As creatives brace for an AI takeover, Adobe has a different story to tell.

At its Adobe Max conference on Tuesday, the creative platform launched a suite of new AI tools across its flagship Creative Cloud tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects, to automate tedious parts of the process. Most of the new features focus on unlocking a new level of precision or detail that would be time-consuming to do manually, emphasizing useful AI assistance over AI for AI's sake.

“We're powering a new era of creativity where creators and creative professionals at every experience level have the tools, models and agents they need to bring their biggest ideas to life and stand out with work that reflects their unique taste, style and vision, while staying in control of every outcome,” said Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe's president and incoming CEO, in the release.

There are so many features that it's difficult to list them all. Here's a quick overview of some of standout upgrades:

• Adobe Creative Agent: This powers the Firefly AI assistant (beta) and is meant to act as a creative partner that can do tasks across apps with just a conversational text prompt.
• Always-on agents (preview): Can do tasks in the background, like preparing social content, according to Adobe.
• Firefly Image: Brings a new set of editing tools such as Edit Object, Relight, and Retouch.
• Firefly Builder (private beta): Lets users create websites, presentations, or apps using natural language
• Open Eyes: Available in public beta, replaces closed eyes with natural-looking results.

Ironically, the most impactful announcement has little to do with Adobe at all: local MCP integrations, launched in preview. This lets creatives use the third-party AI model of their choice to make local changes to their Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects project files. The project's layers, vectors, bins and sequences stay editable. This is a major win for users because it reduces the need to switch between AI chatbots, especially when you have built a memory with one tool. For instance, a marketer who has already given ChatGPT all its brand assets, tone, and style won't have to re-explain them to implement those elements in an Adobe project.

Our Deeper View

There's a common misconception that AI use in creative spaces will naturally replace the artist. While some companies have tried that in the past, like the failed Coca-Cola AI holiday ad, I doubt it will work on a large scale because it always meets user pushback. What ultimately connects art with people is the story behind it, and artificially generated stories won't cut it because something feels inherently unnatural, unfamiliar, and lacking. As the title of the piece I wrote on this exact topic suggests, "AI should replace the scaffold, not the artist." It's good to see many of these Adobe tools fall into that category.