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.

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 expressions
• Generate images and videos

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.

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.

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.