Anyone who uses Photoshop regularly knows the photo editing app has gotten a big AI makeover over the past few years. Adobe is taking its next step on that journey now. Photoshop’s AI assistant is publicly available in the web and mobile apps.
Photoshop’s AI assistant is meant to be an editing partner. You can ask the AI to make nearly any kind of edit, from changing the color of an object or removing an obtrusive element. While pro users might be comfortable making those edits manually, the AI assistant might be more appealing to its less experienced users and folks working under a time crunch. Adobe Express, the company’s Canva competitor, has had a similar AI assistant available as a public beta for the past few months.
While these AI assistants won’t be the “everything machines” that ChatGPT or Gemini claim to be, it’s a stark sign that Adobe’s AI revolution is marching onward. They have an emphasis on “conversational, agentic” experiences — meaning you can ask the chatbot to make edits, and it can independently handle them. The company’s focus on agentic AI, like much of the AI industry, aims to persuade people to delegate tasks to AI.
Adobe’s AI ambitions
These AI efforts represent a range of what conversational editing can look like, Mike Polner, Adobe Firefly’s vice president of product marketing for creators, said in an interview.
“One end of the spectrum is [to] type in a prompt and say, ‘Make my hat blue.’ That’s very simplistic,” Polner said. “With Project Moonlight, it can understand your context, explore and help you come up with new ideas and then help you analyze the content that you already have,” Polner said.
In a recent Adobe survey of 16,000 global creators, 86% said they use creative generative AI. Over three-fourths (80%) said Gen AI helped them create content they otherwise couldn’t have made. The new stats align with a growing popularity of generative media tools, like AI image and video generators, with newer models like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s nano banana going viral this year.
Adobe’s been all in on AI for a while. In 2025, Adobe introduced AI-first mobile apps for Photoshop, Firefly and a new video editor called Premiere. The professional photographers, designers and illustrators who are Adobe’s primary customers haven’t all been sold on Adobe’s AI ambitions, raising concerns about AI’s legality, energy use and ethics.
Agentic AI assistants are just the tip of the iceberg of all the news Adobe dropped this week. For more, check out Firefly’s new generative audio and music tools and Adobe’s cutting-edge photography AI research projects.
Correction, March 10: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the Photoshop AI assistant’s features. The assistant isn’t able to rename layers in the mobile or desktop apps, though that may be possible in the future. But it is available on web.
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