THE CRUNCH
Adobe used its Max conference in Miami to push its Creative Cloud apps further into agentic AI. An updated Firefly AI Assistant can now carry out multi-step jobs, with a new Plan Mode that lets you review and edit the agent's proposed workflow before approving it. A Model Selector lets you pick which AI model orchestrates the tasks or leave the choice to Adobe's software. The company is also previewing always-on agents that handle recurring work in the background, such as organising incoming footage, applying LUTs, cleaning up audio and backing up files automatically.
The customisation side is expanding too: users can define colours, brand guidelines, preferred formats, characters and products, then apply those preferences across every project the assistant touches. The assistant is also spreading deeper into video, where in Premiere it can track masked subjects through a frame and apply effects or adjust colour and exposure across whole clip sequences. A separate agent is coming to the Premiere mobile app for conversational edits on the go, starting in private preview.
The other big piece is a local Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard connection that lets external chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini work directly in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects. Adobe says the integrations let third-party agents make direct changes to native project files on your computer, while layers, vectors, bins and sequences stay editable so you can take over and refine the work at any point. Adobe's own vice president Deepa Subramaniam told TechCrunch the company is still deciding which capabilities to expose and will be guided by user feedback.
The always-on agent preview has no launch date yet, though Adobe says it will arrive in Firefly AI Assistant first. In one demo shared with Engadget, a user had the assistant sort footage as it uploaded to a project, then prepare a social media promotion campaign once the files were organised.