Adobe has announced a new AI assistant for After Effects at Adobe Max 2026, promising to make one of its most powerful creative applications a little less intimidating – particularly for anyone who has ever struggled to get their head around expressions.
Expressions are an incredibly useful part of After Effects, enabling editors and motion graphics artists to create complex animations and automate repetitive tasks using snippets of code.
However, they're not exactly the easiest thing to master – especially for video editors who aren't particularly comfortable writing code.
That's where Adobe's new AI assistant comes in, enabling users to describe the animation they want to create in everyday language and the assistant generating the necessary expressions automatically.
During a briefing ahead of Max, I watched Adobe demonstrate the assistant creating an animation designed to resemble a collage moving at 18 frames per second.
Rather than having to manually write the expressions, the editor simply described the intended result and let the AI handle the technical work.
Importantly, the resulting expressions remain editable – so users can still fine-tune the animation or make adjustments themselves.
Adobe also suggests that this could be a useful way to learn how expressions work, as users can examine the generated code and see how particular effects are achieved.
Beyond animation, the assistant can also help organize complicated After Effects projects, build or debug existing expressions, and generate images and video, all using conversational instructions.
The new capabilities are powered by Adobe's Creative Agent, which is being expanded across Creative Cloud applications, with the After Effects AI assistant available in beta.
Adobe is also looking beyond its own AI tools, announcing plans to introduce support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) which will enable users to connect their preferred third-party AI agents directly to After Effects.
These agents will be able to work with native project files locally on a user's computer, while keeping compositions and other elements editable. Adobe says the MCP integrations are expected to arrive in early 2027.
There is plenty of debate about just how much AI should be involved in the creative process. Still, Expressions are a powerful tool that many editors find difficult to get started with, and anything that makes After Effects a little easier to understand is welcome in my book.
