Generative AI is fast, but speed alone has not made it dependable for ad production. The teams getting the most out of it are not generating finished assets from a blank prompt. They start with strong stock footage and use AI to adjust it into what a campaign needs, which is quicker and holds up better than building from scratch. The skill that separates them is less about the tools than about describing the idea clearly enough for the tools to deliver.
That mix of stock and AI is the bet Envato has built its product around. The 20-year-old marketplace, one of the web's largest libraries of digital creative assets, calls it 'stock plus AI,' letting teams pull high-quality footage and shape it with AI in one place, while the model and prompt choices happen behind the scenes. Hichame Assi has been Envato's CEO since October 2020, after a decade at travel marketplace HotelsCombined, where he rose to chief executive and helped grow the business across global markets. He positions the company between the AI-native startups built entirely on generation and the older stock catalogs that predate the technology, with a pitch to offer creatives both.
"Creative pros can now use stock content, which is really high quality, and supercharge it with AI," says Assi. Getting an AI tool to produce that result takes more effort than it looks, and that effort is where platforms differ.
New AI models launch all the time, and each tends to specialize. One handles motion well while another is better at editing a still image, so sorting out which to use for a given shot becomes its own task. Then there is the prompt. Designers think in images, and turning what they picture into the right words rarely lands on the first try. "Many of them have been trained to use visual language rather than written language to come up with it," notes Assi, so even a clear idea can take a few tries to come out the way they imagined.
Envato's answer is to handle the model choice itself. The platform holds all of them and, for each request, runs whichever one will produce the best result, so the creative no longer has to keep track of which model does what. That frees them to focus on describing the idea clearly, and all the models reward anyone who can do that with strong, fast results. "It reduces the extra friction and the mental load of having to keep remembering the different features of all the models," says Assi.
A practical way to put AI to work in production today is to begin with footage that already looks right, then use AI to adjust only the parts that need work. "You look for stock footage to use in a YouTube ad, and it's rarely going to be exactly perfect for what you need. Now with AI, you can riff on it and make small edits to customize it the way you want," says Assi.
The footage is sharp out of the gate, giving the work solid material to build on. AI handles the finishing touches while the clip carries the rest. The tools keep improving, and for still images, Assi already sees AI producing more of the shot on its own, so its role will only grow.
The edge widens when the other pieces sit close at hand. Envato sets its edited and generated visuals against a library of audio and fonts, so a clip can come out with matching sound and type in place, much closer to done. "It's really about taking the different ingredients and putting them together," adds Assi, who sees video as where this pays off most right now.
No single platform covers everything, and the teams that plan around that hold up better than the ones waiting for one tool to do it all. Assi expects most professionals to keep two or three subscriptions, leaning on whichever one suits a given niche.
What matters for buyers is how a tool behaves inside that mix. The ones worth keeping let work move in and out freely, so a team can switch between them without starting over. Envato makes that case on its own setup, where it stays focused on finding content and shaping it and hands the deep editing off to dedicated software. A tool that knows its lane is easier to build a stack around. "I don't think there'll be one company that solves everything," says Assi.
The business case comes down to keeping creatives in motion. When a team can find an asset and finish it in one place, the savings show up as faster turnarounds and fewer tools to manage, and that math holds from solo freelancers up to large in-house studios. "There's speed, and there's convenience, because it's all in the same place without having to have multiple subscriptions," says Assi.
The harder shift is one of habit. The teams that gain the most fold AI into the work as one stage, building their process around moving from a starting asset to a finished one without breaking stride. That advantage compounds. "The models get stronger, and the creative pros themselves get better, so the combination of the two together will improve over time," says Assi.
