Adobe opened its MAX 2026 conference in Miami Beach on 10 November with its biggest push yet into agentic AI. The company is putting its Adobe Creative Agent inside Photoshop, Premiere and the rest of Creative Cloud, while also letting rival AI assistants use its tools.
The announcements, made at the opening keynote of the three day conference at the Miami Beach Convention Center, cover Firefly, Creative Cloud, GenStudio and new deals with Google, Microsoft and Disney. Adobe calls MAX the largest creativity conference in the world.
The agent moves into the flagship apps
Adobe first showed the Creative Agent at MAX 2025. A year later it is moving from a side experiment into the apps professionals use every day. It is now available in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, Express, Acrobat and Firefly, with After Effects and GenStudio to follow.
The agent works from a chat window or a prompt bar and can act across the Creative Cloud apps. It can open assets from Creative Cloud Libraries and Firefly Boards, apply edits in Photoshop and Firefly, and create designs in Express.
Adobe lists six starting tasks for the agent. It can make an image from scratch, improve an image or video, turn a design into a social post, research and write a project brief, generate a design brief, or build a webpage from a single prompt.
Firefly is also growing from an image generator into a full creative studio. New tools cover video, design and image work, plus a gallery of one click Quick Actions for common jobs.
Firefly Graph, now in beta, lets creators build repeatable workflows from tools, assets and models. Firefly Builder, in private beta, turns a written prompt into an interactive prototype with no code. Firefly Boards, for shared mood boards and briefs, are now generally available.
In Photoshop, the new Relight tool changes the lighting of an image with one click and is in early access, while Generative Restyle changes an image style from a text prompt. Premiere gains Color Mode, a new colour grading system.
Lightroom gains Open Eyes in beta, and InDesign gains co-editing in beta. Across the suite, Adobe also promises faster load times, faster rendering and faster exports.
Adobe opens its tools to rival assistants
The most striking shift is not inside Adobe apps at all. Adobe is previewing Creative Cloud MCP, which lets people direct Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects from the AI assistant they already use, including Microsoft Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT.
The integration works locally on project files, so layers, sequences and compositions stay editable when an outside agent makes the change. It is in preview for developers and enterprise customers.
Adobe Express is now available inside ChatGPT, and Acrobat is available in Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. Photoshop, Acrobat and Express are also coming to the Gemini app, with Google AI Pro subscribers getting 12 months of Photoshop at no extra cost.
The Microsoft deal puts optimized versions of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and Substance 3D Painter on Arm based Windows PCs, including the new Surface Laptop Ultra. Express is also being built into Microsoft Photos on Windows 11.
Disney signs on as an AI innovation partner
Adobe also announced a multi year strategic alliance with The Walt Disney Company, becoming an Official AI Innovation Partner. Adobe technology will support concept exploration in Disney innovation labs and in parks and cruise development, using custom AI models built around Disney properties.
For marketers, Adobe is bringing its CX Enterprise Coworker agent into GenStudio to plan, brief, generate and launch campaigns from a prompt. Brand Intelligence, an agent that learns and enforces brand standards, is expanding into Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Why this MAX lands differently
Adobe has made this kind of turn before. Founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, it moved from boxed software to subscriptions with Creative Cloud in 2013. Photoshop, first released in 1990, is still its best known product.
The agent itself is not brand new. Adobe previewed the wider expansion in June 2026 and launched Firefly in March 2023. What changed at MAX is the scale, with the agent now inside the flagship apps and Adobe tools now inside rival assistants.
The timing adds weight. The conference comes three weeks before Anil Chakravarthy becomes chief executive on 1 December, with Shantanu Narayen moving to executive chair. Chakravarthy, currently president, presented the announcements as putting professional tools within reach of more creators.
Adobe points to its own research for the demand. Its Creators Toolkit Report, which surveyed more than 16,000 creators worldwide, found 78 percent saying creative AI has accelerated the growth of their business or following. Yet 85 percent said the final creative decision should always remain theirs.
“AI is not only reshaping creative tools, it’s redefining creativity itself,” said Shantanu Narayen, chair and chief executive of Adobe.
The open question now is whether creators hand multi step work to agents or keep the agent on narrow tasks. Adobe is betting both ways, with agents inside its own apps and its tools inside everyone else’s assistants.
