Adobe has rolled out an AI-powered assistant called the Firefly AI assistant that is designed to carry out tasks across its suite of creative applications. The assistant will accept direction from human creative professionals about desired outcomes for images, videos and other digital content, and then autonomously invoke Adobe tools - including Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro - to achieve those results.
Adobe also said the new assistant will be accessible to users of Anthropic's Claude model through a connector that links the services. The company did not disclose the financial arrangements between Adobe and Anthropic for that integration.
On how the assistant fits into traditional creative workflows, Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer at Adobe's creativity and productivity business unit, said: "There are parts of projects, or individual sections of an image, where you really care about getting into the individual pixels, and we want to continue to support customers in doing that, but there are places where you would be happy to just hand this stuff off to an agent or an assistant." The comment underscores Adobe's view that some work will remain manually intensive while other tasks can be delegated to an automated agent.
Adobe positioned the Firefly AI assistant as the latest in a sequence of investments it has made since 2023 in proprietary AI capabilities that the company says are financially guaranteed as safe for corporate use. Adobe framed these investments as a way to set itself apart from lower-cost competitors as generative AI reduces the technical barriers to creating images and videos.
The company did not provide details on how much the new assistant will cost end users. Adobe said it expects the assistant to increase customer consumption of what it calls AI credits, which are currently the primary method the company uses to charge for its AI products.
The product launch arrives amid leadership transition at the company. Adobe's longtime chief executive said last month that he will step down after a successor is named, a development the company said is occurring against a backdrop of investor skepticism about when Adobe's investments in AI will begin to generate returns.
The Firefly AI assistant is presented by Adobe as a tool to streamline repetitive or outcome-driven creative tasks while preserving options for pixel-level manual work. The availability of a connector to Anthropic's Claude expands potential access to the assistant, but the lack of disclosed commercial terms and user pricing leaves questions about how the offering will be monetized and how it will affect enterprise procurement.