Disney and Adobe build private AI models for production

At Adobe MAX 2026 in Miami, Adobe, the maker of Photoshop and Illustrator, announced that The Walt Disney Company had appointed it an Official AI Innovation Partner. The aim is to compress some development processes that once took months into days or hours.

Adobe vice president for GenAI New Business Ventures Hannah Elsakr described the approach as “an accelerant for artistic vision, creativity and guest engagement” and said it would allow artists to do more creative work as well as faster work.

Which production workflows will the models change?

Disney and Adobe will develop custom AI models trained on Disney’s intellectual property, including specific world knowledge such as character attributes, environments and visual styles. The models will generate and explore concepts for Disney and ESPN productions and for theme parks.

StudioLAB, the collaborative innovation hub at Walt Disney Studios, will guide model development around prototyping needs. ESPN Edge will apply custom models to sports broadcasting. Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort and Disney Cruise Line will also use the customer AI models.

Adobe will provide access to Firefly AI, Premiere for video editing and Photoshop for image editing, all available in Creative Cloud Pro. The package also includes Firefly Foundry’s proprietary models plus dedicated engineering and research resources for production pipelines.

How does Firefly already fit into Disney’s work?

In June, Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development announced its use of Firefly Foundry in the Theme Park Design Toolkit. One sketch-to-image model turns hand-drawn concepts into fully rendered 2D concept art. A custom image model generates on-brand creative assets linked to Disney franchises. The new agreement expands that existing arrangement.

Why choose Adobe over a frontier-model lab?

Disney’s previous AI efforts have produced uneven results. Some internal developments drew ridicule. An OpenAI deal collapsed after the company pulled the plug on its Sora video-generation model just three months in. The nearest replacement so far is an agreement allowing TikTok creators to use Disney intellectual property.

The risk-management case for the choice rests on keeping Disney’s intellectual property inside a private system rather than passing it to an external foundation-model provider. Private models trained on Disney assets should give both companies more control over brand consistency, provenance and ownership than general-purpose models trained on large volumes of content.

Firefly was unlikely to win the race to build the world’s largest foundation model, but the partnership gives Adobe a different route to commercial strength: helping brands use AI with their own content.

What does the agreement mean for creative employment?

For concept artists, the expansion of the arrangement raises a direct employment question. Disney has already made multiple rounds of layoffs in 2026 under CEO Josh D’Amaro. Plans target annual cost savings of up to 20% across various divisions, and July cuts included job losses among Pixar artists.

The timing has done little to settle suspicions that Adobe’s tools could facilitate job losses by allowing fewer artists to work faster. Elsakr’s promise of more creative work sits alongside those cuts.

Could Disney become Adobe’s template?

If the arrangement works, Disney could provide a proof of concept for other major entertainment companies adopting AI. It would also mark Adobe’s move from creative-software supplier toward an infrastructure role comparable to Microsoft in enterprise office work, AWS in cloud computing or Unreal Engine in gaming.

The next test is whether the promised move from months to days or hours holds for the targeted development work without eroding the brand consistency, provenance and ownership the private system is intended to protect.