Adobe MAX 2026: A 5-Step Plan to Test Adobe’s New AI Tools This Week

Adobe MAX 2026 delivered its big reveals in Miami this week. The opening keynote on November 10 launched Firefly Design in beta, added AI Assistants to more Creative Cloud apps and previewed local MCP connections for outside agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. On November 11, Adobe’s Sneaks session showed 10 research projects and opened a new Adobe Labs Playground where some of them can be tried now. Here is a practical five-step plan to test what is actually usable this week.

Step 1: Load your brand into Firefly Design. Firefly Design is open to all users in beta at firefly.adobe.com/design, combining vector, raster, motion, 3D and print on one canvas. Upload your brand guidelines, let it build a brand kit, then request a social post, a story, a banner and a poster. Check the hex codes and fonts, not just the overall look.

Step 2: Recover lost artwork in Photoshop beta. Convert to Text Layers rebuilds type from a flattened image as live, editable text, matched against Adobe Fonts. Try it on an old poster whose source file is missing.

Step 3: Test resizing with Generative Recompose. Also in the Photoshop beta app, take one key visual from 4:5 to 9:16 and 16:9. Judge whether the subject sits where an art director would place it, and time the job against your current process.

Step 4: Give the AI Assistant a boring task. The Assistant, now in beta in Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects and Frame.io, shows its plan before acting. Start with chores like renaming layers or recolouring an icon set, and confirm everything stays editable.

Step 5: Explore Sneaks safely in Adobe Labs. The Playground offers previews of Project Deep Brush, which paints colour and light along an image’s surfaces, Project Hands On, which creates on-canvas controls, and Custom Filters for Photoshop. Treat them as experiments: Adobe has not said what usage terms apply, so keep them away from client work.

Before you scale
Firefly now hosts many partner models, and Adobe notes they may have different usage terms, so record which model created each asset. The local MCP integrations are only a preview, with a private beta expected in early 2027.

At The Quick Craft, we test new tools against real briefs before they touch client work, combining the best of Adobe’s AI with human art direction so every asset stays on brand.