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When Adobe began abandoning shrink-wrapped software for the cloud in 2011, it dragged the entire industry toward subscriptions. Now the company is attempting its next migration, this time into territory it doesn’t control: chatbots. On Thursday, Adobe launched a plugin for ChatGPT that brings more than 70 of its tools natively into an assistant used by more than 1 billion monthly users, uniting its creative and productivity software, according to the company, in one place for the first time.
Why extend such capabilities into ChatGPT at all? The simplest answer is that it’s where the users are, and increasingly where the next generation of them starts. Adobe estimates that about 12 million Americans are training to move into creative work, more than half of whom have no formal creative education. More than three out of four (77 percent) see AI as being essential to their transition. That means Photoshop and Illustrator aren’t likely to be the first programs opened.
Playing on someone else’s turf does have an obvious cost, as OpenAI owns the interface, the user relationship, and the terms. But for Adobe, it’s less about giving its software away than about building a funnel inside of ChatGPT.
When installed, the Adobe plugin in ChatGPT draws on features from many of Adobe’s apps, including Express, Photoshop, Firefly, Premiere, Acrobat, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, and Stock. It doesn’t support the entire Creative Cloud suite, though Deepti Pradeep, Adobe’s senior director of agentic AI, told The AI Economy that it’s the “breadth of Creative Cloud that we believe makes sense within the LLMs.” She added that more tools could come in the future, though “we’re bringing what we believe adds value to our customers in the workflow there and in the context of ChatGPT.”
This isn’t the first time Adobe has brought its apps to ChatGPT. In December, it launched connectors for Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat as part of OpenAI’s “Apps with ChatGPT” program, enabling people to use them for free via natural language prompts. “You needed to invoke each of these apps separately to call their tools,” Pradeep said, pointing out that each had fewer than 10 tools available. According to her, customers have praised the move—no context-switching, low friction regardless of subscription, and a lower mental barrier to apps people found intimidating. Buoyed by the feedback, Adobe opted to consolidate everything behind one mention.
@Adobe
The first step to using the Adobe plugin is to install it on ChatGPT. Go to the “Plugins” page and add it. Then, start a new chat and type “@Adobe” in the prompt, or you can use the “+” button. Include your request in the prompt, such as applying specific edits to a batch of photos, turning a long-form video into a highlight reel that’s then adapted for social media, or having a dataset converted into professionally formatted PDFs and other business-ready documents.
Notably, users only need to type @Adobe in their prompt to activate the plugin. They don’t have to follow that with the specific application they want to use—Photoshop, Acrobat, Lightroom, etc. It’s a shift in how we use software in this conversational AI era and what Adobe strived for. “Within our ecosystem, we just want to be Adobe,” Pradeep said. “We just want to bring to you anything you may want to do, whether it’s creativity or productivity, and make that happen and orchestrate it for you. You shouldn’t have to be concerned about what app it is calling at the backend. You’re only thinking about the outcome you want to achieve.”
Anything the plugin generates follows Adobe’s generative AI content policy: outputs won’t be used to train OpenAI’s models, and files carry a digital signature and verified certificate. The plugin runs on Creative Cloud, so assets land in your Adobe storage automatically, waiting in apps like Photoshop or Premiere whenever you want to keep working on them.
Tackling the First and Last Mile
The Adobe plugin isn’t an end-to-end design pipeline, and it isn’t a replacement for Creative Cloud. Though having access to more than 70 tools is a lot, Pradeep was candid that Adobe brought over what makes sense inside a chatbot, not the full depth of its flagship apps. For most creators, that should be sufficient, but for power users or anyone who needs pixel-level control, traditional software still has a place.
What the plugin is built for, Pradeep said, is the first and last mile: getting an idea moving, then handling the finishing work that stands between a finished concept and a publishable asset. That maps closely to Adobe’s own research.
In a June report, the company found that AI use clusters at the front of the creative workflow and at the back, while the middle stage—the selection, direction, and judgment work—expands to fill the space. The data showed that 84.8 percent of U.S. creative professionals thought positively about AI’s role in brainstorming. It’s the only task in Adobe’s survey that rated high across creativity, enjoyment, AI use, and positive sentiment about AI’s role. In the later stages, however, AI was used mostly for photo and video finishing. Nearly 58 percent of U.S. photo professionals reported substantial use of generative AI to remove distracting background elements, while half used it to composite multiple images. Among U.S. video creators, 48.6 percent had AI help them with visual effects.
It seems creative professionals are keen to use tools like ChatGPT to assist with the workflow bookends, but aren’t comfortable handing over the creative work to AI, at least for now.
Expect Adobe in More Chatbots
The Adobe plugin is generally available today on ChatGPT web and app. It’ll also work in Codex. Pradeep told me Adobe wants to hear feedback: “We’re building this closely, keeping in mind what customers want, how they want to use these workflows, and what brings value to them.”
Adobe said it’s going to bring its tools to more AI chatbot platforms. Besides ChatGPT, it already has connectors to Claude and Microsoft Copilot, but Google Gemini and Slack are next on the list with expected launches later this month.
