San Jose’s Adobe puts AI helpers that take orders in plain English into Photoshop, Premiere and its Firefly app
Adobe also will let outside AI assistants, such as the ones people already use in other apps, edit Photoshop and Premiere files directly. That feature is only a preview for now.
San Jose-based Adobe on Tuesday said it is putting AI “agents” into more of the apps that designers, photographers and video editors use, so people can type what they want done and let the software carry out the steps, the company announced at its Adobe MAX conference in Miami Beach.
An AI agent is a program that does more than answer a question. It plans a series of steps and carries them out, the way an assistant might if told, “Make versions of this ad for Instagram and YouTube.” Until now, most AI features in Adobe’s apps did one thing at a time, such as filling in part of a photo from a text prompt. Adobe says its Creative Agent lets users hand off “complex, multi-step tasks” while staying in control of the result.
What is new
- AI Assistants, still in testing, powered by the Creative Agent are expanding to Illustrator, Premiere, InDesign, After Effects and Frame.io, Adobe’s video review service.
- In Firefly, Adobe’s AI creative app, the assistant gets a Plan Mode and a choice of AI models. Adobe is also previewing “always-on” agents that keep doing routine jobs, such as sorting incoming files or resizing content for different sites, while the user is away.
- New editing tools include Relight in Photoshop, which changes the lighting in a photo, and Color Mode in Premiere, a new system for adjusting the colors of video. Lightroom gets Open Eyes, in testing, to fix photos where someone blinked.
- Firefly Builder, in a private test, turns a typed description into a clickable prototype of a website, presentation or app without coding.
Letting other AI tools in
Adobe is also previewing what it calls local MCP integrations. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI chatbots connect to other software. With it, a person could tell an outside AI assistant they already use to edit their Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere or After Effects project files on their own computer, and the layers and video timelines would stay editable afterward, Adobe says. Adobe did not give a release date.
The company also announced wider deals with Google and Microsoft. Adobe’s Acrobat PDF software will be available inside Google Workspace, Google’s office apps, and Adobe’s tools will come to AI Mode in Google Search. Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects are getting versions built for Windows laptops that run on Arm chips, the more power-efficient kind of processor used in phones.
Adobe did not say whether the new features will raise subscription prices. MAX runs through Nov. 12.
Source: Adobe news release, Nov. 10, 2026.