Adobe said on Wednesday it was releasing a new artificial intelligence assistant designed to help users carry out tasks across its suite of software for editing photos, videos and other digital content.
The Firefly AI assistant is designed to take orders from human creative professionals about what results they want for a piece of content and then autonomously tap into Adobe’s software tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, to get that outcome.
The new capabilities will also be available to users of Anthropic’s Claude AI model through a connector to Adobe, though Adobe did not disclose the financial arrangements between the firms.
“There are parts of projects, or individual sections of an image, where you really care about getting into the individual pixels, and we want to continue to support customers in doing that, but there are places where you would be happy to just hand this stuff off to an agent or an assistant,” said Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer at Adobe’s creativity and productivity business unit.
The Firefly AI assistant is the latest in a series of Adobe investments since 2023 in proprietary AI tools that it says are financially guaranteed as safe for use in corporate settings. This is one of the ways Adobe is trying to differentiate itself from lower-cost rivals as AI lowers the barrier to entry for creating images and videos.
Adobe’s longtime CEO said last month that he will step down after a successor is named, amid investor skepticism about when the company’s AI investments will pay off.
Adobe did not disclose how much the new assistant will cost users, but said it expects the assistant to increase their consumption of what it calls AI credits, the main way the company currently charges for AI products.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jamie Freed)
