Adobe Puts AI Agents on the Payroll With Workfront AI Collaborators
Now generally available, AI Collaborators let you assign tasks to outside AI agents like teammates—with humans keeping final approval
At the Adobe Summit last April, the company announced the Workflow Optimization Agent designed to automate “intelligent, connected actions” across workflows. Four months later, the agent—since rebranded as AI Collaborator—is now generally available. Through Adobe Workfront, the company’s work management application, users can delegate work to these virtual teammates similarly to how they might with their human colleagues.
This doesn’t appear to be your standard agent. Rather, AI Collaborators is more like a governed harness—the controlled connection between Workfront and agents from Microsoft Copilot Studio, Anthropic’s Claude, and Writer. When assigned work, they behave as permissioned users in Workfront, packaging all the necessary project information agents need. The connected agent then follows through before delivering results back to Workfront for review and approval.
The same results could likely be achieved without using AI Collaborators, though it would require more effort. Previously, users would identify the task and the project it belongs to. Then, they’d have to download the pertinent document and files, going through multiple sources such as SharePoint, local drives, and/or cloud storage. From there, they’d go to the AI agent and generate a prompt that includes instructions and anything else needed to give it project context. The agent executes the task and returns a deliverable, only for multiple back-and-forths to follow. Finally, an approved draft is generated and shared in Workfront.
This process is streamlined with AI Collaborators. Users start by creating an AI Collaborator they want in Workfront, with three types to choose from: a task agent, a reviewer that checks documents against brand guidelines for compliance, and a project coordinator that tracks project progress and keeps stakeholders informed. The first two are available now, with the third coming soon. Next, the user describes what it does and identifies the agent that should do the work, using either an MCP, public API, or agent-to-agent connection. When it’s time for a task, there’s no prompting needed. The user assigns the AI Collaborator a task, and Workfront provides it with the work description, brief, brand voice, and messaging rules—the user doesn’t have to do any curating.
Some AI Collaborators that an organization may have include a social media manager that turns briefs into published social posts; a content variation generator that generates channel-specific versions of hero images; a campaign strategist that plans seasonal gear launches; an SEO specialist that optimizes product pages to rank; an email marketer; a market researcher; and a performance analyst.
A marketing executive who wants to update copy on the company’s website could, for example, assign the work to the AI Collaborator, which is already connected to a copywriting agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio. The AI Collaborator returns an on-brand draft that the team’s copywriter refines and approves—their time spent on craft and judgment, not setup.
In Adobe’s case, its global marketing team is using AI Collaborators to generate channel-specific image renditions as soon as key assets are available, draft pages within Adobe Experience Manager, and handle event-promotion handoffs across teams.
Handing work to AI sight-unseen may concern some people, but Adobe said its new feature has permissioning, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop approvals baked in at the beginning. The company claimed this structure is what will help enterprise users start to see value from AI agents. AI Collaborator compresses the loop without sacrificing judgment. With improved productivity and a repeatable process that generates quality results, companies may now have a tool to bring order to the chaos of agent sprawl.
But that’s not all: in addition to announcing AI Collaborators, Adobe has launched Workfront MCP. With it, users can bring project information from Workfront into Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, or any AI tool they use.
Both AI Collaborators and the Workfront MCP are available today.