As Accenture’s Head of Learning and Development (L&D) Media, Chirantan Baruah leads a team responsible for creating internal training content for nearly a million employees across 52 countries.
“I think of myself as a symphony conductor,” Baruah says. “I lead an ensemble of creative designers, writers, coordinators, and specialists who collaborate and turn complex ideas into engaging stories and experiences.”
From presentations and flyers to interactive experiences and gamification campaigns, Baruah leads his department’s content creation operation. But as a global professional services company, Accenture has grown, so has the demand for new content to train and educate its talent. Slowed by inefficient workstreams and outdated tools, the process of creating, reviewing, and publishing new creative content was becoming burdensome.
Eager to address this challenge, Accenture’s Office of the CIO sought solutions to expedite the development of new content, facilitate improved review cycles, and involve non-design teams into the creation process. After evaluating options, the office chose Adobe Express and selected the L&D Media team to lead the way.
A new tempo for creative agility.
Puneetha Reddy is a senior graphic designer at Accenture with more than 15 years of experience in 2D design and video. Working across Adobe Creative Cloud, she’s adept at gliding out of one creative app and into another to create a finished product, but even this deft toggling could lengthen already tight timelines and slow the creative process.
Reddy and her cohort of designers found new agility and velocity through the deep and powerful integrations of Adobe Express with Creative Cloud applications. The result? A 45% gain in overall efficiency.
“We can seamlessly switch between Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Express to maintain creative control while improving speed,” says Reddy.
Meena Deshmukh, a design senior analyst on the L&D Media team, agrees. “It’s incredible,” she says. “Rather than jumping between tools to achieve the desired result, we can work in Adobe Express and save time.”
The team appreciates the library of pre-designed templates built directly into Adobe Express, full of up-to-date social media canvases they can customize and quickly export. “You don't have to look up the recommended size for an Instagram post or a YouTube video thumbnail anymore,” Reddy says. “We can just open a template and go.”
With the extensive library of content built into Adobe Express, including unlimited access to Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts — plus the L&D Media team’s own library of custom assets and templates — they can effortlessly strike the right note, fine-tuning each project with speed and precision.
“We receive many requests for quick outputs like presentations, infographics, and mailers, and manually creating components was time-consuming. But Adobe Express offers brand-ready templates and content for quick turnaround,” Baruah says. Recently, his team of 20 designers created nearly 200 production-ready assets in just three weeks using Adobe Express as their main creative hub — triple their previous output.
Many of these assets were videos, traditionally a time-intensive format requiring pro-level software, hours of intricate editing, and a lengthy rendering process. As part of the broader human resources organization, the L&D Media team is regularly tasked with creating explainer videos, course animations, and interactive elements to engage and train Accenture’s global team. Adobe Express allowed them to strip down this process, creating the same robust content in a fraction of the time while reducing costs.
“I was shocked by how quickly I could compile videos in Adobe Express,” Deshmukh says. “What used to take hours, took me just 15 to 20 minutes to compile multiple videos with an intro and outro. Adobe Express has become our go-to video creation app.”
Orchestrating seamless collaboration.
Adobe Express enables all of the L&D Media team to join in. Enhanced workflows bridge the gap between designers and those in non-creative roles, producing a more cohesive and efficient creative process and allowing everyone to easily contribute.
Among the 75 users in the L&D Media pilot with Adobe Express, 55 were in editorial, marketing, or other business-related roles. They were empowered to remix templates with personalized content tailored to their needs. This shift lightened the designers' workload and improved overall team efficiency — freeing creatives to focus on more high-value projects.
Deshmukh says these new workstreams brought fresh energy and accessibility to roles beyond traditional creative positions. “It simplified the process for everyone,” she says. “Our designers craft core templates, which other team members can then quickly adapt for graphics, presentations, or even videos.”
The L&D Media team is also using Adobe Firefly within Adobe Express to streamline content creation. By automating image generation and providing creative suggestions, Firefly’s generative AI technology has helped the team reduce time spent on brainstorming and initial drafts. By enabling rapid production of high-quality visuals, the team can shift focus from creation to refinement, ultimately enhancing both the quality and speed of their digital learning materials.
Composing a new era of creative efficiency.
Accenture’s L&D Media team continues to transform and reshape how content is created using Adobe Express. By streamlining workflows and empowering the full team to contribute meaningfully, they’ve unlocked new levels of creative harmony and productivity.
This productive synergy mirrors the success Accenture has seen with its existing suite of Adobe enterprise solutions, which integrates seamlessly to create workflows that increase efficiencies while decreasing effort. For example, Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Experience Manager Assets power all of Accenture.com, while Adobe Workfront brings all team workflows into one centralized hub.
As Baruah says, “Anything that we can plug into Adobe Express to make our workflow easier is a welcome change.”
Whether it’s designers and marketers building assets from branded templates or developers digging into customer data to boost campaigns, the Accenture team has freed itself from repetitive tasks and siloed projects with its Adobe tech stack. Baruah says it’s that kind of freedom that gives creatives their true power.
“These workflows have given us the space to dedicate more energy to creative problem-solving and tackle larger, more intricate projects,” Baruah says. This also gives non-designers the ability to adapt and create content that aligns with their stakeholders’ needs — ensuring a smooth, efficient content pipeline and added value to their audience.
After the promising results of the L&D Media team pilot, Accenture’s Office of the CIO plans to expand the use of Adobe Express across other teams in marketing, sales, and beyond, amplifying its impact and enabling faster content creation and collaboration throughout the company.
Learn more about how to transform marketing operations with Adobe Express.
Govind Balakrishnan is senior vice president and general manager at Adobe, responsible for Adobe Express and DMe Services. During his 19+ years at Adobe, his passion has been to build tools and runtimes that cultivate creativity on all platforms. Balakrishnan was the creator of Flash Lite before becoming responsible for the Flash Platform. He has spent the last few years developing and driving the Creative Cloud mobile and services strategy and the Creative Cloud mobile app portfolio. More recently he has taken responsibility for Adobe Express. Prior to joining Adobe, Balakrishnan was an Architect of Maya 3D, Autodesk’s Oscar award-winning 3D modeling and animation software.
