Adobe Max 2026 brought on-device agentic AI on laptops and PCs in sharper focus
Up until now, all AI collaborations have been centered around the cloud. Even at this year’s Adobe MAX, majority of the announcements made were related to cloud including their Firefly, Gen AI updates, and an increasing model library. They will also be adding connectors for Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT shortly. But during my brief with Shilpa Anand, Vice President of Global Strategic Partnerships at Adobe, she made a comment that made me think for quite a bit after the event concluded. “We’re going to spend a lot more time thinking about on-device.”
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The cloud is the opening act
Adobe has also done a large number of partnerships since the AI boom. There are more than 30 models that can be used inside Firefly. MCP will soon be introduced in Claude, Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT, and as per Anand, at one event, Sam Altman demonstrated that Adobe was one of the top ten connectors available in the OpenAI platform.
Her calculation about the entire scenario was quite simple, where the creators “have to go between three panels or three services to get something done.”
Pretty easy. But what about the process? Choosing an agentic connector in Adobe means that generation will happen on that lab's server rather than yours. “We are calling their API when the user chooses to use their model,” said Anand, so the computation happens in the lab's servers. Adobe is a seamless way into someone else's home.
What's amazing is the sheer pace of the process. Partnerships that usually took months to strike were now formed “in days and weeks,” she said. This was also the reason why Adobe had expanded its agentic reach from one platform to four in a year. This was also the reason why nobody had a chance to iron out the awkward details.
Silicon pulls up a chair
Everything you need to do is just stroll along the Creative Park, and you'll realize right away what the second component of the strategy is. RTX Spark and demonstrations from NVIDIA were presented at their booth. M-series silicon by Apple got a lot of mentions while talking to different people. It's hard to say anything else but Microsoft which, as Anand mentioned, is "a partnership around trying to do more on-device". The company Topaz Labs which models on-device were presented at the keynote is the upscaling company that got acquired by Adobe this year.
But NVIDIA doesn't offer any models to Adobe. “They actually don’t have anything directly that we could use,” when it comes to creation of images and videos, Anand mentioned. So Adobe and NVIDIA are working together in developing Firefly model based on NVIDIA’s AI for the physical world. The giant AI chip manufacturer is a partner, but not a vendor with the bonus of getting the hardware they created themselves.
Do you think this strategy is too unrealistic for you? Think how many components there are. Local GPUs at the booth, on-device models from an acquisition, and another deal with Microsoft in the same area. That can’t simply be a coincidence now, can it?
The questions a laptop answers
Local AI is not just about the speed you get, it also answers a lot of privacy concerns. Where does your footage go once it gets touched by a cloud-based model? The answer was what you would expect: "The data belongs to our customers", and in its contracts Adobe forbids partners to keep copies.
Launches bring their own set of questions. Seedance reached the rest of the world ahead of the US, she said, and Adobe does launches this way deliberately. "We don't spray everything." And when a model couldn't be launched somewhere due to regulatory issues, Adobe wouldn't try to skirt them.
That’s how the local approach works. If the AI operates on your computer, you’ll keep your footage safe at your desk; therefore, no one will have to justify which country’s servers got to process your files. That’s just my interpretation. Anand’s context was broader. “Users need AI and tools. Both of them are required to do the job.” Tools are what Adobe does best. Where the AI gets operated remains to be answered.