Adobe’s new Firefly AI Assistant wants to run Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and more from one prompt
Adobe today launched its most ambitious AI offensive to date, unveiling the Firefly AI Assistant — a new agentic creative tool that can orchestrate complex, multi-step workflows across the company's entire Creative Cloud suite from a single conversational interface — alongside a raft of new video, image, and collaboration features designed to position the company at the center of the rapidly evolving AI-powered content creation landscape.
The announcements, which also include a new Color Mode for Premiere Pro, the addition of Kling 3.0 video models to Firefly's growing roster of third-party AI engines, and Frame.io Drive — a virtual filesystem that lets distributed teams work with cloud-stored media as though it lived on their local machines — represent Adobe's clearest signal yet that it views agentic AI not as a feature upgrade but as a fundamental reshaping of how creative work gets done.
"We want creators to tell us the destination and let the Firefly assistant — with its deep understanding of all the Adobe professional tools and generative tools — bring the tools to you right in the conversation," Alexandru Costin, Vice President of AI & Innovation at Adobe, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the launch.
The stakes could hardly be higher. Adobe is fighting to convince Wall Street, creative professionals, and a wave of well-funded AI-native competitors that its decades-old software empire can not only survive the generative AI revolution but lead it.
How Adobe turned a research prototype into a 100-tool creative agent
The centerpiece of today's announcement is the Firefly AI Assistant, which Adobe describes as a fundamentally new way to interact with its creative tools. Rather than requiring users to manually navigate between Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, Lightroom, Express, and other apps — selecting the right tool for each step of a complex project — the assistant lets creators describe an outcome in natural language. The agent then figures out which tools to invoke, in what order, and executes the workflow.
The assistant is the productized version of Project Moonlight, a research prototype Adobe first previewed at its annual MAX conference in the fall of 2025 and subsequently refined through a private beta. "This is basically [Project] Moonlight," Costin confirmed to VentureBeat. "We started with all the learnings from Moonlight, and we engaged with customers. We looked internally. We evolved that architecture to make it more ambitious."
Under the hood, Adobe says it has assembled roughly 100 tools and skills that the assistant can call upon, spanning generative image and video creation, precision photo editing, layout adaptation, and even stakeholder review through Frame.io. The system is built around a single conversational interface inside the Firefly web app where users describe what they want and the assistant maintains context across sessions. Pre-built Creative Skills — purpose-built, multi-step workflow templates such as portrait retouching or social media asset generation — can be run from a single prompt and customized to match a creator's own style. The assistant also learns a creator's preferred tools, workflows, and aesthetic choices over time, and understands the content type being worked on — image, video, vector, brand assets — to make context-aware decisions.
Crucially, outputs use native Adobe file formats — PSD, AI, PRPROJ — meaning users can take any result into the corresponding flagship app for manual, pixel-level refinement at any point. "We always imagine this continuum where you can have complete conversational edits and pixel-perfect edits, and you can decide, as a creative, where you want to land," Costin said. The Firefly AI Assistant will enter public beta in the coming weeks, though Adobe did not specify an exact date.
Why Wall Street is watching Adobe's AI pricing model so closely
For a company whose AI monetization story has faced persistent skepticism from investors, the pricing structure of the Firefly AI Assistant will be closely watched. Costin told VentureBeat that, at launch, using the assistant will require an active Adobe subscription that includes the relevant apps — meaning users who want the agent to invoke Photoshop cloud capabilities, for instance, will need an entitlement that includes the Photoshop SKU. Generative actions will consume the user's existing pool of generative credits, consistent with how Firefly credits work across the rest of Adobe's platform.
"To use some of these cloud capabilities from Photoshop and other apps, you need to have a subscription that includes access to the Photoshop SKU," Costin explained. "You'll be consuming your credits when you use generative features." He acknowledged, however, that the model could evolve: "As we better understand the value of this — and the costs of operating the brain, the conversation engine — things might change."
The question of whether Adobe can convert AI enthusiasm into meaningful revenue growth is anything but theoretical. When Adobe reported its most recent quarterly results in March, it touted 10% year-over-year revenue growth to $6.4 billion and disclosed that annual recurring revenue from AI standalone and add-on products had reached $125 million — a figure CEO Shantanu Narayen projected would double within nine months.
