Adobe is committing itself to the notion that chatbots and AI agents could be your next design assistant, or even automate creative workflows and repetitive tasks on your behalf. Some of the tools and features announced today at Adobe’s Max conference in Miami, Florida, include allowing your preferred third-party AI agents to access and change Creative Cloud projects, new capabilities for Adobe’s Firefly AI Assistant, and the ability for AI agents to keep perpetually running recurring work in the background.
Local Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations for Creative Cloud tools were previewed at the event, which aim to give you a choice between using Adobe’s own AI assistants, or the third-party agents you already use everyday. The integrations enable external AI agents from providers like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to work locally in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects, where they can make direct changes to native project files on your computer.
You can take over from the agents at any time to manually refine the work because all layers, vectors, bins, and sequences remain editable. Agents that are connected to other MCP-capable tools can also include them in the same workflow, such as asking the AI agent to pull reference documents from Google Docs, design a project around them in Adobe’s tools, and then share the results with colleagues or clients in Slack. Creative Cloud local MCP integrations aren’t available yet, but Adobe says a private beta will be launching in early 2027.
“Always-on” agents were also previewed at Adobe’s Max event, which can perform recurring tasks continuously in the background, and allow you to focus on other work or step away from your computer entirely. You can assign them a job, such as organizing incoming assets, ongoing quality checks, or preparing content, and then review the agent’s plan and approve the final outcome. For example, an agent could be assigned to automatically turn all incoming images into promotional graphics for different social media channels, allowing you to check in daily and select the best results to publish. Adobe hasn’t specified when this preview will launch, but says it’ll be coming to Firefly AI Assistant first.
The Firefly AI Assistant beta, which is powered by Adobe’s creative agent, is also getting some upgrades. New capabilities include a Plan Mode that enables users to review, edit, and approve the agent’s plan before it starts running a task, a Model Selector that lets you specify which AI model to use for a project or leave it on auto-select to automatically assign the model based on the required results, and a new integration with Firefly Boards. Firefly AI Assistant now also lets you customize preferred formats, colors, brand guidelines, characters, and products, and choose to automatically apply those preferences across every project.
The creative agent has been used to stick AI assistants into Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, and Frame.io since it was introduced earlier this year, and now it’s expanding further into video editing. In Premiere, it can now be used to track masked subjects through a frame and apply effects or adjust color and exposure across entire clip sequences. The agent is also being added to Premiere mobile editing app, allowing you to make conversational video edits while on the go.
If it feels like Adobe is slapping agents and chatbots into all of its products then you’d be correct. That’s all according to the plan the company’s creativity head David Wadhwani laid out in April when he said the Adobe creative agent will eventually surface “in virtually everything we develop.” Whether it’s developing its own agentic solutions or throwing open the doors to third-party bots, AI agents will play a key role in Adobe’s future.
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