Adobe launches Photoshop AI Assistant public beta and upgrades Firefly Image Editor

Adobe is pushing conversational AI deeper into creative work

On March 10, 2026, Adobe announced a broad image-editing update centered on Photoshop AI Assistant and Firefly Image Editor. The headline move is that Photoshop AI Assistant is now available in public beta across web and mobile, extending Adobe’s conversational AI strategy beyond Acrobat and Adobe Express into its flagship imaging product. The company is positioning the update as a way to let creators describe the result they want in natural language, then either let AI apply the edit directly or walk them through the process step by step.

What changes inside Photoshop

According to Adobe, Photoshop AI Assistant can handle tasks such as removing distractions, changing backgrounds, refining lighting, and adjusting color simply from a prompt. In the app, users can also make voice requests, which pushes the feature toward a more assistant-like editing workflow instead of a traditional tool-panel workflow. Adobe is also launching AI Markup in public beta for Photoshop web, allowing users to mark specific image regions and attach prompts to those marked areas. That matters because it combines conversational editing with precise spatial control, a gap that many prompt-only image tools still struggle with.

Firefly becomes a broader editing hub

Adobe also expanded Firefly Image Editor with Generative Fill, Generative Remove, Generative Expand, Generative Upscale, and Remove Background. These tools can be used on both AI-generated and uploaded images, which keeps Firefly positioned as an editing environment rather than only an image-generation surface. More strategically, Adobe says users can now choose from more than 25 AI models inside Firefly, including Adobe’s commercially safe models as well as Google Nano Banana 2, OpenAI Image Generation, Runway Gen-4.5, and Black Forest Labs Flux.2 [pro]. That turns Firefly into a multi-model workflow layer instead of a single-model product.

Availability and strategic signal

Through April 9, paid Photoshop web and mobile subscribers get unlimited generations when using AI Assistant, while free users get 20 generations. Adobe says the new Firefly image-editing capabilities are available globally starting now. The larger significance is that Adobe is no longer treating AI as an isolated add-on. It is absorbing conversational AI, region-aware editing, and outside model choice into the core creative interface. For the broader market, that is a signal that the competition is shifting from raw model quality alone to end-to-end workflow control.