As a solopreneur, you wear many hats: graphic designer, marketer, customer service representative and CEO. Keeping up with these roles often feels impossible, especially when you lack the time or skills to design professional visuals or analyze mountains of customer feedback. This week, two AI announcements promise to lighten the load. Adobe released Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat as apps inside ChatGPT, allowing anyone to edit images, design marketing materials and manage PDFs using simple natural‑language commands. Meanwhile, customer‑experience platform Cresta introduced Automation Discovery, an analytic tool that combs through customer conversations to reveal where AI agents can add the most value. Together, these updates give you the ability to create polished content and streamline customer service without hiring extra staff.
The Biggest Announcements in Creative and Customer Service AI
Adobe brings its flagship apps to ChatGPT. On December 10, Adobe launched native integrations for three of its most popular products: Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat. The company’s new ChatGPT apps enable more than 800 million ChatGPT users to edit photos, build designs and transform PDF documents directly within the chat interface. Instead of navigating complex software menus, you can type a request like “Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background of this image,” and ChatGPT will open the Photoshop tool set in the conversation. From there you can adjust brightness, apply creative effects, or isolate a subject using intuitive sliders.
Adobe Express, a design tool similar to Canva, also lives inside ChatGPT. You can browse templates, replace text and images, animate designs and iterate on edits without switching apps. Once you are happy with the design, you can download it as a post for Instagram, an event flyer or a sales deck slide. Acrobat for ChatGPT completes the productivity trio: it lets you edit PDFs, extract tables, merge or compress files and even redact sensitive information, all from within a chat. According to Adobe, these apps are free for all ChatGPT users and available on web, desktop and iOS, with Android support for Express launching immediately and Photoshop and Acrobat coming soon.
Cresta’s Automation Discovery shows you where to deploy AI agents. Also this month, Cresta unveiled Automation Discovery, a solution designed to help businesses of any size identify which customer conversations are ripe for automation. One of the biggest challenges in deploying AI chatbots or voice assistants is knowing what to automate and how to do it without damaging the customer experience. Automation Discovery solves this by analysing your existing conversation transcripts. It maps out typical conversation flows and highlights common deviations or pain points. The system assigns an “automation readiness score” to each type of inquiry based on factors like volume, complexity and resolution rate. It even suggests workflow prompts and projected ROI so you know exactly which interactions will benefit most from an AI agent.
For example, if many customers repeatedly ask about order status or return policies, Automation Discovery will show that these topics have high volume and straightforward resolution paths — ideal candidates for self‑service chatbots. On the other hand, it can flag complex troubleshooting questions that require human expertise. By providing an evidence‑based roadmap, Cresta reduces guesswork, speeds up AI adoption and ensures your automation efforts focus on the highest impact areas.
How You Can Use These Tools Right Away
Ready to get started? Here’s how you can put these innovations to work in your solo business:
- Experiment with Adobe’s ChatGPT apps: If you already use ChatGPT, simply type the name of the app and your request in the chat. For photo editing, ask things like “Adobe Photoshop, make the colors in this image pop” and use the sliders that appear to adjust contrast or apply a Glitch effect. To create marketing materials, try “Adobe Express, design a holiday sale flyer for a bakery” and pick from the templates offered. You can customise the text, swap images, and even animate the design. Need to clean up a contract? Ask “Adobe Acrobat, help me merge these three PDFs and remove page two,” and the app will handle it. As these tools are free to use, there’s no risk in exploring different features and discovering what works best for your brand.
- Analyse your customer interactions with Cresta’s Automation Discovery: For businesses with a customer service component — whether through email, chat or phone — understanding common questions is key to automation. Upload anonymized conversation logs to Cresta’s tool (or request a demo if you’re curious). The system will automatically map conversation flows and generate readiness scores. Use this analysis to decide which interactions you can handle with simple chatbots (for example, order tracking or appointment scheduling) and where human intervention remains essential. If Cresta’s enterprise focus feels heavy for your needs, you can mimic the process yourself: look for repetitive questions in customer emails and create canned responses or simple chatbots using platforms like Tidio or ManyChat.
