From an AI agent that runs Photoshop for you, to Acrobat inside WhatsApp and Claude, Adobe has announced a flurry of new tools in the past few months. Here’s what’s new and how it will change the way you create, edit and work.

Adobe has been busy. Over the past month it has made a string of major announcements covering Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Acrobat, Firefly and its consumer Elements apps. It has also brought its tools to the AI platforms and chat apps many of us already use every day, including Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot and WhatsApp.

Put the announcements side by side and one theme stands out. Adobe wants you to be able to describe what you want, in plain English, and have its AI do the fiddly, repetitive steps for you. Just as important, you stay in charge of the final creative decision.

Here’s what has been announced, and what it means for you.

1. Adobe’s “creative agent” arrives across Firefly and Creative Cloud

The biggest announcement is Adobe’s creative agent, which now powers an AI Assistant inside Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io (all in public beta), with After Effects also in beta.

The idea is simple. You describe the outcome, and the assistant works out the steps. Each app’s assistant specialises in that app’s work:

• Photoshop: swap a background, resize assets for every social platform or tidy up your layers.
• Premiere: sort footage into bins, batch-rename clips, find interview questions and assemble a rough first cut.
• Illustrator: generate 50 versioned files from a spreadsheet, or run a pre-flight check for colour mode errors and missing fonts before anything goes to print.
• InDesign: drop in a new brand PDF and have updates applied across every layout.
• Frame.io: organise shoot assets, pull together feedback across revisions and generate B-roll.

Adobe Firefly, its all-in-one creative AI studio, also gets new skills aimed at creators and solopreneurs:

• Brand kits: describe your style, name and colours, and Firefly creates a logo, brand identity and palette.
• Short product videos: turn product photos into polished short-form video.
• Quick Cut: automatically assemble clips into a first edit.
• Storyboard-to-video.

A new Firefly studio experience, in private beta, adds Elements (reusable characters, locations and objects) and Projects to keep work consistent across a campaign.

“Every creative now has an agent capable of helping them execute across every app and platform where they work so they can set the vision, apply their taste and make the calls that only they can,” says David Wadhwani, President of Adobe’s Creativity & Productivity business.

What it means for you: Adobe’s own Creators’ Toolkit Report surveyed more than 16,000 creators. It found 75% see creative AI as integrated into, or essential to, how they work, and 85% say the final creative decision should always be theirs. For small business owners, content creators and marketing teams, the assistant takes on the time-consuming production jobs (resizing, renaming, versioning, formatting) so you can spend your time on ideas.

2. Adobe comes to Gemini and expands in Claude

Adobe is taking its tools to where people are already chatting with AI.

• Gemini: for the first time, Gemini’s users (more than a billion a month) can call on Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe Express and Firefly mid-conversation to enhance photos, create marketing assets and customise designs.
• Claude: the Adobe plugin now has more than 80 pro-grade tools across Acrobat, Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, InDesign and Adobe Stock. For the first time, it also includes Acrobat, so you can:
  • combine, split or delete pagesredact sensitive informationconvert PDFs to other formats
• A new interactive editor lets you reorder pages, edit text, and add comments and highlights. There’s also a layer-based editor for Adobe Express designs, so you can adjust individual elements by hand.

What it means for you: you no longer need to jump between apps. You can draft a proposal in Claude, redact the PDF, and design a matching social graphic in Express, all in one conversation.

3. Photoshop gets more precise AI controls

For creative professionals, Photoshop’s latest update is about control:

• Light Adjustment Layer: Camera Raw-level lighting controls in a non-destructive layer.
• Instruct Edit with Masks (powered by Firefly Image 5): describe your edit in a prompt, and anything outside the mask (faces, logos, brand assets) stays untouched.
• Markup: draw directly on the image to show the AI what you mean, rather than relying on text alone.
• AI-Assisted Editor (beta): a dedicated prompt-bar interface.
• Prompt to Edit: transform a whole image with a single instruction.
• Plus Dynamic Text, improved Shapes and Paths, and Stock panel integration.

