Adobe Adds More Than 70 Creative Tools To Slack

Adobe said Monday it has built more than 70 tools from its creative and productivity apps directly into Slack, according to TechCrunch. The new Adobe for Slack app pulls in features from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Acrobat, InDesign, Lightroom, Stock, Adobe Express and Adobe's AI image generator Firefly, Engadget reported.

The integration works through Slackbot, the workplace messaging app's chatbot. Users type out what they want done, and Slackbot picks the right Adobe tool to handle it, according to TechCrunch. The bot can also read the surrounding conversation for context, drawing on messages, Slack Canvases and files stored in Adobe's Creative Cloud library, Engadget reported. Adobe pointed to tasks like turning a spreadsheet into a chart, building social media graphics from templates, batch-editing large sets of photos, and converting a chat thread into a PDF, image or video.

The app is live now for Slack's Business+ and Enterprise+ customers on web, desktop and mobile, Engadget reported. An Adobe account isn't required to use it, though signing in unlocks fuller access to the tools, according to Engadget.

Part Of A Wider Push Into Chat Apps

The Slack rollout lands about a month after Adobe launched a nearly identical integration for ChatGPT, also offering more than 70 tools, and the company plans a similar tie-in with Google's Gemini soon, according to TechCrunch. It follows Slack's addition of similar plugins for the design tools Canva and Figma back in June, when Slack first added support for the Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets chatbots call outside software, Engadget reported.

Deepti Pradeep, Adobe's senior director for agentic AI, told TechCrunch that focus group participants said the appeal is speed and convenience. "Saving time, getting to the outcome they want faster without having to micromanage every step, being able to access Adobe wherever they're already working," she said, adding that it has pushed Adobe to focus "less about individual edits and more about the larger outcome someone is trying to get to."

Competing For Chat Real Estate

TechCrunch noted that most people still do their work inside messaging boxes rather than dedicated apps, which is pushing software makers like Adobe, Canva and Figma to meet users inside ChatGPT, Claude and Slack instead. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been building tighter Slack integrations of its own, since Pradeep noted that team conversations often hold context that AI tools can use. Pradeep told TechCrunch that having multiple tool options is good for customers, but argued Adobe's edge is offering both creative and productivity software across those different chat platforms.