Instagram’s Edits App Gains AI Creative Assistant for US Users

Instagram on September 30, 2026 began rolling out the Edits assistant, an AI creative partner that analyzes a creator’s Instagram metrics and generates content ideas, to everyone using the Edits app in the US. Brett Westervelt, who leads the Edits app, announced the rollout in a post on the Instagram for Creators blog.

Westervelt described the assistant as a creative partner that knows the creator and their audience: it can help analyze insights, brainstorm ideas, and find inspiration in what other people are creating on Instagram instead of offering generic advice. Example prompts in the post include asking what connected most with an audience this month, why one reel held attention and another did not, what is trending on the platform, and what to make next.

Metrics Analysis and Idea Generation

According to Instagram, the assistant knows an account’s Instagram metrics, including follows, views, video retention, likes, and shares, and combines them with the creator’s comments, current Instagram trends, and audience interests. The company says it can spot patterns in an account’s performance over time and surface actionable insights that are hard to see from the metrics alone.

Instagram says the assistant generates ideas for video concepts, hooks, captions, and scripts pulled from a creator’s own track record rather than a generic list of trends. Creators can research their own ideas to see which concepts have found success on the platform, refine videos for their followers based on how variations of trial reels are performing, and receive trending audio recommendations matched to their niche and style, saveable directly from the chat.

Developed With a Creator Council

Instagram said it spent the past several months working with a council of creators who tested early versions of the Edits assistant, reported what was helpful, and shaped what the assistant does. The company described this first version as reflecting some of creators’ most requested features and asked for feedback on what to support next.

Instagram highlighted creator @turnipvegan, who used the assistant to discover that his non-food content, which documents his journey building a greenhouse in the desert, outperformed his cooking videos. “It’s like a cheat code for creators,” he told Instagram.

Instagram also reported that beauty creator and professional makeup artist @jaleesajaikaran saw her videos perform very well after the assistant recommended mixing a seven-second reel in among her one-minute videos; she had never thought to vary the length. She told the company that while she could read her insights directly and check her 30-day and 90-day growth, the useful part was getting ideas based on those insights.

Westervelt wrote that creators consistently asked for a tool that handles the analysis while leaving the creative decisions to them. “Edits assistant does the digging for you,” he wrote. “The creative calls are still yours.”

Edits App History and Meta’s Creator AI Tools

Edits launched on April 22, 2025 as Instagram’s mobile video editor and creative studio. Marking the app’s first year in an April 22, 2026 anniversary post, Westervelt wrote that the team had shipped over 130 new features through weekly updates since launch. Tools documented in that post include an in-app teleprompter, an Ideas tab where saved reels and audio sit alongside sticky notes, insights that summarize a creator’s comments, weekly ideas generated for each creator, and templates whose project files can be opened to see how they were made.

Meta has introduced a related tool on its other platform. On June 4, 2026, the company announced creator assistant on Facebook, a conversational creative partner built into the creator dashboard that answers questions about content performance and brainstorms ideas drawn from what is trending on Facebook. Meta said that assistant was rolling out to creators in the US, Canada, and India, with new capabilities and additional countries planned for the coming months.

Access, Cost, and Meta One Plans

The Edits assistant is free to use in Edits with a daily prompt limit, and Instagram said power users will soon be able to unlock more usage with a Meta One subscription. To open it, users launch the Edits app, which is available on iOS and Android, and tap the chat icon.

Instagram had listed the assistant as an upcoming feature in its September 15, 2026 post introducing Meta One creator plans. Meta One creator plans on Instagram are priced per profile in four tiers: Essential at $14.99 per month, Advanced at $49.99 per month, Expert at $149 per month, and Max at $499 per month. In that post, Instagram said Edits Plus will come to Meta One as a new product plan offering more cloud storage for syncing and accessing projects across devices, plus additional usage of the assistant.