According to Thurrott.com, Adobe is launching free Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Acrobat apps within ChatGPT as of today. The apps allow ChatGPT’s users to edit images and PDFs, create professional designs, and more directly inside a conversation with the AI. This follows OpenAI’s announcement two months ago about bringing third-party apps like Canva and Spotify to the chatbot. The inclusion of Adobe’s flagship creative software validates OpenAI’s strategy to transform ChatGPT into an app store-like platform for its 800 million weekly users. The new apps are available globally on desktop, web, and iOS, with Android getting full access soon.
A Major Shift for Both Companies
Here’s the thing: this is a big deal for Adobe. Their entire business model for decades has been built on powerful, complex software with steep learning curves. Now, they’re essentially putting a conversational front-end on some of their most popular tools. You can just ask ChatGPT to “brighten this photo” or “extract text from this PDF,” and it happens. That’s a paradigm shift. It makes their technology accessible to a massive, casual audience who would never download the full Creative Cloud suite. For OpenAI, snagging Adobe is a huge win. It’s not just another travel or music app; it’s a pillar of professional software lending serious credibility to ChatGPT’s “platform” ambitions.
What This Actually Means for You and Me
So, is this the death of traditional Photoshop? Absolutely not. The in-chat versions are streamlined, offering “many popular features” but not the full, deep toolbox. Think of it as an incredibly smart, conversational version of Adobe’s online Express tools. But that’s still powerful! For quick edits, resizing, basic PDF work, or slapping together a social graphic, talking to an AI is going to be faster for most people than opening a dedicated app. The real magic is the blend: you can make a conversational edit, then fine-tune it with actual Photoshop-style sliders right there in the chat. It’s lowering the barrier to entry in a way we haven’t really seen before.
The Broader Platform Battle Heats Up
Look, this is about more than just editing a selfie. This is a strategic land grab in the AI platform wars. OpenAI is building an ecosystem inside ChatGPT, and with 800 million weekly users, they have a distribution channel developers desperately want. For developers, it’s a new, potentially simpler way to reach people without building a standalone app. For enterprises, it introduces a new layer of productivity—imagine customer service bots that can now dynamically edit documents or create visuals on the fly. The market impact? It puts pressure on every other AI assistant and chatbot to become a platform, too. Can Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude respond with similar heavyweight partnerships? Probably. But OpenAI just scored a major point by partnering with the creative software giant. The race to be the central AI hub just got a lot more interesting.
