Adobe opens Creative Cloud apps to third-party AI assistants

Adobe will open its Creative Cloud applications to third-party AI assistants, with the ability to edit content in Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, and Premiere from tools such as ChatGPT or Claude, the company announced at its Max event.

The model context protocol (MCP) integration, due in private beta in early 2027, would let third-party AI assistants to make changes to content in Creative Cloud desktop applications, without losing the ability to adjust individual elements of a design or video manually afterwards.

For example, a third-party AI assistant could remove a logo from multiple advertising campaign assets. “Make the change once, then ask your agent to cascade it across the rest of the campaign, and step in at any moment to refine the work by hand,” said Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s VP, product marketing for Creative Cloud, in a blog post Tuesday.

Third-party agents could also connect to other apps in a single workflow, so it would be possible to “pull in a project brief from Google Docs, work on it in Adobe’s tools and share the result with your team via Slack,” for example, Subramaniam said.

The MCP connections can help creative professionals “keep their work where they choose to work, without sacrificing the upside of modern collaborative and secure systems,” said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “End users … have always relied on multiple tools to capture their taste and bring it to life. For them, these connections are another tool that opens up access to so much more of their toolkit.”

Keith Kirkpatrick, vice president of research at The Futurum Group, also anticipates demand from Adobe users to access Creative Cloud apps via third-party AI assistants, though he expects it will appeal most to a “fairly specific crowd” of “creative technologists, production teams, and power users who already spend their day in Claude or ChatGPT and want an agent to take care of the tedious stuff: organizing assets, setting up layers, building out sequences.”

“Most creative pros are still going to want their hands in the application,” he said.

Opening access to Creative Cloud apps via third-party agents could potentially loosen the direct relationship Adobe has with customers — a scenario that many software vendors are now grappling with.

For Adobe, it’s a necessary adaptation, as employees increase their use of AI assistants to get work done. “Companies are using several AI models at once, and people are starting more of their work inside these assistants,” said Kirkpatrick. “If that’s where the request starts, Adobe wants to be the one doing the work behind it.”

Gartner predicts that enterprise AI assistants will account for more of knowledge workers’ daily interaction time than any other application within the next three years, according to a recent Magic Quadrant report.

Miller said that opening its applications to third-party tools could be beneficial for Adobe’s business. “This won’t negatively impact Adobe’s place with their core creative, marketing, or business users,” she said.

“In fact, the flexibility will give their customers options in where and how to get work done. “For users who have found their flow and patterns of work in ChatGPT or Claude, [they can] stay there but still access the skills and tools you need to use to generate the quality of work expected,” Miller said.

The MCP integration in Creative Cloud is the latest part of Adobe’s strategy to embrace third-party AI assistants — Adobe has previously announced ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini integrations that provide limited editing capabilities for apps such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Premiere, Express, and Lightroom, directly within the AI assistants. This contrasts with the new MCP integrations that let AI assistants make changes directly to content in Adobe’s desktop applications.

“The real question is whether any of this turns into paying Adobe customers, and Adobe hasn’t shown that yet with its existing connectors,” said Kirkpatrick. “Adobe’s edge has to be that its tools are better and that it comes with the IP and brand controls enterprises need.”

Firefly upgrades — Builder, Design, and ‘always-on’ agents

The MCP integration was one of numerous agent-related announcements at Adobe Max on Tuesday, with other updates aimed at enhancing native functionality within Creative Cloud and the Firefly AI assistant.

This includes “always-on” agents that work in the background, taking on recurring tasks for users. Users choose from pre-built agents aimed at specific workflows, then customize what actions the agent takes, set goals, and review plans before it begins. The agents ask for approval for certain decisions, learn preferences from feedback, and are managed via a central dashboard in Firefly.

“On a multi-week video project, for example, an always-on agent can organize incoming footage, remove duplicate clips, and flag camera shake or audio issues for your review,” Mike Polner, vice president of product marketing, Creators at Adobe, said in a blog post.

“For the right person, I think it’s an easy sell,” said Kirkpatrick, such as a social media manager starting their day with a batch of draft posts to review, though it may be less appealing to creative professionals responsible for generating broader ideas.

For some end users, the always-on agents can be “an additional set of hands to drive efficiency,” said Miller, while “others will see this as a force multiplier, allowing them to expand their business flow … while the assistant handles the sorting and cleaning.”

Customers who use the always-on agent should ensure there are sufficient guardrails in place, said Kirkpatrick.

“Before activating an always-on agent, I’d want to know exactly what it can touch, and I’d make sure it drafts but never publishes on its own. Everything it makes should get a brand check,” he said.

He cited Adobe’s own survey of marketing and creative professionals that showed that around a believe that public-facing content is “off-brand.” “An agent working around the clock can make that a lot worse if nobody’s paying attention,” said Kirkpatrick.

Managing costs of an always-on agent with budget controls is another consideration, he said. Adobe hasn’t disclosed full pricing information at this stage. Always-on agents, launching in beta in early 2027, will initially be available for Adobe Firefly.

Other Firefly capabilities announced at the MAX event include Firefly Builder, in private beta, which creates prototypes of websites and interactive apps from natural language prompts. Firefly Design, in beta, is a new design workspace app that combines tools for image editing, animation, illustration, and 3D designs.

Adobe

While Adobe builds out its own native and third-party AI features, it also faces competition from other software tools aimed at creative professionals.

“From a competitive perspective, I see Canva and Figma going after the same in-house teams and are showing up in the same AI assistants,” said Kirkpatrick.

Adobe also faces competition from AI model providers such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI that are building design tools into their products.  

“Where Adobe really wins is when precision, brand control and commercially safe content matter, and that’s mostly in the enterprise,” said Kirkpatrick. “With individual creators, its lead is a lot smaller, and where Adobe is most at risk for displacement.”ComputerworldRead More