Adobe is bringing its AI creative assistants into public beta and rolling them out to the Creative Cloud ecosystem. Starting Thursday, you can use the AI assistant in beta versions of Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Illustrator and Frame.io.
These creative, AI-made tools announced for the first time in April. It’s Adobe’s biggest shift yet in AI, building on years of AI-powered editing tools to integrate an AI assistant into its industry-standard editing software that can handle creative tasks. It also plans to bring its AI design connector to Gemini, the last major chatbot it didn’t have, integrating Adobe’s AI offerings into ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot.
Agent capabilities vary by application. In Photoshop, AI can help manage your layers and remove background clutter. A Premier Pro agent can sort videos into bins and target interview questions to pull specific clips. InDesign can automatically run a check to ensure that projects comply with product guidelines.
As with all AI product launches, Adobe says it doesn’t intend for AI to replace human creators. Agents are designed to help them “organize complex workflows,” Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of product marketing for creative professionals, told me.
Creative agents are about “giving you control, letting you direct, letting you check in all the time, if you choose to manually edit further,” says Subramaniam. “Or to keep the context setting and iterate and negotiate with the agent to achieve the desired result.”
AI assistants can also help you learn to use different Adobe applications.
Finding your ‘happy path’ to creativity
If you have a strong creative idea, an assistant can create those visual assets and refine them until they are ready. Or if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you can give a chatbot-like assistant a general answer, such as “make it visible.”
The goal of the creative assistant is to “guide you on the path to happiness,” as the company calls it. AI learns your preferences over time so it can automatically apply them. The goal is to keep the AI on track and avoid any randomness that comes with AI guesswork.
Firefly Studio, the company’s hub for creating and editing AI, is also getting updates. Firefly’s AI assistant is being developed to allow you to save specific character designs, settings and items in Firefly.
In this example, the person, the desk and the landscape were all settings that were pulled into the AI notification.
You can then pull these designs from your AI knowledge so you don’t need to define a feature every time, and they’re meant to give you reliable consistency across generations — a big challenge for professional AI creators.
You can interact with the Firefly assistant just like you would with a chatbot.
There is a new workflow that Firefly Assistant can do. These are set functions called skills. You can use it to create a custom brand kit, storyboard ideas, convert photos into video reels and edit original video called quick cut. All of these Firefly updates are in private beta right now, but you can sign up for the waitlist here.
