It's Wednesday, April 29th: This week, builders can drop Claude straight into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton sessions, spin up agents on Google's new Gemini Enterprise platform, or wire production multi-agent workflows in Python or .NET with Microsoft's Agent Framework 1.0.
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In Today’s Top Tools, we spotlight some of the most innovative, creative AI apps that we recommend adding to your stack.
🎨 Claude Lands Inside Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton
A working musician shouldn't have to leave Live to ask a question, and a 3D artist shouldn't be alt-tabbing between Blender and a chat window to debug a scene. On Monday, Anthropic shipped nine new connectors that put Claude directly inside the apps creative pros already live in, with launch partners spanning image, video, audio, and 3D.
This is a real shift from the "open ChatGPT in another tab" workflow. Claude now reads the actual document, scene, or session you're working on and writes changes back to it through each app's native API.
The 9 connectors at launch. The first wave covers most of the creative software stack:
Adobe for Creativity — works across 50+ tools in Creative Cloud including Photoshop, Premiere, and Express
Blender — natural-language access to Blender's Python API for scene analysis, custom scripts, and debugging
Autodesk Fusion — create and modify 3D models through conversation
Affinity by Canva — automates batch image adjustments, layer renaming, and file export
SketchUp — describe a room, a piece of furniture, or a site concept, then refine in the tool
Splice — search the royalty-free sample catalog from inside Claude
Resolume Arena and Resolume Wire — real-time control via natural language for VJs and live visual artists
Concrete examples from the launch:
Ask Claude to analyze and debug an entire Blender scene, then have it add new tools directly to Blender's interface
Have Claude walk you through unfamiliar Ableton Live features grounded in the official manual instead of forum guesses
Search Splice samples by mood, BPM, or instrumentation and drop them into a project without leaving the chat
Hand Claude a brief and watch it generate a starting 3D model in SketchUp you then refine by hand
The connectors are available now in the Claude Directory for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. Each runs over the Model Context Protocol, which means the same connector pattern works with any MCP-compatible client, not just Claude. Anthropic also joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron, which is a real signal that creative tooling support isn't a one-week marketing push.
🛰️ Vertex AI Becomes the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
Vertex AI is gone. In its place, Google rolled out the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at Cloud Next on April 22nd, a single environment for building, scaling, and governing agents at company scale.
The headline change is structural. Where Vertex was a bag of services for ML teams, the new platform treats agents as first-class citizens with their own runtime, memory, identity, and gateway. It's Google's clearest answer yet to what an enterprise agent stack should actually look like.
What's new under the hood: The platform organizes everything into four layers:
Build — an enhanced Agent Development Kit (ADK) with graph-based orchestration, plus a low-code Agent Studio and MCP support
Scale — a faster Agent Runtime with persistent memory, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol orchestration, and Memory Bank for long-term context across sessions
Govern — Agent Identity (cryptographic IDs for traceability), Agent Gateway as "air traffic control" for data access, and Model Armor against prompt injection and tool poisoning
Optimize — Agent Simulation to stress-test agents pre-deployment, plus real-time observability for safety and performance
200+ models in one Model Garden: The platform gives developers first-class access to Google's own Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, music model Lyria 3, and the open-weight Gemma 4, alongside third-party models including Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Two hundred plus models are available through Model Garden without separate contracts.
The new Agent Gallery: Google also opened an Agent Gallery on Cloud Marketplace with pre-built agents from Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Oracle, Lovable, Replit, and others. Knowledge workers get a separate front door called Gemini Enterprise — a no-code Agent Designer plus a unified inbox for managing long-running agents.
How to get started: The platform is live now via Gemini for Workspace, with pro-code access at cloud.google.com/ai. Existing Vertex AI projects migrate automatically — no re-architecting required.
🛠️ Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, Now Production-Ready
If you've been watching the agent framework wars, this is the one that just stopped being a science project. Microsoft Agent Framework hit version 1.0 earlier this month, which means it's officially production-ready, MIT-licensed, and supported in both Python and .NET out of the box.
