Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects project files will open to AI agents that Adobe did not build, with layers and sequences left editable. Adobe previewed the local integrations at MAX in Miami Beach on November 10, and a private beta is planned for early 2027. The keynote also carried Shantanu Narayen's farewell as chief executive. I was in the room as an analyst, and for chief information officers and chief technology officers the more consequential material came on either side of the goodbye: Narayen's account of where Adobe has to ship its tools, and the local MCP preview Anil Chakravarthy presented.

Adobe set the CEO handoff for December 1, and the successor ran the enterprise side

Adobe said in March that Narayen would step down once the board chose a successor, ending an 18-year run as CEO (Adobe, 2026). On September 3 the board named Chakravarthy president and CEO, effective December 1, with Narayen becoming executive chair. A week later Adobe reported third-quarter revenue of $6.76 billion and said it had passed 1 billion monthly active users across its creativity and productivity products (Adobe, 2026).

Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 to run the Digital Experience business, added worldwide field operations that September, and now leads the unit Adobe renamed Customer Experience Orchestration. CMSWire reported that he oversaw the buildout of the CX Enterprise agent system, the GenStudio content platform and Brand Visibility, introduced CX Enterprise Coworker, and led the Workfront and Semrush integrations. Before Adobe he was CEO of Informatica for four years.

He told the MAX audience that his first MAX was in 2019, a few months before he joined Adobe, and he took the stage 21 days before becoming CEO. In April I wrote that the next CEO's first job would be a plain-language account of what Adobe sells, and MAX gave him his first stage for it.

Narayen's farewell listed large language model platforms among the places Adobe ships

Narayen closed his last MAX keynote as CEO after 29 years at Adobe. He thanked the creative community for its partnership and trust over the years and introduced Chakravarthy as the leader of Adobe's new chapter. The goodbye took two minutes.

Under Narayen, Adobe moved its business into areas it had never entered. In the keynote he pointed to Creative Suite and Creative Cloud, Express, Firefly and the creation of the customer experience category, and the unit Chakravarthy now leads accounts for about 25% of Adobe's revenue (CMSWire, 2026).

Before the goodbye, Narayen built the keynote around five pillars he said have shaped Adobe:

• Interfaces: Adobe moved from the mouse and keyboard to touch, voice, prompts and conversation.
• Media formats: Adobe supported or invented formats from PSD and PDF to Flash and Substance 3D.
• Availability: Adobe reaches customers on desktop, web browsers, iOS and Android, and on what he called “increasingly LLM platforms.”
• Productivity: Adobe helps customers produce more content and see how it performs.
• Collaboration: Narayen described creative work as a team sport that connects creators, marketers and business teams.

Four of the pillars describe the franchise Adobe built over three decades. Availability, the third, points to where Adobe plans to distribute next. By listing large language model platforms beside desktop and mobile, Narayen treated AI assistants as another place Adobe ships its tools. He also named interoperability with any tools customers use as one of Adobe's innovation principles, alongside attribution and ownership.

Chakravarthy opened with choice, then previewed local MCP integrations

Chakravarthy started with what he heard on a listening tour since taking his new role. Some creators want nothing to do with AI, he said, and others want it to handle tedious steps. Adobe will keep an option to work in its apps without AI and will offer a choice of generative models inside them. He put it this way: “Adobe will meet you where you are.”

He then previewed native support for the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants operate software through defined connections. Adobe's release describes local integrations that let a user direct a third-party agent to edit native project files on a computer, with layers, sequences and compositions left editable. A second Adobe release says they will be available in private beta in early 2027.

Adobe's release lists Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects as the four apps in the preview.

In the keynote demos, an OpenAI agent resized and translated a poster in Photoshop, and Anthropic's Opus 5.5 prepared a design for screen printing in Illustrator by separating each color into its own panel. A third demo turned a long podcast into social clips. The demos were labeled as coming soon.

Adobe also has connectors that make its tools available inside AI assistants, which is a separate track from the local preview. TechCrunch reporter Ivan Mehta wrote that chatbots including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can use Adobe features through the server, and that Adobe already had ChatGPT and Claude integrations before this launch. Adobe has connectors with Anthropic, OpenAI and Slack, and plans to expand its Gemini and Gemini Enterprise connectors with Google. In the keynote, Chakravarthy listed Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Slack as surfaces that carry Adobe's creative tools and said Microsoft Copilot is coming soon, a detail Adobe's written releases do not repeat. Deepa Subramaniam, an Adobe vice president, told TechCrunch that Adobe sees no “need or desire to sort of limit what the MCP endpoint can expose” and will learn from user feedback about what to add.

Adobe is also building its own assistant. The Adobe Creative Agent powers a Firefly AI Assistant and AI assistants in Illustrator, Premiere, InDesign, After Effects and Frame.io, all in beta. Firefly offers models from Adobe, Topaz Labs, ByteDance, Google, Kling, OpenAI and ElevenLabs. Topaz is the image and video enhancement company Adobe acquired.

Chakravarthy's remarks served creators, and Adobe's release carried the enterprise items

Chakravarthy spent his stage time on creators, while Adobe's written announcement carried the enterprise items: CX Enterprise Coworker coming to GenStudio, where users direct campaign planning, creation and activation through a conversation, and an ideation space in Workfront that combines team ideas with performance data to produce a campaign brief. Adobe Brand Intelligence, which enforces brand standards, is coming to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. I covered the Disney Imagineering and L'Oréal demos in my MAX recap.

Enterprises govern Adobe through named seats, the Admin Console, brand standards, and the workflows they built in Workfront and GenStudio. A local agent integration adds a control point on an employee's desktop, where an assistant from another company directs the edits. It is the same kind of endpoint question I raised in June about on-device enhancement in Adobe's Topaz deal. Subramaniam pitched Creative Cloud at MAX on trust and security protocols, and in the Infotech note I co-wrote after Adobe Summit, we described Adobe's own agent framework as built around governed data and human oversight.

Brand Intelligence is coming to the desktop apps, and whether it governs outside agents is not yet described.

The openness gives buyers real options, and the AI opt-out gives regulated teams a policy position

Adobe says the local preview will let users direct third-party agents to edit native project files while preserving their editable structure, so teams that already work in an AI assistant should not need to export flattened files once the private beta opens. The option to work without AI gives regulated teams and agencies with client restrictions a cleaner policy position. At enterprise scale, both benefits depend on settings that administrators can enforce.

I came to MAX as a returning user. I used Dreamweaver and Flash in the Macromedia days and Adobe's analytics after that, and the move from perpetual licenses to subscriptions lowered the barrier for people like me, who publish on the web without being professional creators. I still use Firefly on its own and through Claude, so I see why a team would want Adobe's tools inside the assistant it already has open. After attending both Adobe Summit and MAX this year, I see Adobe as a company of engineers and creatives.

Subramaniam also gave customers a continuity message. She said Creative Cloud carries the assurance that the technology “isn't going anywhere,” and that Adobe will be here next week and next year. With a CEO change weeks away and AI assistants courting the same users, my read is that Adobe wanted customers to hear it.

Administrator controls for agent-driven work are the next item to watch

Adobe's MAX announcement leaves administrator controls and licensing terms for the local integrations unanswered, including how generative credits apply. The private beta is planned for early 2027, which gives Adobe time to answer before general availability. Three details will shape how you set policy:

• Can administrators allow or block outside-agent access by team, user or app?
• Do Brand Intelligence rules apply when another company's agent makes the edit?
• How do named-seat licensing and generative credits apply when an agent does the work?