Our vision for accelerating creativity and productivity with agentic AI

There's a wave of innovation and excitement around agentic AI — tech that’s capable of conversing, acting and solving complex problems. As with so many recent advancements in AI, agentic technology is spurring a lot of conversation — both excitement and questions.

At Adobe, 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’ve always believed that the single most powerful creative force in the world is the human imagination. AI agents are not creative, but they can empower people — enabling individuals to unlock insights and create content that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to and enabling creative professionals to scale and amplify their impact more than ever. For people at all levels, agentic AI’s potential makes starting from templates feel stale and old-fashioned. For professionals, it offers a pathway to growing their careers by freeing up time to do more of the things only they can do.

We envision many ways that AI agents can help you work more efficiently and raise the bar of what you create. For example, what if Acrobat could analyze a set of documents and help a salesperson craft their pitch for a specific customer? What if a business owner could create a unique, animated flyer from a blank page in minutes just by telling Adobe Express what they want? What if Photoshop gave you suggestions for making your image pop — then carried out those actions for you, at your direction, with just a click? These are just some of the ways we see agentic AI accelerating your work and empowering your creativity.

Here’s a preview of our agentic AI vision for creativity and productivity:

Adobe Acrobat

Our agentic approach in Adobe Acrobat is rooted in providing an environment in which people can do their best work, beginning with providing more intuitive and efficient ways to interact with and understand the information in their digital documents. Acrobat is the global standard for digital documents; there are more than three trillion PDFs in circulation and 400 billion are opened in Acrobat each year by our 650 million monthly active users. And the first step in our agentic journey, Acrobat AI Assistant, is already resonating strongly with business professionals and students alike.

We’re working to bring more agentic-supported capabilities into Acrobat to make it even more helpful for business professionals, knowledge workers and consumers. In the coming months, Acrobat will enable the creation of custom agents that can be assigned specific roles — like 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

We believe agentic AI will fundamentally accelerate our vision to empower people to “step beyond the template” and easily create standout visual content with Adobe Express. Millions of customers — from marketers and small business owners to sales teams and content creators — already turn to Adobe Express every month to elevate their visual storytelling. With agentic AI, we will completely reimagine the content creation process to be more intuitive and efficient — and Express users will benefit from having a guide helping them achieve significantly better outcomes, regardless of their prior experience with creation tools.

We’ve been building an agent in Adobe Express that acts as a creative partner across every stage of the creation process. It will support customers in building their vision better and faster without having to learn every aspect of the tool. They can simply ask the agent to create and improve upon a design, while always having the ability to further edit and refine their work as needed. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the possibilities we’re exploring for how AI Assistant could be integrated into Adobe Express.

Agentic AI in Adobe Express will bring the best of Adobe’s creativity capabilities and the rapid developments in generative AI to more people — and do it in a way that is both radically approachable and connected to professional ecosystems. For solopreneurs, it could mean agentic AI helping them get to eye-popping designs by using trending fonts, effects and looks from the creative community. And, for enterprise marketers, it could mean creating a whole new set of campaign collateral within minutes by localizing preapproved on-brand materials made by the creative team. For students, agentic AI in Express has the potential to inspire new levels of critical thinking across disciplines and foster more impactful ways of communicating.

Creative Cloud

For creative professionals, we believe agents will become a natural part of creative workflows and make creative tools even more powerful and productive — just as generative AI has. In the two years since we launched Adobe Firefly, our customers have generated more than 20 billion commercially safe, production-ready assets globally and now create more than one billion Firefly assets each month, mostly as part of their existing workflows within their Creative Cloud apps. More than 75 percent of Photoshop users already use Firefly-powered features in Adobe Photoshop and we believe agents have the potential to have a similar impact. Imagine what you could accomplish if you could give instructions to the agent in the creative software to finish a series of tasks while you move on to the creation of a new design or train yourself on new techniques. By offloading tedious tasks to an agent, you’ll be able to take on more work and explore more concepts.

Photoshop

With Adobe Photoshop, we’ve already laid the groundwork for intelligent, agent-driven workflows. For instance, last year we introduced Distraction Removal, which analyzes an image to find distractions like poles, wires and people in the background and can remove those distractions for you with just a click.

At MAX London later this month, we’ll debut the foundation of what will become our first creative agent in Photoshop with the all-new Actions panel. Our vision is for Photoshop to be able to analyze your image and recommend smart, context-aware edits. Want a more dramatic sky? Photoshop could not only spot the opportunity to improve your image but also take the action for you with a single click, while keeping you in control. We also envision you being able to use natural language to access more than 1,000 one-click actions in Photoshop.

This isn’t just about faster edits — this is the foundation for how we envision an agent could support you in helping you learn and use Photoshop. In the future, the Photoshop agent could help you learn the tool, share feedback and suggestions and even handle repetitive tasks like preparing assets for export. You stay in control in the creative driver’s seat, while your agent helps you out where you want it to. This is all part of our vision to build the most creator-friendly approach to AI in the industry.

Premiere Pro

We’ve also laid the foundation for agentic professional video workflows in Adobe Premiere Pro. Last week, we released Media Intelligence in Premiere Pro, which understands the content of your clips, automatically recognizing objects and the visual composition of shots in every frame. The reception from video pros has been phenomenal because Media Intelligence solves a time-consuming part of the editing process, helping you find what you need in seconds by understanding your content and your context.

This is only the beginning — we’re working on agents that understand all your media and that you can direct to take actions like developing a rough cut. The hardest part of the editorial process is often simply getting started. Finding the best shots in mountains of footage and combining them in a way that tells a coherent story is daunting. While AI can’t replace human creative inspiration, with your input it can make some educated guesses to help you get your project off the ground. For example, AI can understand spoken dialogue, parse information within an image or frame of video, and understand camera moves and compositional elements such as “angle,” “wide shot” and “close up.” Once you’ve gotten started, it can provide suggestions that help you quickly ideate and explore creative options. It can also help you learn how to perform complex tasks with a few simple keystrokes, helping you grow as an editor. 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.

Accelerating creativity & productivity with Agentic AI

With our Firefly family of models, we’ve taken the most creator-friendly approach to AI in the industry — and integrated Firefly-powered features into Adobe products to help accelerate and expand the creative process. Now with agentic AI, we’re excited for its potential to help every creator, at every skill level, work across every medium. The Adobe Research team — the research scientists and engineers who helped create the Acrobat AI Assistant and AEP AI Assistant — are busy building the foundational pieces for Adobe’s new agentic AI framework. We’ve started building toward this future by creating Experience Platform Agents in our enterprise applications that augment the capabilities of marketing and creative teams to drive personalization at scale. And we believe agentic AI will act as a powerful force multiplier for creative professionals. By learning from feedback, adapting to changes, and proactively contributing ideas and execution for faster delivery, intelligent agents have tremendous potential to accelerate creative work. We’re excited by the technology’s ability to enable a single creative to scale their imagination and output by allowing them to operate with speed, versatility, and impact.