Adobe just put more than 70 of its tools inside ChatGPT

Adobe’s whole business is the apps creative professionals open every day. This week it put more than 70 of those tools inside a rival’s chatbot. The company has launched a single Adobe plugin for ChatGPT that pulls in Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Express, and its Firefly generative models.

It replaces the handful of separate connectors Adobe shipped late last year through OpenAI’s Apps SDK. Now there is one extension, added from ChatGPT’s settings and summoned by typing @Adobe. It is available worldwide from today.

What it actually does

You describe a task in plain language, and the plugin works out which Adobe tools it needs. Then it runs them behind the scenes. You can apply one style across a batch of product photos, resize a design for different platforms, or turn a spreadsheet into an Acrobat PDF. Hand it a long video, and it can cut a highlight reel and reformat it for Shorts, Reels, or TikTok.

You can use the plugin as a guest. Signing in to a Creative Cloud account unlocks more, including saving work across sessions and generating images with Firefly. Adobe says it runs best inside OpenAI’s Codex app and its recently launched Work suite, Engadget reported. How much you can generate depends on your ChatGPT plan.

A tool inside someone else’s front door

The strategy is the real story. The chatbot is becoming the place people start their work, and Adobe would rather be summoned inside ChatGPT than lose the user who never opens Photoshop again. It is meeting people on a rival’s surface before that surface swallows the workflow whole.

Adobe is careful to draw a line.

“We want Adobe’s pro-grade tools for creativity and productivity to be available wherever people work,” said Forest Key, its vice-president of Firefly and agentic AI. The plugin “isn’t a replacement” for the flagship apps, he added, which “go deeper when projects call for hands-on precision”. Speaking to CNET, product lead Deepti Pradeep framed it as an on-ramp back into Adobe’s own apps.

For OpenAI the logic is simpler. Every task it can absorb is a reason not to leave ChatGPT, which feeds its ambition to be the app people never close.

The tightrope

There is a catch, and Adobe names it. The plugin will not deliver pixel-perfect results, Digital Trends noted, and the flagship apps remain the place for precision. There is a harder tension too. Adobe is baking generative AI deeper into its products, through Firefly and new Photoshop assistants, even as many professional creators remain hostile to generative tools.

The company is betting it can be both the chatbot’s creative engine and the professional’s trusted studio. The risk is that the first makes the second feel optional.