At Google I/O 2026, the company's annual developer conference, three creative tools became callable inside Gemini within four days, Tech Times reported1. Gemini is Google's AI assistant. Canva, the Australian design platform, went live on 19 May as a Connected App: typing @Canva in a Gemini chat generates, searches or edits designs. Adobe followed on 20 May with a "creativity connector" orchestrating more than 50 professional tools, among them Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro. CapCut, the video editor owned by China's ByteDance, was confirmed on 21 May as coming soon for trimming, transitions and auto-captioning.
A Connected App is a third-party tool that runs as a function inside Gemini rather than as a separate destination the user opens. The reader unfamiliar with the term should picture the editing app no longer as a place you go, but as a capability the assistant reaches for on command. That reframing is the whole point.
The signal sits above any single integration. Google is selling the orchestration layer, the prompt that dispatches work to other tools, as the product. Even Adobe, a creative-software incumbent, becomes a function called from a Gemini prompt. The move generalises the pattern set when Avid embedded Gemini in its Media Composer editing system through Google Cloud. It also subsumes Adobe's own first step, putting Firefly inside Premiere Pro: where that integration lived natively in one editor, the Gemini connector now reaches Adobe's entire suite from a single prompt.
The layer that owns the workflow entry point captures the margin; the layers beneath it commoditise. The same dynamic ran through earlier software cycles, browsers over plugins, app stores over developers. A creative tool that lives inside Gemini trades reach for the risk of becoming an interchangeable backend that something else calls.
