Adobe is Bringing Agentic AI to Acrobat, Creative Cloud

Adobe announced that it is embracing agentic AI capabilities across its key Creative Cloud and productivity offerings. And it provided an early preview of what that work will look like.

“Agentic AI is tech that’s capable of conversing, acting and solving complex problems,” Adobe’s Ely Greenfield explains. “Our approach to agentic AI is clear, and it mirrors our approach to generative AI: The best use of AI is to give people more control and free them to spend more time on the work they love — whether that’s creativity, analysis or collaboration. We envision many ways that AI agents can help you work more efficiently and raise the bar of what you create.”

Here are some of the examples that Adobe provides.

Adobe Acrobat. With over 3 trillion PDF files in circulation (!) and 650 million monthly active users, Acrobat is obviously a key piece of the productivity puzzle. So it is perhaps not surprising that it already includes Adobe’s first agentic offering, Acrobat AI Assistant. Since its release in mid-2024, Adobe has improved Acrobat AI Assistant with new generative AI capabilities, but now it has new agentic capabilities in the works that will ship in “the coming months.” Key among them is the ability to create custom agents that can be assigned specific roles, such as “research or sales assistants or academic tutors ready to help analyze documents, answer questions and use reasoning to suggest further areas to explore.”

Adobe Express. Adobe began adding generative AI capabilities to Express almost two years ago, but it now plans to “completely reimagine the content creation process to be more intuitive and efficient” using a new agentic guide that will help users “achieve significantly better outcomes” regardless of their skill level of familiarity with the product. The agent in Adobe Express will work as a partner (a copilot?) that can create and improve designs, edit and refine work, and work across all customer groups, from students to solopreneurs and the enterprise.

Creative Cloud. Adobe believes that agents will become “a natural part of creative workflows and make creative tools even more powerful and productive — just as generative AI has.” And so it expects to infuse these capabilities across the Creative Cloud suite, as it has with Firefly AI capabilities over the past two years. Adobe notes that customers have now created 20 billion “commercially safe, production-ready assets” globally, and they now create over one billion new Firefly assets every month. 75 percent of all Photoshop users already use Firefly-powered features in that app, and offloading tasks to agents will make customers even more efficient, it says.

Photoshop. Adobe’s most famous creative solution already includes the groundwork for agent-driven workflows, the company says, with tools like Distraction Removal that do their magic with just a single click. (In that case by analyzing an image to find and then remove distractions like poles, wires and people in the background.) And it will announce its first Photoshop agent at the MAX in London later this month. “Our vision is for Photoshop to be able to analyze your image and recommend smart, context-aware edits,” Greenfield says. “We also envision you being able to use natural language to access more than 1,000 one-click actions in Photoshop.”

Premiere Pro. With the recent release of Media Intelligence, which recognizes objects and visual composition of shots in every frame of a clip, Adobe has also laid the foundation for agents in its flagship video editing solution. So now, Adobe is working on agents that will understand all the media in a project and be able to take actions like creating a rough cut video, understand spoken dialog, parse information in individual frames, understand camera moves and composition, provide suggestions, and perform complex tasks in a single click. “We envision a world where you can direct a creative agent to help you refine shot choices, craft rough cuts, assist with color, help mix audio, and more,” Greenfield notes of the Premier Pro agent.

You can expect to learn more about these and other new capabilities at the next Adobe MAX, which opens in London on April 24. But be sure to check out the original blog post for some preview videos of these coming new agentic features.