Adobe is integrating its most important creative tools directly into ChatGPT. What sounds like a simple cooperation is in reality a strategic masterstroke that demonstrates how AI is fundamentally transforming the world of work – and who’s pulling the strings.
Since December 2025, ChatGPT has been more than a chatbot. Anyone opening the platform now finds Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat there – not as external links, but as fully-fledged apps that can be controlled via text input. “Remove the background”, “create a LinkedIn banner”, “summarise this PDF” – commands that previously required opening separate programmes, menus and tools are now executed in the chat. Adobe has embedded its software giants into OpenAI’s ecosystem, and with that a new era begins: that of the invisible tool that submits to language.
The integration is comprehensive. Photoshop functions allow users to enhance holiday photos, add or remove objects, adjust looks – all triggered by simple prompts. Adobe Express creates social media posts, flyers, banners or presentation slides from text descriptions and automatically adapts them for different platforms. Acrobat summarises PDFs, reorders pages, adds comments or converts formats, without the user ever setting eyes on the programme. Working in the background is Adobe’s AI stack, including Firefly technology, which provides generative image and design functions based on licensed data. For the user, the interaction remains in the chat – seamless, fast, intuitive.
Technically, tasks are routed to Adobe’s cloud services, whilst ChatGPT functions as the interface. Users must connect their Adobe account with ChatGPT; the range of functions depends on the existing licence – whether Express Free, Premium or Creative Cloud. The rollout initially addresses web, desktop and iOS, with Android support announced for 2026. What sounds like a technical detail has far-reaching implications: Adobe is outsourcing the user interface, OpenAI is becoming the central hub for creative work, and the boundary between tool and assistant is blurring.
For enterprise customers, Adobe goes a step further. The “Adobe Marketing Agent” is a specialised agent for ChatGPT Enterprise that supports marketers directly in the chat with data from Adobe Experience Cloud and Campaign environments. It assists with analysis, segmentation, campaign ideas and the generation of marketing assets – email copy, landing page text, social snippets – whilst accessing existing marketing data sources. The message is clear: creativity and data analysis are merging, and the chat is becoming the cockpit for both.
In parallel, Adobe has unveiled the “LLM Optimizer”, a tool that at first glance has nothing to do with ChatGPT – and yet everything. The Optimizer isn’t a plugin, but rather a tool for brands to optimise their content so that it appears more frequently and more accurately in responses from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other large language models. It measures how often and how content appears in AI responses, identifies gaps and makes concrete optimisation suggestions, including via integration into Adobe Experience Manager and other content management systems. Whilst SEO has for decades aimed at visibility in Google search results, the focus now is on being present in AI-generated answers. Adobe calls it “Generative SEO” – and is positioning itself as the gatekeeper of this new discipline.
The strategy is brilliant. Adobe is binding its software to the world’s most-used AI platform, making it both more accessible and more invisible. Users who previously opened Photoshop to edit an image will in future do so in ChatGPT – and barely notice that Adobe technology is running in the background. At the same time, Adobe is securing access to millions of ChatGPT users who might never have bought a Creative Cloud licence. And with the LLM Optimizer, Adobe is offering brands a tool to remain relevant in the new world of AI-mediated information – a world in which it’s no longer Google but ChatGPT that decides which content gets seen.
Yet the integration raises questions. Who controls the interface between human and tool when that interface is a chatbot? What happens to user data when Adobe accounts are linked with ChatGPT? And what does it mean for the creative industries when operating complex software is reduced to simple text commands – are specialist skills being devalued, or are they simply being elevated to a higher level?
Adobe and OpenAI offer different answers. For Adobe, the integration is a promise of democratisation: creativity for everyone, tools without a learning curve. For OpenAI, it’s another building block in constructing an ecosystem in which ChatGPT doesn’t just deliver information but gets work done. For users, it’s convenience – and dependency. Because once you’ve become accustomed to controlling Photoshop via chat, you’ll hardly want to return to menus, layers and toolbars.
What remains is the realisation that the future of software doesn’t lie in ever more powerful programmes, but in ever more invisible ones. Adobe has understood that the user interface of the future is language – and that whoever controls this interface holds the power. OpenAI provides the platform, Adobe the tools, and together they’re shaping a working world in which creativity, productivity and AI are inextricably interwoven. Whether that’s a liberation or a new form of dependency remains to be seen. Only one thing is certain: the chat is the new Photoshop. And this is only the beginning.
