Lighting Up Firefly
Akanksha Thareja’s MBAi journey led her to Adobe, where she helped launch the company's new video generative artificial intelligence model that can create stunning clips from text prompts — and a lot more.
A reindeer stands in the midst of a snowy forest as the late-day sun falls toward the horizon, its head turning slowly toward you, so close you can almost feel the velvety softness of its antlers.
In truth, there is no flesh-and-blood reindeer, no snowy forest, no late-day sun, no velvety antlers. Rather, the five-second video clip is a scene created from a text prompt using the generative artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of Adobe Firefly.
It’s a product Akanksha Thareja (MBAi ‘23) is deeply familiar with. Thareja is a product manager with Adobe Firefly, a family of generative AI models powering innovative capabilities in Adobe's creativity and design apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom. Among other features, it can create video clips from written words or images and can be used to extend videos in Adobe Premiere Pro.
“I've never worked in any tech space where the tech evolves so rapidly,” said Thareja, who joined Adobe in February after graduating from Northwestern's MBAi Program, a joint-degree program offered between the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering. “I’m learning so many new things from the people around me. It's a very rapidly changing market.”
It is a market Thareja said she was prepared for because of her time in the MBAi program.
Thareja had a background in software engineering, including more than three years with Microsoft, when she decided to add additional technical knowledge and business skills to her professional toolbox. Her goal was to stay in the tech arena and get back into the workforce as quickly as possible.
MBAi offered exactly what she wanted: a chance to grow her technical and AI knowledge, while learning how to apply these skills to solve real business challenges.
“It was a perfect timeline for me,” she said. “Having the business courses along with the partnership with the McCormick School of Engineering was a big plus for me because, when I was thinking about the next steps in my career, this was like two birds with one shot.”
That shot included an internship at Adobe, where she worked on augmented and virtual reality. That gave her familiarity with the company she works for today and more experience with high-tech innovations in the visual arts.
Thareja’s internship knowledge layered well on the foundation she learned in MBAi. Among the most valuable skills she gained came in the program’s negotiations course.
“That's a course everyone should take,” Thareja said. “It's for personal growth and professional growth. I literally went back and looked at the framework the professor had us create during the assignments, and I've been using that framework for my everyday job.”
The duties at the job have been aimed at fast paced ideation and launching video capabilities in Firefly and in Adobe’s suite of apps. Through the platform, creators can put a prompt into a generative AI model and have the visual representation returned to them in mere moments.
For example, the reindeer scene was created using the prompt: “Cinematic closeup and detailed portrait of a reindeer in a snowy forest at sunset. The lighting is cinematic and gorgeous and soft and sun-kissed, with golden backlight and dreamy bokeh and lens flares.”
“This model comes with that very high cinematic quality,” Thareja said. “Down the road, we are also going to bring better editing workflows using the capabilities of this model.”
At the core of her work is ethical AI, a key tenet of the MBAi program. Thareja said one of the biggest misconceptions about AI today is that it isn’t safe or that it is coming for people’s jobs.
Thareja said her focus with Adobe Firefly is and always will be on the responsible development of AI tools.
“It is a tool that assists creators and helps them get to a place in a more efficient manner,” she said.