Adobe is bringing its creative AI assistants into public beta and springing them across the Creative Cloud ecosystem. Starting on Thursday, you can use the AI assistant in the beta versions of Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Illustrator and Frame.io. 

These creative, agentic AI tools were first announced in April. It's Adobe's biggest swing yet at AI, building on years of AI-powered editing tools to integrate an AI assistant into its industry-standard editing programs that can actually do creative tasks. It's also planning to bring its AI design connector to Gemini, the last major chatbot that didn't have it, rounding out Adobe's AI offerings to ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot.

The agents' abilities vary by app. In Photoshop, the AI can help manage your layers and batch remove backgrounds. Premiere Pro's agent can sort videos into bins and identify interview questions to pull specific clips. InDesign can automatically run a check to make sure projects are compliant with brand guidelines.

Like with every AI product drop, Adobe says it doesn't intend for AI to replace human creators. The agents are meant to help them "orchestrate complex workflows," Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of product marketing for creative professionals, told me.

Creative agents are about "giving you control, letting you direct, letting you jump in at every point in time, if you so choose to edit further by hand," Subramaniam said. "Or to keep context setting and iterating and dialoguing with the agent to accomplish the outcome that you want."

Finding your 'happy path' to creation

If you have a strong creative vision, the assistant can create those visual assets and tweak them until they're right. Or if you don't know exactly what you want, you can give the chatbot-like assistant more general feedback, like simply "make it pop."

The goal of the creative assistant is to "guide you down the happy path," as the company calls it. The AI learns your preferences over time so it can implement them automatically. The goal is to keep the AI on track and avoid any randomness that comes with AI hallucinations.

Firefly Studio, the company's hub for AI creation and editing, is also getting some updates. Firefly's AI assistant is being upgraded to let you save specific character designs, settings and objects to Firefly. 

You can then pull these designs into your AI prompts so you don't have to describe the element every time, and it's meant to give you more reliable consistency across generations -- a major challenge for professional creators who use AI.

There are a couple of new workflows that Firefly's assistant can do. These are preset tasks called skills. You can use it to create a custom brand kit, storyboard ideas, turn photos into video reels and do an initial video edit called quick cut. All these Firefly updates are in private beta now, but you can sign up for the waitlist here.