, on-brand results across projects and teams.

You’ll leave with practical strategies for working smarter with AI while maintaining creative control, brand consistency, and design quality.

Topics include:

• Using Copilot as a workplace creative assistant across Microsoft 365
• Understanding Copilot’s four pillars for prompting: Goal, Context, Expectation, and source
• Building brand packages for more consistent AI-generated content
• Generating infographics and presentation content with Copilot
• Recognizing Copilot’s strengths and limitations

You can turn ideas into finished campaigns faster with the AI Assistant in Adobe Express. This session explores how the rapidly evolving AI Assistant can help you plan, build, and deliver cohesive campaigns faster than ever. Through practical, real-world demos, you’ll see how AI supports idea generation, streamlines everyday creative tasks, and helps you produce more assets with less effort—while keeping your design voice intact. Walk away with a clear understanding of what’s possible now, what’s emerging, and how to use the Express AI Assistant to work smarter at every stage of your content creation process.

You will learn how to:

• Use AI-assisted layout, alignment, and spacing to reach usable layouts faster
• Apply color, text styling, and animations quickly to test visual direction early
• Modify images and replace objects without rebuilding designs from scratch
• Generate and refine on-brand text directly inside design workflows
• Use the AI Assistant in Adobe Express to move campaigns from concept to deliverables faster

AI is moving fast, and so is the legal landscape around it. You need to understand how to protect yourself, your company, and your clients when using generative AI in professional creative work.

In this session, attorney Seth Polansky breaks down the legal and ethical realities creative professionals need to understand right now. He’ll explain where current copyright law stands, what risks come with using AI-generated assets and content, and how to navigate AI responsibly as it becomes part of everyday creative workflows.

Whether you are experimenting with AI tools or integrating them into professional work, this session will help you ask smarter questions and avoid costly mistakes.

You will learn how to:

•    Understand the current legal landscape surrounding AI-generated content
•    Identify copyright, ownership, and licensing risks tied to AI assets
•    Recognize ethical concerns and potential liabilities in creative workflows
•    Build smarter AI policies for your professional creative work

Photoshop selections used to be one of the most tedious parts of image editing. Now AI can handle much of the heavy lifting in seconds.

In this session, Photoshop expert Colin Smith shows how modern AI-powered selection tools can dramatically speed up retouching, compositing, masking, and image-cleanup workflows. Learn how to get better results faster, when to trust the AI, when to step in manually, and how to combine different selection techniques to solve real editing challenges.

This is a practical, workflow-driven session focused on saving time, reducing frustration, and helping you work smarter in Photoshop.

You will learn how to:

• Create fast, high-quality selections with today’s AI-powered Photoshop tools
• Compare Select Subject and Object Selection for different editing challenges
• Target specific areas of a person with advanced People selections
• Use the Remove tool to quickly find and remove distractions

How much of your day disappears into tedious tasks instead of the creative work you love doing? This session shows how AI can take on those repetitive jobs so you can focus on what matters most. You’ll learn practical ways to streamline file cleanup, organization, and everyday production tasks by building your own custom app or agent. You’ll see demos that walk through the process using tools like n8n. These tools give you flexible options to automate the mundane parts of your workflow and support a smoother, more creative workday.

Topics include:

• Building simple AI-powered apps for custom creative workflow solutions
• Automating tedious tasks through independent agents and robust apps
• Streamlining everyday production tasks with agentic workflows

• Speed up editing and reduce manual work
• Automate transcription, rough cuts, and captioning
• Organize footage with AI-assisted tagging and asset management
• Upscale and restore low-resolution video
• Repurpose long-form content into short, social-ready clips