Adobe MAX 2026 Miami Beach: Day-by-Day Leader Plan

Adobe MAX 2026 will run November 10–12, 2026, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, with in-person preconference courses on November 8–9¹. If you're going in person, settle the hotel first: Adobe says its discounted MAX rooms go first-come, first-served and will sell out¹. This plan is for founders, agency owners and marketing leads. It goes day by day using the times Adobe has published, says where Adobe hasn't published a time yet, and covers who to look for and what to settle before you travel.

Quick Summary

Adobe MAX 2026 runs November 10–12 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, with preconference courses November 8–9. Adobe has published times for a handful of featured AI sessions: Tuesday afternoon holds three, Wednesday's 4:00 PM EST session on craft and AI is the most useful for anyone running a creative team, and two Thursday 8:30 AM repeats clash. Keynote, Sneaks and awards times aren't on the pages cited, so check the official agenda.

When the trip makes sense for a business, and when it doesn't

Adobe describes MAX as a conference for designers, illustrators, photographers, social media content creators, video pros and people who want to learn more about generative AI tools¹. Navan's travel guide adds marketers and creative leaders to that crowd². If you run a design studio, a content team or a marketing service business, much of the program touches work your team already bills for. As the person managing that team, you'll be watching for something different from what they watch for: how long jobs take, what they cost to produce, and which skills your people will need next year.

The trip won't suit everyone. If your team doesn't work in Creative Cloud, much of the catalog is hands-on technique you'd never use. For a firm of two or three people, a ticket ($1,595 with the promo code shown on Adobe's page³) competes with a lot of other spending, and the main days are also offered online¹, which may cover most of what a small team would come for. Keep in mind too that Adobe chooses and describes the featured sessions, and it sells the tools being demonstrated. Claims about faster workflows are the vendor's account, so they're worth testing against your own projects before you change how you scope client work.

Refunds, deposits and visas

Registration fees are no longer refundable, and no-shows don't get a refund either¹. If you hold a MAX hotel room, one night plus tax is charged to your card as a deposit and applied to your final bill. The nightly resort fee isn't included in that charge¹.

Anyone traveling from outside the US can ask for a visa letter during registration. Adobe says the letter arrives within 48 hours, and registration fees are fully refunded if the visa doesn't come through in time¹.

Adobe also offers a group discount for teams¹. One way to use a second ticket is to split the clashing sessions described below and compare notes each evening. Preconference courses are a separate purchase: you log back into the attendee dashboard and use "manage group passes and purchase" while space is available¹.

November 8–9: who the preconference suits

Adobe describes the preconference courses as in-depth training, held in person only¹. That means two more days and two more hotel nights before the main program begins, which is a lot of time for most business leaders to give up.

One way to make those days pay off is to send the person who will teach the rest of the team once you're back. A designer who spends two days on one tool can bring home a working method that colleagues then learn from them directly. If nobody on your team is going to play that role, arriving on the evening of November 9 keeps the trip to the three main days.

Tuesday, November 10: keynote morning, AI afternoon

Navan's travel guide, citing Adobe's published agenda, says registration opens Tuesday at 8 a.m.². Adobe promises "visionary keynotes" across the three days³,⁴, but the Adobe pages cited here give no time for the opening keynote, so check the official agenda and keep your morning clear around it.

The afternoon is where Adobe's guide to its AI sessions places several featured talks from the 25-session "Accelerating creativity with AI" track⁵:

• Adobe lists Sam Luo, designer, educator and founder of LYH Studio, for 12:00–12:45 PM EST. He will show Firefly, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign working together on editorial layouts, from first concept to finished presentation⁵. This one suits teams that produce reports, decks or long-form marketing pieces.
• Adobe lists Laura Jordan Bambach, a former D&AD President, for 3:30–4:15 PM EST with "Set Out Without Fear: Why AI is Not Our Creative Titanic"⁵. The session is about keeping people's own creative thinking central while they use AI to try new approaches, which is the question many studio owners are weighing.
• Adobe lists two sessions together for 5:15–6:00 PM EST. Creative technologist Don Allen III's "Build Worlds Faster: A Hybrid AI Workflow in Photoshop" goes up against creative technologist Emily Bisset's "AI is Fast, Artists are Faster: Your Creativity + Adobe Firefly"⁵. Bisset's session repeats on Thursday and Allen's is listed once, so seeing Allen on Tuesday and Bisset on Thursday gets you both.

For the evening, Uphill Techno reports a Welcome Reception on Tuesday⁶. The Adobe pages cited here don't list it, so confirm it on the agenda before you plan dinner around it.

