Here's a number that stopped me mid-scroll: 78 percent.
That's how many creators using AI say it's actually accelerating the growth of their business or following. Not just making their lives easier. Growing their audience. Growing their income. And for full-time creators, that number jumps to 89 percent.
I've been traveling full-time since 2017, and almost everything I do—photos, video, writing this site—runs through tools that didn't exist when I started. So when Adobe released its latest Creators' Toolkit Report, surveying more than 2,000 U.S. creators through The Harris Poll in October, I wanted to know what's actually happening out there. Is AI helping people create, or is it just another thing to learn and then abandon?
Turns out, it's genuinely helping. But it's not the whole story.
The Gap Between the Idea and the Result
Here's where it gets interesting. Sixty percent of creators using AI say it's made it easier to stand out from everyone else doing similar work. Good news, right?
But 68 percent also say they at least sometimes settle for a result that doesn't quite match what they pictured. And in the past three months, 47 percent of creators who've used AI gave up on a project mid-stream because getting it exactly right took too much effort. More than a quarter of those creators got stuck because they couldn't change one part of their work without redoing the whole thing.
That tracks with my own experience learning new editing software. I'll get 90 percent of the way to what I imagined, then hit a wall trying to fix the last 10 percent. The tool gets you close. Close enough isn't always good enough.
Katarina Mogus, a tech creator and podcaster quoted in the report, put it well: AI doesn't replace her creativity, it expands what's possible. She's still the one making the decisions. The tool just gives her more ways to get there. That's the distinction that matters—AI as an extra set of hands, not a replacement for judgment.
Video Is Where the Opportunity Gap Shows Up
This part surprised me. Thirty-eight percent of creators say they're making more video than a year ago, and 65 percent say video is important to hitting their goals. Makes sense—video is how most audiences discover new creators these days.
But wanting to make video and knowing how to make it well aren't the same thing. Thirty-four percent of full-time creators say they turned down a paid video gig in the past three months because they didn't feel skilled enough to deliver it.
That's a real cost. Real money left on the table because of a skills gap.
When asked where they want AI assistance most, creators pointed to visual effects and cleanup (21 percent), editing clips into a coherent story (19 percent), and fixing messy audio (18 percent). Not glamorous stuff. Just the technical grunt work that stands between an idea and a finished piece.
Who's Actually in Charge Here
The agentic AI numbers caught my attention too, since that's newer territory. Among creators who've used an AI agent for creative work, 36 percent say it let them finish a project that would've been too complex before. Twenty-six percent say they could now take on paid work they couldn't have handled previously. Fifty-nine percent say it saves them time overall, even after all the instructing, checking, and refining.
And yet—77 percent say the final creative call should always belong to the human. Not the agent. Not the algorithm.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Sixty percent of creators believe people with advanced AI skills are getting opportunities others aren't, and 51 percent think that gap will widen. But here's the encouraging bit: 89 percent of creators already using AI are confident they can learn whatever new skills come next.
I believe that too. I've taught myself new tools well into my sixties because curiosity doesn't come with an expiration date. The creators in this report aren't handing over their vision to a machine. They're using the machine to get their vision out faster, with fewer technical walls in the way.
So what happens if you stop waiting until you've "mastered" a tool and just start experimenting with it today? Probably the same thing that's happened for 78 percent of the people in this survey—you'll get further than you expected.
Source: Adobe
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