Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects will soon work alongside the AI agent of your choice. But Adobe is keen to stress that your layers stay fully editable.
Adobe has today announced it’s opening its doors to third-party AI agents in one of the biggest shakeups of its Creative Cloud suite since the subscription service was launched in 2012.
The big reveal was made on the opening day of Adobe MAX 2026 in Miami Beach, where I’m reporting live from the ground to bring you all the latest updates from the giant software firm.
Did we see this coming? To be fair, yes – but I’m still a little surprised Adobe has gone down this path, given its history. It’s spent the best part of four decades making its tools so good and convenient that you’d never need to use anything else. So opening itself up to other people’s AI feels like a huge shift, and perhaps a sign that even Adobe knows the way we work is changing at breakneck speed.
How Adobe is opening its doors
The big announcement is around Adobe now providing native support for MCP – that’s Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets AI agents plug into software and use its tools.
It’s previewing it for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects only. Essentially, you can link your preferred agent to your desktop apps and have it work on native project files while staying in control. “Layers, vectors, bins, sequences, compositions all stay editable, so you can step in at any moment to refine the work,” says Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of product marketing for Creative Cloud at Adobe.
MCP, baby. Adobe opens Creative Cloud to external AI agents
Of course, Adobe has been dabbling with AI for some time now. It has its own Adobe Creative Agent, built into Firefly and the Creative Cloud apps, as well as the Adobe Connector, which adds Adobe’s tools to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. But MCP is the big one.
I’ll be honest: I came to Miami half expecting Adobe to be playing catch-up. I’ve chatted with loads of founders and studio heads lately, and they’re already running their own agents to cope with demanding global clients. But watching the opening keynote this morning and seeing Claude work alongside Creative Cloud tools, I came away thinking Adobe is still ahead of the game.
“Adobe will meet you where you are,” says Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s president and incoming CEO. For those of you who want nothing to do with AI, they’ve listened – Adobe is continuing to invest in precision tools. For everyone else, it’s the agents that take on the boring, tedious stuff. And Creative Cloud, says Subramaniam, is “the assurance that the technology we provide isn’t going anywhere”.
The MCP integrations will be available in private beta in early 2027.
What else is new?
Looking at Photoshop’s updates specifically, three beta features will be generally available this week.
I’ll start with Relight, which now lets you add up to three light sources anywhere in 3D space after your shoot. It updates in “near real time” as you move the lights around, with no prompting either.
Photoshop AI Assisted Editor
Photoshop Generative Restyle
Photoshop Quick Compare
Generative Restyle applies a prompted “look” as its own layer, with a slider – or a typed percentage – to dial the strength up and down.
The Remove tool now spots related elements, so removing a bin also removes its shadow. And Quick Compare lets you check before and after your edits without hiding any layers.
At every MAX there are always a few highlights that designers rave about. This year, it’s Convert to Text Layers, now in beta. Give it a flat JPEG, and Photoshop analyses the typography, then matches it against the 35,000 fonts in Adobe Fonts and rebuilds it as live, editable vector text. Generated text is “frozen”, says Joel Baer, director of product management for Photoshop. “What I want is vector text.”
Photoshop Relight
Lightroom gets Glow for soft, cinematic light and one-tap Blemish Removal, while Open Eyes (beta) fixes untimely blinks. Following Adobe’s acquisition of Topaz Labs, there are also new Topaz enhancement models for upscaling, sharpening, noise reduction and HDR.
For editors, there’s some even bigger news. Premiere 27.0 has been released today, and it’s full of impressive upgrades and new features. Color Mode, Premiere’s dedicated colour-grading workspace, is now generally available. Its style presets work at clip or sequence level and are fully customisable (unlike LUTs).
The AI Assistant, now in beta, handles project organisation, string-outs and multi-cam syncing. Editors can also write their own reusable skills, much like you already can in Claude, for example, as well as upload scripts or outlines for context.
The Generative Media Tool generates images, music and soundscapes alongside video and sound effects, directly in the timeline. (Partner models include Google’s Veo and Kling.) Enhanced Audio, Adobe’s next generation of Enhanced Speech, separates dialogue, ambience, music, and effects so each can be adjusted, muted, or split onto its own track. And last but not least, Generative Remove (now in beta) ditches unwanted objects from actual footage.
Elsewhere, After Effects now has an AI Assistant (beta) that can organise projects, generate images and video, and build or debug expressions. Illustrator gets refreshed Content Libraries, and there’s a reworked Blend Tool with live preview. InDesign, meanwhile, adds co-editing in beta, so more than one designer can work on the same layout at the same time.
What about Firefly?
Firefly is now billed as Adobe’s “full AI creative studio”. It gives you images, video, Audio and design all in one place. “Our goal is to help you work faster while keeping you firmly in the director’s chair,” says Mike Polner, vice president of product marketing for creators.
New features include Firefly Design (beta), included with Creative Cloud, a canvas that combines vector, image editing, animation and 3D. In public beta is Firefly Graph, which helps you build repeatable workflows. Firefly Builder (in private beta) turns prompts into interactive, on-brand prototypes for any site or app. The Creative Agent is now also in Firefly, too, and Adobe is previewing “always-on” agents that keep work going when you’re away from your desk.
Firefly Graph
FireFly Builder
Premiere Mobile gets the same Creative Agent in private beta, plus licensed music from Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.
As Adobe puts it: “People set the direction, and AI agents handle the repeatable work”. It’s a theme I keep seeing throughout all the news released this week: the creative stays in the driver’s seat.
Disney, Microsoft and more
Adobe also announced two big partnerships today. The first is with Disney, which will use Adobe’s AI tools to help its teams come up with ideas faster. That means everything from early concepts to designing new theme park attractions and cruise ships.
The second is with Microsoft. Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects will now run faster on the newest Windows laptops, including Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Ultra. And you’ll be able to use Adobe Express’s quick editing tools straight from the Photos app on Windows.
A final thought
It’s been a big day, and a changing of the guard, so to speak. This is Adobe’s last MAX before Anil Chakravarthy takes over as CEO on 1 December, with Shantanu Narayen moving to executive chair after almost two decades at the helm.
It feels like a new era in other ways, too. Watching those demos on stage, I was impressed and, if I’m completely honest, a little terrified. Much like many of my fellow attendees, given the looks on some of their faces. When Adobe moved on to Firefly, the applause noticeably thinned. Was it a room full of creatives wary of AI or just a long keynote and a lot of jet lag? I suspect a bit of both.
I’m here in Miami Beach all week to dig deeper into what all of the above means, so watch this space.
– Shantanu Narayen stepping down after 29 years at Adobe
