Adobe is expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities across its entire product ecosystem, introducing new agent features designed to handle complex, multistep creative tasks. The announcements were made during the kickoff keynote for Adobe MAX 2026, the company’s annual creativity conference held in Miami Beach from November 10 to 12.
Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s incoming president and chief executive officer, outlined the company’s strategy to integrate these tools while maintaining a focus on user autonomy. Chakravarthy, who assumes the CEO role on December 1, noted that the creative industry faces a challenge in helping professionals stand out amid a flood of content. He emphasized that while some users are eager to adopt AI, others prefer to keep it out of their workflow entirely.
Adobe AI agents and user choice
The core of Adobe’s new approach is the expansion of the Adobe Creative Agent. This tool will allow users to delegate intricate projects to an AI assistant across Creative Cloud and Adobe Firefly. The company is also previewing local Model Context Protocol integrations, which will enable users to direct third-party agents to make changes directly within native project files in applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.
Shantanu Narayen, the outgoing CEO who will become executive chair, stated that the company’s goal is to deliver tools that fuel creativity without compromising craft, control, or rights. This philosophy underpins the new features, which are designed to offer options rather than mandates. Adobe has expanded partnerships with Google and Microsoft and is building on collaborations with Anthropic and OpenAI to support this infrastructure.
Under the agreement with Google, Adobe is integrating Google’s latest frontier AI models into its tools and exploring new editing capabilities for Photoshop with Google DeepMind. The partnership with Microsoft includes optimized versions of Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Substance 3D Painter for high-performance Arm-based Windows PCs, as well as access to Adobe Express tools within Microsoft Photos.
New Firefly tools and Disney partnership
Adobe Firefly, the company’s AI creative studio, is receiving a significant update. It will now offer a choice of top industry AI models from partners including ByteDance, Google, Kling, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs. The platform will introduce “always-on agents” for creative workflows, capable of managing recurring tasks such as organizing assets and checking quality in the background.
Several new Firefly products were also announced. Firefly Video provides a single workflow for assembling videos ranging from social media content to short films. Firefly Design, currently in beta, brings together tools for illustration, image editing, animation, 3D, and print on a single canvas. Firefly Image introduces new editing tools like Edit Object, Relight, and Retouch, which allow creators to modify specific parts of an image while preserving the rest.
Additionally, Adobe announced Firefly Builder, available in private beta, which helps creators transform ideas into interactive prototypes using natural language commands. In the marketing sector, Adobe GenStudio now features a conversational AI interface for campaign planning, while Adobe Brand Intelligence is expanding its Intelligent Reflow capabilities to automatically adapt designs to new sizes and layouts.
The conference also highlighted a multiyear strategic partnership with Disney. Under this agreement, Adobe technology will support concept exploration in Disney’s innovation labs, as well as in its parks and cruise development pipelines. The collaboration will utilize custom AI models and tools to assist in creative development.
Adobe recently announced that its products have more than 1 billion active monthly users worldwide. The company continues to navigate the balance between automating workflows and preserving the human element of creative work as it rolls out these new technologies.
Source: Variety