What it means for you: brands can protect the elements that must never change while still getting the speed of generative AI.

4. Premiere and After Effects: generate straight into your timeline

Video editors get some of the most practical updates. It’s also a big year for Premiere, which received an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award earlier this month, marking 35 years of helping filmmakers make television history.

• Generative Media Tool: select a gap in your timeline, describe what you need, and Premiere generates video or audio that matches the surrounding edit. You can choose Adobe Firefly or partner models including Google Veo, Kling, Runway and Luma.
• Generate Sound Effects, Soundscape (beta) and Music (beta): all commercially safe. Generated music carries synchronisation rights for any media.
• AI audio tools (beta):
  • Enhance Audio separates dialogue, music, ambience and effects within a single clip.
  • Separate Crosstalk splits two overlapping speakers onto their own tracks.
  • Dynamic Auto Ducking balances sound levels without manual keyframes.
• AI Assistant in After Effects: motion designers can reorganise projects with thousands of layers and create complex effects and expressions without writing code.
• Color Mode updates add one-click Auto Color. Frame.io Mounted Storage is now available to all accounts, letting you stream full-resolution media from the cloud.

What it means for you: no more leaving your edit to hunt for a missing B-roll shot or sound effect. And rescuing a noisy interview recording no longer means a reshoot.

5. Acrobat becomes a thinking tool, not just a PDF reader

Acrobat is moving well beyond reading PDFs. New features include:

• Interactive reports and summary slides: turn dense documents into charts and key takeaways.
• Audio features: personal podcasts, audio summaries and read-aloud, so you can listen to your reading on the commute.
• Stylize: apply thousands of Adobe Express templates to plain documents such as résumés, invoices and proposals, without changing a word.
• For businesses:
• Knowledge Base lets teams ask questions across trusted document collections and get sourced answers.
• Analyzer pulls structured data out of thousands of invoices, contracts and reports.

Answers include clickable citations, and Adobe says it doesn’t train its models on your document data.What it means for you: a small business owner can turn quarterly financials into easy-to-read charts. A job seeker can polish a résumé in minutes. And a busy executive can get through five research reports while walking the dog.

6. Acrobat inside WhatsApp

Acrobat-powered PDFs are now available globally in WhatsApp Web and Windows. You can:

• preview and read PDFs in full screen inside the chat, including password-protected files
• highlight, underline and strike through text
• tap “Edit in Acrobat” for advanced tools, then send the revised file straight back to the chat

Documents remain end-to-end encrypted. Advanced editing and AI Assistant features require an Acrobat subscription.What it means for you: WhatsApp has three billion users, and plenty of us already run business on it. Reviewing an invoice or contract without downloading a file or switching apps is a real time saver.

7. Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 2027

Consumers haven’t been forgotten. Adobe’s Elements 2027 family brings pro-style AI to family photos and home videos:

• Photoshop Elements:
  • Generative Expand extends a photo beyond its borders to fit any frame.
  • Generative Upscale rescues old or blurry favourites.
  • An AI Assistant (beta) and new Creative Filters such as Embroidery, Oil Painting and Duotone.
• Premiere Elements:
  • Generate Image and Generative Title Art.
  • Contextual toolbars and editing indicators.
• Elements Organizer:
  • Semantic Search (English-only beta): find a photo by describing it.
  • Smarter duplicate detection.
  • Share to Phone via QR code.

What it means for you: if you’ve got thousands of photos on your computer, finding “the one of Mum at the beach at Christmas” just got much easier.

The bottom line

Taken together, these announcements show where creative and productivity software is heading. The skills barrier is coming down, the busywork is being automated, and the tools now come to you, whether you’re in Claude, Gemini, WhatsApp or Photoshop itself.

Adobe is betting that the winners in the AI era will be the creators who stay in the director’s chair. From what we’ve seen, that’s the right bet.

The latest AI Assistant capabilities in Firefly are available now in the Firefly web app. AI Assistant is in public beta in Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io, and in beta in After Effects. Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 2027 are available through Adobe.com and major retailers.