After Effects AI Assistant overview

The AI Assistant is a beta feature in Adobe After Effects that helps you work on your project using natural language, instead of following in-app workflows or manually navigating menus. It's designed to feel like a conversation — you describe what you want, ask follow-up questions, or refine your request, and the Assistant translates that into actions within your project and composition.

To open the Assistant, select the AI Assistant icon in the header bar, or select Window > Assistant. The Assistant behaves like any other panel, so you can move, dock, or group it with other panels.

Availability and access

After Effects AI Assistant is available only in regions where Creative AI services are supported and will be displayed in the apps where these services are unavailable. 

For enterprise users, access to After Effects AI Assistant is managed in the Adobe Admin Console. After Effects AI Assistant has a separate Admin Console access role from Premiere AI Assistant. Access is off by default and must be assigned by an administrator, while users without access can still use After Effects.

What you can do with the AI Assistant

The AI Assistant can help with a range of tasks in After Effects. Here are a few of its current capabilities:

• Organize your project
• Work with compositions
• Work with text layers
• Work with shape layers
• Work with Motion Graphics templates and Essential Graphics
• Work with expressions
• Generate images and videos
• Render compositions

Organize your project

• Explain, restructure, rename, or color-code project items.
• Review layers, compositions, and folder structures, and suggest a cleaner arrangement.
• Simplify legacy files or inherited projects with unclear layer organization.
• Organize project items into folders.
• Move project items back to the project root.

Work with compositions

The Assistant can help with a variety of composition tasks, such as:

• Open compositions in your project.
• Create compositions and automatically open them.

Work with text layers

Use the Assistant to make different types of edits to text layers, including:

• Modify text layers without having to replace all the text in a layer.
• Edit specific ranges of text within a text layer.

Work with shape layers

Some of the ways you can use the Assistant to work with shape layers include:

• Add, delete, rename, reorder, and enable shape operators.
• Edit stroke dashes in shape layers.

Work with Motion Graphics templates and Essential Graphics

The Assistant can help with various Motion Graphics template and Essential Graphics tasks, including:

• Inspect the current Essential Graphics state.
• Expose properties and media, and work with Essential Properties.
• Rename controls.
• Export Motion Graphics templates

Work with expressions

You can ask the Assistant to help work with expressions in several ways, including the following:

• Read an expression back in plain language.
• Write a new expression from a plain-language description.
• Explain why an expression is throwing an error.
• Bridge the gap between what you want and the syntax to write it, or between someone else's expression and understanding it.
• Rename layers, project items, or effects while updating expressions that reference the renamed item.
• Work with checkbox expressions that include .value.
• Work with expanded keyframe interpolation options.

Generate images and videos

You can ask the Assistant to help generate images and video in several ways, including the following:

• Create footage, reference images, or design elements with Adobe Firefly, directly in the Assistant panel.
• Bring visuals straight into your project without switching apps.
• Generate videos from reference images or text descriptions with Adobe Firefly and partner models.