Disney, Adobe to co-develop custom AI models tailored for media giant

Nov 9 : Disney and Adobe have struck a multi-year deal to co-develop custom generative AI models for the media giant with the goal of scaling AI tools across its theme parks, studio and sports media businesses.

The move, announced Monday, will start with speeding up project development timelines at Disney's Experiences division, home to its global theme parks, resorts and cruise lines, and for concept exploration at StudioLAB, the innovation hub within Walt Disney Studios.

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. 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.

"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, senior vice president of R&D technology and engineering at Disney, said in an interview.

"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.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg News reported that Disney was considering cutting thousands of jobs and has asked some managers to target 20 per cent in annual cost savings.