It also folds in the two big agent codebases Microsoft has been shipping for years. Semantic Kernel and AutoGen are now one framework, with one runtime, one observability story, and one path from local dev to enterprise deployment.
What it actually gives you. Out of the box, the framework ships with:
Graph-based workflows that connect agents and deterministic functions with streaming, checkpointing, human-in-the-loop, and time-travel debugging
Built-in OpenTelemetry instrumentation so production runs are traceable from day one
A flexible middleware system for request and response processing
Model providers for Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Foundry, and OpenAI directly, plus an open extension point for others
An interactive DevUI for inspecting agent state, tool calls, and traces while you build
Two SDKs, same primitives: Python developers install with pip install agent-framework. .NET developers install with dotnet add package Microsoft.Agents.AI. Both target the same agent and workflow primitives, so a Python prototype can be ported into a .NET production service without re-modeling.
From AutoGen and Semantic Kernel into one tree: If you've been building on Semantic Kernel or AutoGen, this is the convergence point. Microsoft has migration guides and the existing repos remain available, but new work goes here. Nearly 10K GitHub stars and 180 open pull requests suggest the contributor community moved with it.
How to start: The repo at github.com/microsoft/agent-framework ships with sample agents, a Discord channel, and weekly office hours for contributors. License is MIT, so it works inside commercial products with no friction.
🏴 MongoDB.local London: For Founders Building What's Next (Old Billingsgate, May 7)
Join AI founders at .local London to scale from prototype to production. Hear from CJ Desai, 20VC’s Harry Stebbings, Sequoia, Hugging Face, and more.
Apply for your complimentary Founder Pass using the link below.
In this section, we feature a few standout opportunities leading AI companies, non-profits, and other organizations. Each role is selected for impact and relevance to our community.
🔬 Work at a Lab / AI Safety
Roles at frontier labs, safety organizations, and research institutions
RESEARCH ENGINEER, SAFEGUARDS LABS — Anthropic | San Francisco or New York (Competitive Salary + Equity)
RESEARCH ENGINEER, MODEL TRANSPARENCY — UK AI Security Institute | London, UK (Competitive Salary)
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, CHEM-BIO — UK AI Security Institute | London, UK (Competitive Salary)
RESEARCH LEAD — FAR AI | SF Bay Area or Remote Global (Competitive Salary)
SENIOR CYBER SECURITY ENGINEER — Faculty | London, UK (Competitive Salary)
🚀 Work in Industry
Roles at funded AI startups and private companies
FOUNDING AI/ML RESEARCH ENGINEER — RamAIn | San Francisco, CA ($150K–$350K + 0.30%–1.20% Equity)
AI ENGINEER, QUALITY — Fieldguide | San Francisco, CA or Remote US ($170K–$220K)
ROBOTICS AND AI SOFTWARE ENGINEER, AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION — Nextera Robotics | Boston, MA ($110K–$140K + Equity)
DATA SCIENTIST — Reframe | Atlanta, GA or Remote US ($142K–$200K)
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, DATA PLATFORM — OneChronos | New York, NY ($115K–$200K)
🏛️ Work in AI Policy / Governance
Roles in government, think tanks, NGOs, and policy organizations
AI POLICY RESIDENT, CENTER ON AI, SECURITY, AND TECHNOLOGY — RAND Corporation | Washington, DC + multiple US locations (Competitive Salary)
DIRECTOR, GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS — The AI Policy Network | Washington, DC (Competitive Salary)
AI SCIENCE ADVISOR, CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S OFFICE OF EMERGENCY SERVICES — California Council on Science and Technology | Sacramento, CA (Competitive Salary)
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About Noah Frank
Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI. His work and body of research explores the economics of emerging technology and organizational strategy.
About Joy Dong
Joy is a news editor, writer, and entrepreneur at the forefront of the emerging tech landscape. A former educator turned media strategist, she currently writes TEA, where she demystifies complex systems to make AI and blockchain accessible for all.