Adobe’s new Firefly AI assistant can use Creative Cloud apps to complete tasks

Last October, Adobe previewed a new assistant under the “Project Moonlight” moniker that could do tasks for you by tapping different Adobe apps like Acrobat, Photoshop and Express. That product is now being launched as Firefly AI Assistant.

The Firefly AI Assistant will be available in public beta in the coming weeks. The company didn’t specify if the AI assistant will be priced differently from Firefly’s credit-based subscription tiers.

Like other creative tools, the Firefly AI Assistant lets you describe what you want it to create, and it will handle the rest. Adobe says the assistant can work across apps like Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Express, Illustrator and its other apps to do tasks for you.

Users can control the outputs from the AI assistant using text prompts as well as buttons and sliders. The assistant can suggest actions, orchestrate between actions and apps, and execute workflows, but leaves room for users to interject at any time.

The agent will also show controls based on the project you are working on. For instance, if you’re editing a product photo set in a forest, the assistant might give you a simple slider to increase or reduce the amount of trees and foliage. Adobe says the assistant will learn more about your creative preferences over time and suggest actions accordingly.

Adobe is also releasing skills, which consist of multiple steps, for the assistant. The “social media assets” skill, for instance, can help you adapt images to different platforms by cropping or expanding, optimizing file sizes, and storing the outputs.

Adobe has been working steadily to launch AI-powered assistants for Photoshop, Express and Acrobat. The company said on Wednesday that it is exploring having these assistants work better with third-party large language models.

Other competitors like Canva and Figma are also working on agentic workflows, though Adobe says its strength is in unifying its existing and popular tools.

“We have the opportunity with the Firefly AI assistant and with agentic experiences to remove some of the friction in learning this large catalog of tools we have and bring all of that value to our customers at their fingertips. And that’s the opportunity we have,” Alexandru Costin, vice president of AI and innovation, creativity and productivity business at Adobe, told TechCrunch.

Adobe is adding new features to the Firefly tool, too. The AI video editor is getting an option to reduce noise in speech, adjust reverb and music, a color adjustment tool, and now integrates with Adobe’s stock library. The company is also adding the Kling 3.0 and Kling 3.0 Omni models to Firefly’s library of third-party AI models.