Adobe’s next platform for Creative Cloud? Your AI assistant

Adobe is preparing for a future where users increasingly interact with its software through AI assistants, rather than always going directly to its applications.

That’s the idea behind its expanded integration with Anthropic’s Claude, as well as the first connector for Google’s Gemini, announced Thursday.

The updated Claude integration adds new ways for users to interact with Creative Cloud applications via text prompts, with 80 “tools” available across applications such as Acrobat Photoshop, Premiere, Express, and Lightroom. That’s up from the initial 50 at launch in April.

The Adobe plugin lets users take actions across various Creative Cloud apps, such as retouching images or resizing videos for social media posts. The latest additions include the ability to convert PDFs to different file formats.

In addition, Adobe has introduced interactive editor tools available in Claude. These offer greater control over Express and Acrobat files, Adobe said.

In Acrobat, it’s possible to edit text, for instance, reorder pages, or add comments and highlights. For Express, this means the ability to select and customize fonts, colors, and more.

The integrations could broaden access to Adobe’s software among workers “who never fully learned how to use Adobe’s tools,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, research director at The Futurum Group.

The ability to control elements of Creative Cloud apps via prompts “removes the learning curve, and can potentially help speed up the time it takes to go from an idea to a mostly finished output,” said Kirkpatrick.

Professional designers, meanwhile, will be “freed up to work on finishing ideas, rather than the spending valuable time doing the initial ideation and refinement,” he said. “It should also help them focus on only the highest-value work, instead of the routine or mundane projects.”

Adobe bets on AI assistants

The Claude connector is part of a wider Adobe strategy to make Creative Cloud applications available within leading AI assistant tools. This includes similar integrations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Salesforce’s Slackbot, and, as of this week, Google’s Gemini.

AI usage by a range of workers is one the rise, even if regular adoption is still limited. Around 15% of US employees use AI daily in their role, according to a Gallup poll from May this year, while 30% use it a few times a week or more.

Gartner predicts that spending on enterprise AI assistants will rise from $17 billion in 2025 to $71bn in 2030, while knowledge workers are forecast to spend more time interacting with these tools in their daily work than with any other application over the next three years.

For Deepti Pradeep, Adobe’s senior director of agentic AI, the emergence of AI assistants creates another way for customers to access Adobe’s tools, rather than a replacement for its own applications.

“I think you will find a mix of all types of users; people who are in LLMs doing their tasks, and people who want to have more control and creativity as they’re going deep in our flagship apps,” she said.  

“Our belief is that we want to be wherever the user is, whether they’re in the flagship apps ‘in the zone’ doing their thing, or whether they’re outside and they want to accomplish the task. So I don’t think it’s ‘this’ or ‘that’ — I think it’s everything. And we just want to be valuable in every moment that the user is in.”

Going forward, Adobe also plans to extend the interactive editor controls available now available for Acrobat and Express to a wider range of apps such as Photoshop. However, the emphasis will be on more streamlined interfaces, with more complex functionality remaining in the core application.

“With image editing there’s so much one can do, and we have very comprehensive products where we possibly can’t bring all that [to AI assistants such as Claude],” said Pradeep.

“So we’re trying to figure out what’s the right level that makes sense for the user in that given context. We want to ensure that we’re bringing relevant, value-added things. What we don’t want to do is over-engineer it.”

Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, said there’s a lot of “buzz” from software vendors about the “start of an age where you never need to log into an application’s interface,” she said. This is exemplified by Salesforce CTO Parker Harris’s comments that customers may not need to log in to the CRM app at all in the future to get work done.

For some workers that may be accurate, said Miller, and the ability to access Adobe apps via third-party AI assistants “will 100% change the space and place they choose to work.”

But, just as access via mobile didn’t kill off Photoshop, “working in Claude will be a new way to work in, with, and through, Creative Cloud,” said Miller. “This is more about the future styles of work than it is about a SaaSpocalypse. Adobe is rightly identifying a new work surface and empowering creators to work where they choose.”

Miller said she already sees demand for Adobe’s integrations in third-party apps, “especially from non-creative, more technical users where updating a technical document that exists as a PDF was once a time-consuming task.

“A prompt-based update leveraging Acrobat and Express integrations with Claude fits within that individual’s workflow,” Miller said.

Adobe doesn’t provide daily or weekly usage statistics around the use of the existing Claude integration. It’s still early days in terms of uptake, the company said, though there is strong repeat use among early adopters and positive qualitative user feedback.

Do AI assistants threaten Adobe?

Some have questioned whether wider use of enterprise AI assistants could negatively impact software vendors such as Adobe, which announced a $25 billion share buyback program in April amid investor concerns about the threat AI poses to its business.  

Miller said that making Creative Cloud apps available across tools such as Claude could be beneficial for Adobe, widening the reach of its own products.  

“This could be an interesting opportunity since Claude is not replacing Adobe’s capabilities or applications in this scenario,” she said. “In fact, it more closely connects Adobe applications to work being done using Claude.”

Kirkpatrick sees the integrations as a way to make Adobe’s creative tools available to a wider audience of office workers.  

“I view Claude and Gemini as an easy-to-use front door, which expands the reach of the platform to users that might ordinarily not ever really use Adobe products,” he said.

‘Freemium’ model

There are three levels of access to the Adobe plugin for Claude.

Guest users require no authentication but can use only a smaller subset of Adobe tools, while those that log in to an Adobe account can access all functionality but with certain restrictions on usage. Paid Creative Cloud users effectively have unlimited access to available Adobe tools in Claude.   

“The actual functionality for guest users, where Adobe doesn’t have basic user identification data, is still limited, which ensures that there’s a reason to further engage with Adobe and its products,” said Kirkpatrick.

Accessing Creative Cloud apps doesn’t require any additional fees or draw on any Adobe AI credits. Adobe declined to comment on future plans to monetize the integration.

For Gemini users, free and paid users can access Creative Cloud tools, but there’s no guest access.

Kirkpatrick describes Adobe’s approaches as a form of freemium model, with more functionality unlocked as users take steps such as signing up for a free Adobe ID or purchasing Creative Cloud or Firefly subscriptions.

This chimes with Adobe’s wider strategy for driving adoption of its own AI tools, with CEO Shantanu Narayen stating during a recent earnings call that attracting new users matters more than “short-term relief” around pricing.

“In a world where new tools and technology come on the market frequently, driving adoption through ease-of-use and then backing that with enterprise-grade security, IP-rights management, and scalability, Adobe’s freemium model appears to be the right play,” said Kirkpatrick.