Adobe is rolling out autonomous agents to orchestrate work across its applications, a move that will reinforce its position at the core of content and marketing workflows as AI disrupts the software landscape, analysts say.

“We’re living at true inflection point; a moment where creativity and marketing are being reshaped by AI, unlocking incredible new opportunities and raising the bar for speed, personalization, as well as scale,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, during his keynote presentation at Adobe Summit on Monday.

Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, described the various agent-focused product updates at Adobe’s Summit conference this week as “an evolution of vision that brings the right AI capability into the right application.”

“Rather than focusing on standalone AI features, the emphasis is on building systems that can coordinate and execute work across workflows and functions,” said Bell. “Capabilities such as CX Enterprise, workflow agents and Firefly integrations point to an ambition to move from AI that supports decisions to systems that can act on them.”

Adobe kicked off its agent-related announcements ahead of the customer experience conference, unveiling its Firefly AI Assistant last week.

Using natural language prompts, the agent can autonomously carry out multi-step workflows across Adobe Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop, Premiere, Express, and others.  Aimed at both novice and expert users, Firefly AI Assistant can also guide users through tasks spanning image, video, audio, and design. A public beta is “coming soon,” according to Adobe.

The launch of Firefly AI Assistant signals Adobe’s intent to “lead in agentic AI for creative professionals, [by] directly addressing workflow friction, usability, and the demand for multi-model flexibility,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, research director at Futurum, in a blog post last week.

“Adobe’s Firefly Assistant is a signal that agentic AI is moving from experimental pilots to production-grade tools capable of handling real creative complexity,” he said, with enterprise buyers “no longer content with simple copilots or one-off automation.”

“The ability to automate multi-step tasks and orchestrate between image and video modalities is quickly becoming table stakes for creative AI platforms,” he said.

Adobe’s main announcement during the Summit event this week was CX Enterprise Coworker; an AI agent that coordinates multi-step workflows and tasks across Adobe’s customer experience applications.

“Adobe is moving to occupy the role of an automated operating system for marketing,” said Jim Lundy, CEO of Aragon Research, in a blog post on Wednesday. “While previous AI tools acted as individual assistants for specific tasks, the CX Enterprise Coworker acts as a supervisor that connects disparate silos of information.”

Lundy said that CX Enterprise Coworker represents a “significant evolution” in the way enterprises will manage the customer lifecycle, replacing manual hand-offs with automated orchestration across customer engagement apps.

“By anchoring this tool in its robust experience platform, Adobe is making a strong case for being the primary intelligence layer in the modern marketing stack,” said Lundy.

There were also updates to GenStudio with Brand Intelligence, a data layer that connects information across Adobe tools to provide context for agents to act upon, alongside a new agent capability in Adobe’s Workfront work management app.

While agents present an opportunity for Adobe, it also faces potential disruption from both design software vendors that build AI into their products and general-purpose AI assistants.

This risk has raised concerns in financial markets, and Adobe announced a $25 billion share buyback scheme this week — a move that can be seen as an attempt to shore up investor confidence amid a period of significant change, both across the industry as AI reshapes the software landscape, and within Adobe itself, with CEO Shantanu Narayen set to step down after 18 years in charge.

Ahead of the event, popular online design platform Canva unveiled its own agentic capabilities, with users able to access various Canva tools via a conversational interface that can complete multi-step processes, such as creating “a multi-channel campaign launch.”

“Canva is focused on accessibility, using AI to simplify and automate design for a broader audience,” said CCS Insight’s Bell. “This lowers barriers to entry and puts pressure on Adobe in lighter-weight and non-professional use cases.”

And, last week, Anthropic announced Claude Design, which lets users create design prototypes and marketing assets such as “landing pages, social media assets, and campaign visuals.”

In addition, Anthropic and Canva announced an integration that brings Claude Design outputs into Canva’s app.

Miller from Constellation Research said that tools such as Claude Design are “powerful additions” to the design ecosystem, enabling non-designers to quickly prototype and test ideas using text prompts. At the same time, these should be seen as more of a starting point. Professional-level design and editing tools are still required to create enterprise-ready prototypes.

“A creator may start in OpenAI, use that output in Claude to further build out the concept, but end in Firefly to ensure enterprise safety and brand controls in a more refined, finely tuned toolset,” Miller said.

Adobe is also working with a range of AI providers to make its software available where customers prefer. This includes the ability to interact with Adobe’s Firefly creative assistant directly from Claude, for instance.

“Our strategy is to meet where the users are,” said Varun Parmar, general manager of Adobe GenStudio and Firefly for Enterprise. A user might invoke an Adobe creative agent via Claude in the morning, he said, “and then later in the afternoon decide to do deeper precision and control work that requires a professional sort of interface, which is where Adobe’s product is world class.”

“We believe that these things will coexist; depending on the use case, you’ll go in and out [of different apps],” said Parmar.

As AI model providers expand into workplace software tools, it makes most sense for Adobe to focus on its core strength of serving creative and marketing professionals, Miller said.

“The risk to Adobe is more of an ongoing challenge to stay focused on customer demand and need, and not veer off course in a never-ending horse race with models proving what can be done, as opposed to commercially safe models that deliver what must be done,” she said.

And despite some media negativity around Adobe’s ability to transition into a new era of agentic AI, Miller said, Adobe’s strategy of embedding data, assets, and workflows into the tools marketers and creatives use remains sound.

Bell sees agentic systems as a “longer-term structural shift, while the more immediate pressure comes from accessibility-focused platforms like Canva.”

Yet Adobe’s access to data and expertise serving large customers provide it with an edge. “Adobe remains strong in professional and enterprise environments, where depth, control and integration still matter,” Bell said.