Adobe’s new AI assistant represents a “fundamental shift” in creative work

Adobe is fully embracing AI tools that enable creators to edit their work using descriptive prompts, rather than using manually defined Creative Cloud apps. The software giant’s new Firefly AI assistant lets users describe what they want to change by typing their own words into the conversational interface.

Adobe says this represents a “fundamental shift in how creative work gets done” by removing skill barriers and tedious tasks, while still giving creators full control over their work. It will be “available soon” on the Firefly AI Studio platform according to Adobe, though no specific release date was given in the announcement.

Unified AI interface, which is based on Project Moonlight Experience Introduced by Adobe at last year’s Max conference, it automatically executes a “complex, multi-step workflow” for editing projects, using specific tools and applications (including Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Express, Illustrator, and more) on the user’s behalf.

Firefly AI Assistant users can instruct the chatbot to “retouch this image” or “resize it for social media,” for example, with Adobe’s AI agent and then provide a selection of edits to choose from along with showing them specific tools or sliders that allow creators to fine-tune the results. For more detailed edits, creators can also open the edited results in Creative Cloud apps to finish the project.

The Firefly AI Assistant will learn user preferences over time, such as preferred tools, workflow, and aesthetic choices, to help make results feel more personalized and consistent. Alexandru Kostin, President of Adobe Artificial Intelligence, said: Edge Creators will be able to choose to enable this feature, and can select specific projects for the AI ​​assistant to learn from. Creators can also create “creative skills” — tools that provide specific, consistent presets — that the AI ​​assistant can execute, or choose from a library of preset skills at launch.

This is Adobe’s latest push into the world of AI agents, as it has already released specific AI assistants for applications such as Adobe Acrobat, He crossesand Photoshop. Adobe says it will also bring these proxy features to third-party AI apps like Anthropic’s Claude, allowing those users to access Adobe tools outside of its Firefly and Creative Cloud platforms.

The announcement comes alongside some new photo, video and audio editing capabilities for Adobe’s Firefly platform, which will be rolling out starting today. Firefly Video Editor is now integrated with Adobe Stock for easy access to B-roll footage, and gives users access to new features to improve color adjustments and clarity of spoken dialogue. New editing features are also available in the Firefly photo editing tool — Precision Flow, which enables creators to create and compare a wider range of created images without modifying their prompts, and a new AI Markup tool that allows users to control where adjustments should be made using brush and rectangle tools or reference images.