Adobe's new AI assistant in Express is conversational

At Adobe MAX 2025, Adobe unveiled a new AI Assistant built into Adobe Express that aims to make design as natural as talking. The tool, now in beta, lets users describe what they want — “make it look more tropical,” for instance and watch the platform adjust colors, images, and fonts in real time.

The idea is to take the friction out of design, particularly for people who aren’t trained designers. Instead of navigating layers of menus or templates, users can type or say what they want and let the AI handle the details. Adobe says the assistant can modify individual layers, swap out backgrounds, and suggest new design elements while keeping the rest of a project intact.

The company also emphasized that the Express assistant draws on Adobe’s creative and content intelligence essentially the company’s long-trained sense of what makes a design cohesive or visually appealing. It uses a mix of Adobe’s own Firefly models and third-party AI to recommend tools or generate elements automatically.

What sets this apart from other AI-driven design tools is its conversational tone. It doesn’t just execute commands but follows up with contextual prompts asking, for example, whether the user wants to change a font to match a new color scheme.

For businesses, Adobe plans to extend this technology into its enterprise suite, offering brand-locked templates and collaboration tools so teams can create on-brand content more easily. Some early adopters, like dentsu and Lumen, have suggested it could help non-designers produce professional visuals without slowing down their workflows.

For now, the AI Assistant is available in beta on desktop for Adobe Express Premium users, with wider access planned through Adobe’s Firefly credit system.