Adobe is preparing to let other companies’ AI agents operate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects. It is a bet that the company can keep the work even when a job starts inside ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, as long as its apps do the heavy lifting behind the chat window.
The plan, laid out Tuesday at the Adobe MAX conference in Miami Beach, centers on local MCP integrations that let a user’s preferred third-party agent make changes directly in native project files on their own computer. Layers, vectors, bins and sequences stay editable, so a designer can take over by hand at any point. The integrations go into private beta in early 2027. Adobe paired the preview with an expanded partnership that puts Acrobat inside Google Workspace and Google’s models deeper inside Adobe’s apps. Taken together, the moves show Adobe trying to be the engine behind whatever assistant a customer picks.
Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s vice president of product marketing for Creative Cloud, described the workflow in a company blog post: remove a logo from one campaign asset, then “ask your agent to cascade it across the rest of the campaign.” An agent that is also connected to Google Drive or Slack can pull a brief from Google Docs, do the work in Adobe’s tools and post the result to a team channel.
Adobe hasn’t settled how much of its software it will expose. “We are still figuring out where and when and how to draw the line,” Subramaniam told TechCrunch. “We don’t have any need or desire to sort of limit what the MCP endpoint can expose.” Not every rival likes the protocol. Figma co-founder Dylan Field said last month that MCP is not a perfect standard and benefits frontier labs more, TechCrunch noted.
Adobe is also building its own agent layer, so customers have a reason to stay inside its apps. The Adobe Creative Agent now powers AI Assistants, in beta, in Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Frame.io, with Photoshop’s version in the Photoshop beta app. In Premiere it can apply effects to every clip in a sequence or adjust color and exposure across an entire sequence at once. Firefly is getting “always-on” agents, in preview, that organize incoming assets, check quality and prepare content for different channels while the user is away. A new Firefly Builder tool, in private beta, turns plain-language prompts into prototypes of websites, presentations and apps, a step TechCrunch described as a move into Figma’s territory.
Google gets a bigger role
The Google agreement runs in both directions. Acrobat will show up as a suggested app in Google Drive and Gmail, including an “Edit with” option in file previews, and Gemini models will help power Acrobat’s AI features. Adobe will add Acrobat and more creative tools to its connectors in Gemini and Gemini Enterprise and bring its creative tools to AI Mode in Google Search. Adobe and Google DeepMind are exploring a customized Google image model for Photoshop that could make near-real-time, prompt-based edits.
The numbers explain why both sides want the deal. Adobe said its creative and productivity products serve more than 1 billion monthly active users, and that more than 400 billion PDFs are opened with Acrobat each year. “By further connecting our respective platforms, we are giving creators and enterprise teams a powerful, integrated environment to turn their ideas into high-impact content,” said Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud. Google said businesses will also be able to use Adobe’s CX Enterprise Coworker agent, which helps teams design graphics, work with PDFs and launch marketing campaigns, inside Gemini Enterprise.
Adobe is also shipping optimized versions of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and Substance 3D Painter (beta) for Arm-based Windows PCs, including the new Surface Laptop Ultra, and building Adobe Express tools into Microsoft Photos, the company said in its main MAX announcement. The day before, Adobe signed a multi-year alliance with Disney for custom AI models, a deal WebProNews covered Monday.
The push lands as the AI labs build their own work surfaces. Anthropic on Tuesday added spreadsheets and whiteboards inside Claude and opened its interactive connectors as full apps, turning the chatbot into something closer to an office suite. Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s president and incoming CEO, said the company wants to “put the power of Adobe’s tools within reach for even more creatives.”
Keith Kirkpatrick, vice president of research at The Futurum Group, sees the logic but wants proof in revenue. “Companies are using several AI models at once, and people are starting more of their work inside these assistants,” he told Computerworld. “If that’s where the request starts, Adobe wants to be the one doing the work behind it.” He also posed the question Adobe will face as the MCP beta opens next year: “The real question is whether any of this turns into paying Adobe customers, and Adobe hasn’t shown that yet with its existing connectors.”
WebProNews is an iEntry Publication