With the launch today of the AI Collaborators feature in Workfront, Adobe aims to bring AI agents directly into the flow of work as permissioned team members that can be assigned.
Three types of these ‘collaborators’ are now generally available in Workfront. A content reviewer agent automatically checks documents in the work management app against brand guidelines. A project coordinator tracks project progress and keeps stakeholders up to date.
Then there are “task agents” that let customers connect external AI agents to Workfront and assign them work.
The task agents are geared towards a variety of purposes — a social media manager that turns briefs into published posts, a performance analyst that reports on how campaigns are faring, or a content designer that creates visuals and layouts.
To set up a task agent, users provide a name and description of the agent’s purpose, then connect it to an agent platform, with Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, and Writer currently highlighted as options.
Once it’s ready to go, users can assign work to the agent in a Workfront project just as they would a human user.
As the agent carries out its tasks, an auditable trail of actions is recorded via the Workfront “update stream.” That allows humans to review outputs, such as AI-generated copy, and approve or adapt the result as needed.
Only admins are permitted to create AI Collaborators within Workfront.
With the launch of AI Collaborators in Workfront, Adobe’s intention is to deploy AI agents where work actually occurs, said Brent Rudewick, vice president for strategy and product management for Adobe GenStudio and Workfront. That, in turn, can help customers shift AI investments from proof of concept to production.
“The challenge we were solving is: how do we bring an agent into the context of the workflow as an authorized, permissioned user?” said Rudewick. “That’s what an AI Collaborator is.”
In many cases, employees might already use their own AI agents — be that ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or other tools. But those agents are removed from important information relating to work tasks, said Rudewick.
“Workfront already has all that context because it’s got the previous briefs you’ve done, the previous content, and it understands the knowledge graph of how that stuff works,” he said. “You’re bringing that agent into a system that already has all of the context: it knows what it needs to go and do, instead of you having to tell it every time you go into one of those other surfaces.”
“This is a step in Adobe’s evolution of AI and automation capabilities,” said Jessica Liu, principal analyst at Forrester. “It follows in the direction of the overall technology market.”
Marketers are looking to automation to gain efficiency, she said, though effectiveness is “unfortunately more of an afterthought at the moment.”
Any automation benefits will depend on organizations having well-designed processes and workflows, Liu said. “Technology that can support marketers in those efforts is helpful, but only if marketers can help themselves first,” she said. “Specifically, they need to have processes and workflows that are diagnosed, scoped, designed, implemented, and optimized. It’s very difficult to automate a process or workflow that is broken or non-existent.”
At the same time, Adobe wants to make it easier for Workfront users to access the feature from third-party AI agent tools via a model context protocol (MCP) client. At launch, this enables users to take actions such as creating a campaign record, assigning work, approving content and more from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and others.
“We want to give choice to the customer,” said Rudewick. “If the enterprise has decided, ‘Hey, Claude is the predominant surface we’re going to use,’ we want them to be able to use that surface and not be blocked to get the value that they have in their application investment in Workfront.
“If you boil Workfront down to its most rudimentary sense, it’s a campaign, it’s a project, it’s a task, it’s an assignment, and it’s an approval — that’s really what Workfront is, so how do we expose that through whatever surface?”
The emergence of AI tools that can perform tasks on behalf of users has been viewed as a threat to software companies such as Adobe. But even as Adobe opens Workfront up to third-party AI platforms, Liu believes the company’s AI investments can help ensure customers remain in the Adobe app.
“For marketers who use many Adobe products, having Workfront AI Collaborators operate within Adobe’s ecosystem should be easier for data transfer, access management, and user interface and experience,” said Liu.
AI Collaborators are available at no additional cost to Workfront customers (Adobe does not publish Workfront prices). However, using the “task agent” AI Collaborator could incur additional costs for third-party agents that connect to Workfront.