What is the story about?
By
Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, April 15 (Reuters) - Adobe said on Wednesday it was releasing a new artificial intelligence assistant designed to help users carry out tasks across its suite of software for editing photos, videos and other digital content.
* The Firefly AI assistant is designed to take orders fromhuman creative professionals about what results they want for apiece of content and then autonomously tap into Adobe's softwaretools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, to getthat outcome. * The new capabilities will also be available to users ofAnthropic's Claude AI model through a connector to Adobe, thoughAdobe did not disclose the financial arrangements between thefirms. * "There are parts of projects, or individual sections of animage, where you really care about getting into theindividual pixels, and we want to continue to support customersin doing that, but there are places where you would be happy tojust hand this stuff off to an agent or an assistant," said ElyGreenfield, chief technology officer at Adobe's creativity andproductivity business unit. * The Firefly AI assistant is the latest in a series ofAdobe investments since 2023 in proprietary AI tools that itsays are financially guaranteed as safe for use in corporatesettings. This is one of the ways Adobe is trying todifferentiate itself from lower-cost rivals as AI lowers thebarrier to entry for creating images and videos. * Adobe's longtime CEO said last month that he will stepdown after a successor is named, amid investor skepticism aboutwhen the company's AI investments will pay off. * Adobe did not disclose how much the new assistant willcost users, but said it expects the assistant to increase theirconsumption of what it calls AI credits, the main way thecompany currently charges for AI products.(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jamie Freed)
