If there are some economists reading the tea leaves and issuing dire warnings about an AI bubble set to pop, Adobe certainly hasn’t gotten the memo. And, if you just happened to be in attendance at Adobe MAX 2025, or even watched online, and took a shot every time those two vowels were spoken together, your blood would turn into Patrón.
From agentic AI assistants and a massive Firefly update with more photorealistic fine-tuning to generating soundtracks and voiceovers for video and custom AI models, Adobe still aims to be your one-stop shop for generating content. “Made to Create” was the tag emblazoned on digital billboards of the LA Convention Center and the MAX stage—a short bit of copy my Uber driver who picked me up from LAX didn’t care for because you’re “going to create anyway”—and that was the central idea Adobe delivered to the audience: they’re still in the business of empowering folks to make creativity more inclusive and fluid.
The bottom line is that Adobe is threading AI throughout its entire ecosystem.
And, if you’re in the insatiable-thirst-for-content business, you can at least see why they’re trying to make these tools faster and more responsive to a creative team’s demands. According to Adone, there is five times more demand for content, and 77% of creative and marketing teams are hiring, which speaks to how they’re enabling every stage of the creative process, whether it’s pixel-level control or tossing off a quick marketing campaign in Adobe Express.
Perhaps the most notable update of all, however, is Adobe’s new partnerships and how you can now use third-partyAI models in Firefly, like Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, GPT Image, Imagen, or Veo. Now, you can do away with all of those other subscriptions to different AI companies and not have to switch to your preferred platforms to generate work seamlessly. What’s more, the work produced is still commercially safe.
Of course, it’s also worth noting that countless AI-fueled videos and images have been generated (and those figures are staggering even when you just count Firefly) without a single mention about the environmental impact and energy required to produce (likewise, the year before). And while I don’t think you can adequately say that companies like Adobe or anyone else preaching the gospel about AI are doing zilch about it, it sure would be nice to hear anyone be just a smidge transparent about how they intend to reckon with it.
Anywho. Let’s get down to brass tacks. In all, Adobe announced over 100 updates to its popular suite of design software, and this is just a small sampling of the goods they delivered at MAX.
That whole thing about AI working its way across every single goshdarn inch of Adobe’s Creative Cloud? Well, get ready to have an AI agent strapped into every project (if you desire, of course).
AI assistants, fueled by agentic AI, will now work in apps like Express, Firefly, and Photoshop. Simply input your directions in your own precious words, and you can edit or create content via conversation. Folks are already doing this with ChatGPT and Gemini, so why not your design work as well, right?
During the MAX demo, the Adobe talking head took an “email” from a client with directions on how they wanted an invitation to be edited. Directly inputting the email’s directions as a prompt, the AI assistant quickly edited the invitation. Which, if you need to make edits to something fairly quickly that don’t require an awful lot of consideration, well, that could be handy, especially if it’s already trained on your brand guidelines. This one feels like it’s for the Canva-loving marketer who doesn’t want to task the design team with something (when they really, really should be).
“The new AI Assistant in Adobe Express is built to transform how you create,” said Govind Balakrishnan, senior vice president and general manager, Adobe Express, Adobe, in a press release. “It works with you, removing obstacles, speeding up processes, and providing inspiration, so you create beyond-the-template content that represents your unique brand, business, or vision. We are lowering the barriers to creativity, making creating amazing content even more accessible to everyone.”
Generative Upscale in Photoshop
Whom amongst us hasn’t had to deal with the pain of shitty, low-res images?
With Generative Upscale in Photoshop, you can take those garbled, super-pixelated images and enhance them into 4K-ready assets, with refined details and corrected colors. What’s more, you can restore your old photos in that dusty family album and correct flaws and recolor. Pretty nifty!
OK, so this one might be a bit of a throwback to last year’s Sneaks at MAX, but 365 days is also a mighty long time, so let’s pretend it’s newish!
With Harmonize, or Project Perfect Blend, Photoshop’s AI can give you natural, photorealistic results by matching light, shadows, and color between background and subject. Have a lifestyle photoshoot where you need to seamlessly add a person or a product into the setting? Not a problem. Harmonize allows you to perfectly blend them into the shot, making hours-long compositing a thing of the past.
Generate Soundtrack / Generate Speech
Firefly’s AI music generator, Generate Soundtrack, is a tool that can examine a video—let’s say some content you shot for TikTok—and can produce royalty-free music to match your content. Meanwhile, Firefly’s Generate Speech allows users to produce professional voiceovers. With over 20 languages available and emotional control of the voice itself, Generate Speech can be used across multiple Adobe tools to provide narration for podcasts, videos, and social media content. Both tools are currently available in Beta.
Look, if I’m being honest about any of the updates I saw this past week, Soundtrack is the one that’s the hardest to swallow. It’s already hard enough to be a working musician (or, you know a designer, filmmaker, etc having to navigate this new world of AI in general), and with the influx of soulless AI songs proliferating streaming sites and YouTube, it just feels like we’re being inundated with music that serves no greater purpose than to be slop wallpaper for the sake of “vibes.” I suppose if you’re an influencer making a video shopping for overpriced snacks and you need some downtempo diarrhea-jazz to soundtrack your little Erewhon trip while you preen in front of your phone, congratulations.
In other words, I’m not a fan.
Available to Creative Cloud subscribers, you can now create your own custom Firefly model, trained on your design assets, which can generate customized content. Simply upload your own work, and your model will churn out graphics rooted in your own distinctive style and aesthetic.
Importantly, Adobe won’t train its generative AI models on your custom content via your own model,nor will they ever share your custom model.
This one is for all of the overworked social media managers.
Working across multiple Adobe apps, Project Moonlight was described as a “personal orchestration assistant” capable of analyzing your Creative Cloud library and social media presence so that it can help generate social content in your own highly personalized tone of voice. By working (or chatting, I guess) with an AI agent, you can convey information, creative ideas, and direction and produce posts, images, and videos. Moreover, it can analyze your social metrics and trends, identify your top-performing posts, and offer insight into how you can realistically grow your audience.
Though, as many a social media manager will tell you, this is impossible. You’re probably better off subscribing to Link in Bio, but, hey, whatever works. Social media managers need love, too.