Adobe adds Chinese AI video models to Firefly, raising commercial safety questions
Alongside the assistant, Adobe is expanding Firefly's roster of third-party AI models to include Kling 3.0 and Kling 3.0 Omni, two video generation models developed by Kuaishou, the Chinese technology company. Kling 3.0 focuses on fast, high-quality production with smart storyboarding and audio-visual sync, while the Omni variant adds professional controls for shot duration, camera angle, and character movement across multi-shot sequences. The additions bring Firefly's model count to more than 30, joining Google's Nano Banana 2 and Veo 3.1, Runway's Gen-4.5, Luma AI's Ray3.14, Black Forest Labs' FLUX.2[pro], ElevenLabs' Multilingual v2, and others.
When asked whether Adobe had concerns about integrating a model from a Chinese tech company given the current geopolitical climate, Costin was direct: "We think choice is what we want to offer our customers." He explained that Adobe's strategy distinguishes between its own commercially safe, first-party Firefly models — trained on licensed Adobe Stock imagery and public domain content — and third-party partner models, which carry different commercial safety profiles. "For some use cases, like ideation, non-production use cases, we got requests from customers to support some external models," Costin said. "If I'm in ideation, I might be more flexible with commercial safety. When I go into production, I’d want to have a model that gives you more confidence."
This raises an important nuance for the agentic era. When the Firefly AI Assistant autonomously selects which model to use for a given task, the commercial safety guarantees may vary depending on which engine it invokes. Costin pointed to Adobe's Content Credentials system — the metadata-and-fingerprinting framework developed through the Content Authenticity Initiative — as the mechanism for maintaining transparency. "The agentic power — and the fact that the assistant has access to all of those models — means it could decide to use a model that carries different content credentials," he acknowledged. "But with the transparency of content credentials, the user will know how a particular piece of content was created and can decide whether that's commercially safe or not." Adobe offers commercial indemnity for its first-party Firefly models but applies different indemnity levels for third-party models — a distinction that enterprise buyers, in particular, will need to carefully evaluate.
Inside Adobe's active collaboration with Nvidia on long-running AI agent infrastructure
Adobe's agentic ambitions also intersect with its strategic partnership with Nvidia, announced earlier this year at Nvidia’s GTC conference. When asked whether the Firefly AI Assistant's agentic capabilities are built on NVIDIA's agent toolkit and NeMo infrastructure, Costin revealed that the collaboration is active but has not yet made it into a shipping product.
"We're in active discussions — investigating not only Nemotron," Costin said. "They have this technology called Open Shell and Nemo Claw, which give us the ability to efficiently run long-running agentic workflows in a sandboxed environment." He said the technology would become increasingly important as Adobe pushes the assistant to handle longer, more autonomous creative tasks — but cautioned that "it's not shipping yet. It's being actively explored."
For Nvidia, which is building an ecosystem of enterprise AI agent platforms with partners like Adobe, Salesforce, and SAP, the partnership could eventually serve as a high-profile proof point for its agent infrastructure stack in the creative vertical. For Adobe, the ability to run complex, long-duration agentic workflows efficiently and securely in sandboxed environments could be the technical foundation that separates the Firefly AI Assistant from lighter-weight chatbot integrations offered by competitors. The partnership also signals Adobe's recognition that the computational demands of agentic AI — where a single user request may trigger dozens of model calls and tool invocations — require infrastructure partnerships that go well beyond what a software company can build alone.
Premiere Pro's new color grading mode and the tools Adobe is shipping today
Beyond the headline AI assistant announcement, Adobe's broader set of updates reflects a company trying to strengthen its position across every phase of the content creation pipeline. Color Mode in Premiere Pro may be the most significant near-term upgrade for working editors. Entering public beta today, Color Mode is described as a first-of-its-kind color grading experience built specifically for the way editors — rather than dedicated colorists — think and work. Adobe notes that it was developed through an extensive private beta with hundreds of working editors, and that participants reported they "actually enjoy color grading" — a sentiment suggesting Adobe may have found a way to democratize one of post-production's most intimidating disciplines. General availability is expected later in 2026.