Wednesday, November 11: one featured session and room for meetings

Adobe's AI guide lists one featured session for Wednesday, and it's the one most relevant to a business owner. Adobe lists "Creative Courage, Craft, and AI Workflows that Actually Work" for 4:00 to 4:45 PM EST⁵. Its description opens: "AI may have removed barriers to making things, but it hasn’t replaced the demand for taste, originality, and creative courage."⁵

Two Adobe people lead it. Tomasz Opasiński, Product Manager / Creative Technologist at Adobe⁷, will work through Photoshop and Firefly workflows meant to hold up in production⁵. Dan Fletcher, Executive Creative Director at Adobe⁷, brings lessons from deploying generative AI across Adobe's global campaigns, along with what the session page calls "a playbook of hard-earned insights to protect creative standards."⁵ Of the featured talks, this is the closest to what a growing agency deals with: AI used at volume, with someone answerable for the quality of what ships.

The guides Adobe has published so far give no other Wednesday times⁵,⁷. The catalog does let you filter sessions as AI-forward, AI-supported or traditional⁵, which helps if you want to fill the morning with something in your team's main tool. Otherwise Wednesday works well for meetings, and if you missed Luo or Bisset on Tuesday, both come back on Thursday. MAX Sneaks and the MAX Bash are among the big events competing for time during the week², and Uphill Techno reports the Bash on Wednesday evening⁶. Adobe hasn't published times for either on the pages cited here.

Thursday, November 12: repeats and a hands-on lab

Several earlier sessions run again on the last day, which makes Thursday a good catch-up day.

Thursday, November 12, 8:30–9:15 AM EST: the repeat of Sam Luo's editorial layouts session and the repeat of the Opasiński and Fletcher session are in the same slot⁵. If you want both, see one of them on its earlier date.

Adobe lists the second run of Emily Bisset's Firefly session for 1:00–1:45 PM EST⁵. Adobe promises "an honest, practical overview" of what Firefly can provide⁵, which makes it a sensible last session before you head home.

For something hands-on, Adobe lists a lab, "You, Animated: Bring Your Story to Life with Adobe Firefly" (L6105), led by Kris Kashtanova, Principal Creative AI Evangelist & Community Advocate at Adobe, with Gaetan Desimone, Sr. Creative Technologist | Creators at Adobe⁷. Participants build a 20 to 30-second animation from start to finish, and beginners follow a guided path⁷. Adobe hasn't published its time on the pages cited here, so check the session catalog before you lock the day.

Entries for the MAX Creativity Awards have closed. The awards cover five categories: design, image making, motion, photography and video⁸. Adobe's awards page doesn't say when winners will be presented, so look for that slot on the agenda if seeing the work matters to you.

Who to look for between sessions

One 2025 attendee quoted on Adobe's sessions page said, "MAX is creative networking to the extreme."⁷ Adobe has long mixed well-known names into its lineup; the free virtual 2020 edition billed photographer Annie Leibovitz and Tyler, The Creator among its guests⁹. None of the 2026 speakers below appear on that 2020 list, so their roles come from Adobe's 2026 pages. For a business leader, the most useful people on the featured list are the ones who run creative companies:

• Chris Do, Founder/CEO of The Futur³, for questions about how a creative business sells and structures its work as tools change.
• Jolene Delisle, Founder of The Working Assembly³, and Siobhán Maroney, Creative Director and Co-Founder of They Are Creative³. Both run studios and handle staffing and client expectations firsthand.
• Laura Jordan Bambach, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Uncharted Studio⁷, whose Tuesday session⁵ covers the decision many studio owners are weighing about how far to take AI.
• Dan Fletcher, whose Wednesday session draws on deploying generative AI across global campaigns⁵. That gives you a good reason to ask how review and approval held up at that volume.

Write the follow-up plan before you leave home: who you hope to meet, what you want to ask them, and what you'll send afterward.

What the sessions suggest about where creative hours go

Two of the featured session descriptions make the same argument. Fletcher's says AI hasn't replaced the demand for taste⁵, and Bambach's is about keeping people's own creative thinking central while AI handles the experiments⁵. That is Adobe describing its own tools, so treat it as a claim to test in Miami. If it holds in your shop, routine production takes fewer hours, and more of a project's value sits with whoever decides which version goes to the client.

The way that production is paid for is shifting as well. Adobe's help pages explain that most standard generative features, such as Generative Fill in Photoshop, use one credit per generation, while premium features like video generation use more¹⁰. Once a plan's monthly credit limit is reached, you either wait for the next month or buy more credits¹⁰. For a team quoting fixed-fee projects, part of a job's production cost now depends on how many generations it takes, which is useful to understand before you quote AI-assisted work.

Before you go, write down two or three jobs your team repeats every week, such as a monthly report layout, social cutdowns from a video or product imagery. Then open Adobe's session catalog and build your schedule around the sessions that touch those jobs. If none do, the online option for November 10–12 may be the better use of your team's week.