- Integrate creative output with your marketing: Once you generate visual assets in Photoshop or Adobe Express, immediately plug them into your existing marketing channels. Use Express to create a series of Instagram posts, then schedule them with a social media management tool. Make interactive PDFs for lead magnets and attach them to your email campaigns. Because you can produce these assets faster than before, you can A/B test different visuals and iterate based on performance.
- Plan your customer‑support automation roadmap: After analysing your conversations, prioritize one or two high‑volume inquiries to automate. Start with straightforward tasks like responding to FAQs or booking appointments. Choose a chatbot platform that aligns with your technical comfort level and budget. When setting up the bot, feed it the exact language your customers use (as revealed by your conversation analysis) to ensure it understands user intent. Monitor the bot’s performance and refine its responses based on feedback.
The Impact on Your Business: Faster Content, Happier Customers
These launches mark a significant shift in how solopreneurs can compete with larger teams. Here’s why they matter:
- Professional visuals without a designer: Many one‑person businesses rely on generic stock images or spend hours learning design software. Adobe’s ChatGPT apps remove the learning curve. By describing the effect you want with natural language, you can produce polished images and branded templates on demand. This saves money on freelancers and time on tutorials.
- Smoother workflows across devices: Because Adobe’s tools are embedded in ChatGPT, you can brainstorm copy, edit a product shot and design a social banner in the same conversation thread. The cross‑device availability means you can tweak a flyer on your phone and finish it on your desktop seamlessly.
- Evidence‑based automation: Customer service automation often fails when businesses guess which interactions to automate. Cresta’s data‑driven approach ensures you prioritize the right conversations. By starting with inquiries that have clear resolution paths, you build trust with customers and gradually introduce more complex automation.
- More time for strategy: When you can churn out graphics quickly and handle routine questions with bots, you free up hours to focus on product development, partnerships or other high‑value activities. AI becomes a virtual assistant that scales your capacity instead of adding to your workload.
While these tools open exciting possibilities, remember that technology should amplify, not replace, your understanding of your customers and brand. Keep your unique voice in the content you create and monitor chatbot interactions closely to ensure they deliver the empathy and clarity your customers expect.
Your Next Steps
Here’s a simple plan to make the most of this week’s announcements:
- Today: Log into ChatGPT and try at least one Adobe app. Create a social media graphic for an upcoming promotion or clean up a PDF contract. Save your favourite template or preset for future use.
- Within a week: Gather a small sample of recent customer emails or support chats. Identify recurring questions and note how customers phrase them. If possible, request a demo or trial of Cresta’s Automation Discovery to get a detailed analysis.
- By next month: Select one high‑volume question to automate. Use a chatbot builder (Tidio, ManyChat or Cresta if your business warrants an enterprise solution) to create a conversational flow that mirrors your customer’s language. Publish it on your website or messaging platform and monitor the response.
- Quarterly: Review your design assets and customer interactions. Update templates in Adobe Express with new seasonal themes, and analyse whether your automated responses are reducing support tickets. Iterate based on feedback and continue adding new AI tools as they become available.
Final Thoughts: From Overwhelm to Empowerment
The democratization of AI is accelerating. With Adobe’s creative apps accessible through simple chat commands and Cresta’s analytics guiding customer‑service automation, solopreneurs can compete with larger companies without sacrificing authenticity. Rather than seeing AI as a threat, view it as a collaborator: it handles the repetitive or technically demanding tasks so you can focus on building relationships, innovating products and telling your story. Dive into these tools, experiment boldly and share your results. The future of small business is not just digital — it’s intelligent.
Have questions about using AI for design or customer service? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe to SoloAITool for weekly updates on the tools that will help your business thrive.
