Adobe’s new Firefly AI Assistant could forever change the way you use its apps

The new agentic AI removes the complexity of the Adobe Cloud apps interface so amateurs can use their power and professionals can do a lot more, faster.

Adobe is rolling out the public beta for its Firefly AI Assistant later this month, turning complex creative workflows into a simple chat interface across applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, or Lightroom. You type what you want, and the AI connects the dots behind the scenes to make it happen. Since it’s a multi-modal interface, it can tune with precision via context-aware control panels when needed beyond the text-based prompt. It’s a first step in what creative apps may become in the future, removing the complexity of user interfaces while keeping powerful control.

If the final product works like the demo, the new Firefly AI Assistant will change the fundamental way people interact with design software, giving the keys of the walled professional creative castle to anyone willing to pay the money, write in plain English, and move sliders that appear contextually to finely tune aspects of their creations whenever it is needed. Instead of forcing newcomers to memorize a labyrinth of menus, nested palettes, and pop-up windows, the assistant lets them achieve complex results just by asking. 

At the same time, the new assistant is the first stepping stone into a new type of automation for professionals. It gives veterans a fast track to bypass the tedious grunt work they already know how to do. “We have the full spectrum covered from people coming new to our franchise and they don’t know the full power of Photoshop and they want to achieve some amazing edits they can also tap into it and just talk to the assistant,” Adobe vice president of AI and innovation Alexandru Costin told me in an interview. “On the other side of the spectrum, the creative professionals that fully understand our tools can actually take those assets and continue editing them in our tools.”

This tool evolved from Project Moonlight, which Adobe teased at last year’s MAX conference and tested in a private beta. The core idea came directly from working professionals who were looking for a modern upgrade to Photoshop Actions, a decades-old feature that allows users to record and replay mouse clicks. Actions only works for fixed, repeatable chores, like adjusting a thousand images’ hue and saturation using fixed values. But users wanted a smarter type of automation agent that could adapt to what the agent sees in each image, video, or illustration. Adobe decided to create something that goes beyond basic editing, changing things on media according to the context and content of the image or the video itself, even creating new images, mockups and final candidates for art.  

The new, smart ‘Photoshop Actions’

“At Adobe MAX actually I was meeting a large group of professionals to ask them about agentic,” Costin tells me, using the industry term for an AI that actively executes multi-step tasks across different software on your behalf. “They said ‘look I would love you guys to give me a button like Photoshop actions where I can record in an agent what I’m doing and then have the agent be able to replay that for me so I can basically decide… that this automation is doing the things my way.'”

While the new Firefly AI Assistant still has two limitations that will not make it a direct Actions replacement—more on this later—it certainly has the potential to become a huge time saver for any professional willing to work with a crew of AI bots.

To make that kind of automation happen, Adobe built what it calls Creative Skills. The AI learns how a specific creator likes to work over time, picking up on their favorite tools and visual style, and can apply that knowledge to handle your files. “You can actually describe your particular taste or approach as a creative professional and then be able to ‘replay’ that using the Firefly AI system, so you save time and you can automate some portion of your work so you have more time for creativity,” Costin says.

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