The Firefly Video Editor gains audio upgrades including the Enhance Speech feature migrated from Premiere and Adobe Podcast, direct Adobe Stock integration with access to more than 800 million licensed assets, and simple color adjustment controls with intuitive sliders and one-click looks. On the image editing front, Adobe introduced Precision Flow, which generates a range of semantic variations from a single prompt and lets users browse them via an interactive slider — a novel approach that Costin described as "the best slider-based control mixed with the best semantic understanding of not only the existing scene, but what the scene could be." AI Markup complements this by letting users draw directly on images to specify where and how edits should be applied. After Effects 26.2 adds an AI-powered Object Matte tool that dramatically accelerates rotoscoping and masking — create accurate mattes of moving subjects with a hover and click, refine with a Quick Selection brush, and perfect edges with a Refine Edge tool.
Frame.io Drive wants to kill the shipped hard drive and make cloud media feel local
Rounding out the announcements, Frame.io Drive addresses one of the most persistent pain points in distributed video production: getting media from point A to point B without losing hours — or days — to downloads, syncing, and shipped hard drives. Frame.io Drive is a desktop application that mounts Frame.io projects to a user's computer so media appears in Finder or Explorer and behaves like local files. The underlying technology, called Frame.io Mounted Storage, streams media on demand as applications request it, while local caching ensures smooth playback. The product builds on streaming technology provided by Suite Studios, and the real-time file access capability is included with every Frame.io account. Adobe emphasized that all content lives solely within Frame.io and is never shared with third parties.
The move positions Frame.io not just as a review-and-approval tool at the end of the production pipeline but as the central media layer from the very beginning of a project — from first capture through final delivery. If successful, the strategy could significantly deepen Adobe's lock-in with professional video teams by making Frame.io the single source of truth for distributed productions. Frame.io Drive and Mounted Storage will roll out in phases, with Enterprise customers gaining access starting today and accounts on other plans following shortly. Others can join a waitlist.
Adobe's biggest challenge isn't building the AI — it's convincing creators to trust it
Taken together, today's announcements paint a picture of a company executing aggressively across multiple fronts — but also one that is navigating a complex moment. Adobe first introduced Firefly in March 2023 as a family of generative AI models focused on image and text effects, with a strong emphasis on commercial safety through training on licensed Adobe Stock content. In the two years since, the company has rapidly expanded into video generation, multi-model access, and now agentic workflows — a trajectory that mirrors the broader industry's shift from standalone AI features to AI-native systems.
But the competitive field has grown dramatically. Runway, Pika, and a host of AI-native video generation startups have captured mindshare among creators. Canva has aggressively integrated AI into its design platform. And the emergence of powerful foundation models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — the latter of which Adobe says it will integrate with Firefly AI Assistant capabilities — means the barrier to building creative AI tools has never been lower. Adobe is also navigating these product ambitions against a complex corporate backdrop: the impending departure of CEO Shantanu Narayen, an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability in Acrobat Reader (CVE-2026-34621) that had been used by hackers for months before being patched this week, a U.K. antitrust investigation over cancellation fees, and a recent $75 million lawsuit settlement.
Adobe's response, articulated clearly through today's launches, is to lean into what it believes is its deepest moat: the integration of AI into a set of professional-grade, category-leading applications that no startup can replicate overnight. Costin framed the agentic transition as empowering rather than threatening to creative professionals, comparing Creative Skills to a next-generation version of Photoshop Actions — the macro-recording feature that has long allowed power users to automate repetitive tasks. "We want to help our customers become — from the ones doing all the work — to be creative directors, doing some of the work, but most importantly, guiding the assistant in executing some of those creative visions," he said.
It is a compelling pitch — and, in its own way, a revealing one. For three decades, Adobe made its fortune by selling the tools that turned creative vision into finished pixels. Now it is asking its customers to let an AI agent handle more of that translation, trusting that the human role will shift from operating the tools to directing the outcome. Whether creators embrace that bargain — and whether Wall Street rewards it — will determine not just Adobe's trajectory but the shape of an entire industry learning to create alongside machines.