SAN JOSE, September 25 — Adobe has spent the past year quietly threading its creative tools into the places where people already work and talk. On Wednesday, the company pushed that effort further, announcing two expansions to its AI chatbot integrations in a single day. The first adds Acrobat tools to Adobe’s existing plugin across Claude and Claude Code, available on desktop, the web, and mobile.
Adobe had already offered access to creative tools from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, InDesign, Adobe Express, and Adobe Stock within Claude. With Acrobat now in the mix, the company says users can get started as a guest, or sign in with their Adobe account “to unlock the full plugin experience, including higher usage limits, additional tools and continuity across sessions.”
A second front, on Gemini
The second piece of news targets Google Gemini users across all plans. Starting Wednesday, Adobe is bringing tools from Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe Express, and Firefly directly into Gemini, letting users ask the assistant to enhance photos, create marketing assets, and customize designs without leaving the conversation. Getting started is deliberately simple.
Users navigate to Personal Intelligence, select Adobe under Connected Apps, and sign in with an Adobe account or create one for free. From there, Adobe says, users only need to describe what they want, and the company “orchestrates the right tools and steps to get you there.” The reporting, by 9to5Mac’s Marcus Mendes, did not disclose financial terms, user numbers, or revenue figures for the integrations.
Adobe has not publicly detailed which additional tools or capabilities it may add to these integrations in the future.
Two rivals, one strategy
What stands out is where Adobe chose to plant its flag. The integrations place its tools inside two competing AI assistant ecosystems: Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. Rather than betting on a single partner, Adobe is spreading its plugin approach across the field, giving users access to its creative and document tools through conversational prompts rather than standalone applications.
That approach extends an effort Adobe has pursued for roughly a year to bring its creative tools to AI chatbots and productivity tools, including ChatGPT, Slack, and Copilot. The company, founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, built its reputation on applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat — programs that for decades required users to open a separate window and learn a separate workflow.
Now the workflow is a sentence. The announcement reflects a broader trend of software vendors embedding their products into AI chatbot platforms as distribution channels, meeting users inside the assistants they already have open. For Adobe, the bet is that the tools matter more than the doorway.
Watch whether the company extends this same plugin strategy to other assistants — and whether the guest-access tier on Claude eventually converts into the kind of signed-in, session-spanning experience the company is clearly building toward.
