Adobe Firefly AI Assistant can now take on recurring tasks for you

The company is also bringing an agent to the Premiere mobile app.

Adobe

Few companies have embraced artificial intelligence quite like Adobe. Between Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator, the company has brought its Firefly assistant, and other generative AI features, to much of its Creative Cloud suite. Adobe is showing no signs of slowing down. At its Max conference in Miami today, the company announced a significant expansion to Creative Cloud's agentic capabilities.

To start, taking a page from Anthropic and OpenAI, Adobe is dipping its toes into the world of proactive agents. An updated version of its Firefly AI Assistant can now carry out multi-step tasks. When you give the AI Assistant a job, a new planning mode allows you to review and edit the agent's proposed workflow before giving it approval to move forward. You can also select a specific model to orchestrate the tasks or leave that decision up to Adobe's software. At the same, the company is giving users more fine control over a few different customization options. For example, you can now define colors and brand guidelines that will apply across projects the assistant takes on for you.

In addition to making AI Assistant more capable, Adobe is also previewing new always-on agents that can take on recurring tasks for you. In a preview the company shared with Engadget, it demoed a user prompting Firefly AI Assistant to sort through footage as it was being uploaded to a project. The assistant offered to organize the raw files, automatically apply LUTs and clean up audio, as well as back up the files, which the user approved in the new planning mode. After organizing the footage, the user tasked AI Assistant with preparing a social media promotion campaign for the project.

Separately, Adobe is bringing a new agent to the Premiere mobile app, which first debuted on iOS last year before later arriving on Android. As you can imagine, the agent is designed to help users make edits using natural language. Adobe is first making this tool available in private preview before rolling it out more broadly. Lastly, the company is testing a new set of MCP connections that allow you to give your favorite chatbot local access to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects so that it can do things like edit layers for you.

As Adobe took me through many of its Max announcements, the one thing I kept thinking about was if the company's end goal was to eventually bypass the creatives that have been its customers for so long. After all, the number of people who might be skilled with Photoshop and Premiere is far smaller than the group might want to use its capabilities. 

To point, in one demo, Zorana Gee, the company's senior director of agentic product, mentioned how entrepreneurs could use Firefly AI Assistant's capabilities to create social posts for their small business. "Ultimately, we're a creative company serving creatives," she said when I asked her about that question. "Depending on where you are on that continuum is where we will meet you, but ultimately it's about how do we allow anybody to hone their craft."

I also asked Gee about Artcraft, the free Adobe alternative that was made possible by the growing sophistication of coding models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Gee said she felt the "professionalism, security and reliability" of Adobe's products would be what allows the company to keep users invested in its ecosystem.