Adobe's AI assistants show creative software is no longer a passive tool

Adobe MAX 2025 is underway in LA, and the creative tech giant has announced a slew of new features coming to its software. There's prompt-based image editing in the AI image generator Firefly with Image Model 5, AI upscaling from Topaz Labs in Photoshop, and Premiere gets a new Object Mask for video editing. Adobe's also announced the launch of customisable Firefly AI models for brands and artists.

But perhaps the biggest game changer isn't any single new tool but a transformation in how we see creative software and how we interact with it. Adobe's already been building tutorials into its software and adding features like the Contextual Task Bar in Photoshop to put frequent tasks in easy reach. Adobe MAX 2025 saw it reveal the next step: in-app AI assistants that will be able to not only follow instructions but also make suggestions and even review your designs.

AI assistants in Photoshop and Adobe Express are now in beta

Now in beta in Adobe Express and Photoshop, Adobe's AI assistants are described as “partners you can talk to”. You interact with them using text in natural language and you can ask them to do jobs for you, from tedious tasks like renaming layers in Photoshop, organising a content library or applying presets in bulk, to completing multi-step jobs like designing a social media ad.

Adobe says the assistants will understand your goals, anticipate your needs, and carry context from task to task to help you move from idea to final output faster. They'll also adapt to your work and style, so the idea is that over time they'll get better at anticipating what you want to do.

What could be more controversial is that the assistants aren't only passive. They can also make suggestions. Change the style of a social media banner in Adobe Express, and the assistant might suggest also changing the text to match the new style. You'll even be able to ask the assistants to 'review your design' and to recommend things that could be improved.

Adobe insists that creatives will remain in the driver’s seat. The AI assistant will only do the jobs you assign to it, and you can always check its work.

Adobe Project Moonlight

Further ahead, Adobe expects its assistants to work together across creative apps. This is the idea behind Project Moonlight, which is described as a “personal orchestration assistant” capable of coordinating across multiple Adobe apps and beyond.

Adobe says each app will have an AI Assistant that's an expert in its domain, so Photoshop for image editing, Premiere for video, Adobe Lightroom for photography. Project Moonlight will operate “like a conductor of an orchestra, bringing them all together in harmony”.

The idea is that you'll be able to tell Project Moonlight what you need, and it will unite the AI Assistants as one creative team to help you do it. It will also connect to users' social media accounts to analyse their content and performance.

According to Adobe, this AI uber-assistant will be able to “understand your style, projects, and assets”, identify social trends and craft content strategies to grow your social media audience. When you use the AI to brainstorm ideas, it will make personalised suggestions and generate images, videos, and social posts aligned to your direction.

Adobe has suggested that eventually Project Moonlight may be able to connect to third-party apps and other AI chatbots. This marks a fundamental change in how we work with our software, turning it into more of a collaborator than a tool that needs to be learned and mastered.

The move could potentially save hours of watching Photoshop tutorials on YouTube because, at least in theory, you won't need to know what tool to use to complete a task you want to accomplish or where to find it: you just ask out AI buddy. But if it can propose ideas as well as execute them, it also broadens the scope of creative software beyond what some users might want from it.

The AI Assistant in Adobe Express is in public beta today. The AI Assistant in Photoshop is in private beta with a waitlist, as is Project Moonlight.