Adobe Summit 2026: AI, Architecture & The Unglamorous Work Of Getting It Right

The Headline: Adobe CX Enterprise

Adobe’s biggest announcement was Adobe CX Enterprise, and with it, the CX Enterprise Coworker. The framing is deliberate: this isn’t just a product update, it’s a signal about where the platform is heading. The idea is that customer journeys activate themselves. AI handles the orchestration in real time, reducing the manual effort of connecting signals to actions across channels.

That’s the aspiration.

What it means in practice is that the engagement platform is no longer a tool you use; it’s increasingly a system that runs. Whether you’re ready to hand over that level of control depends heavily on how solid your data and content foundations are. We’ll come to that.

B2B Specifically: Marketo Isn’t Going Anywhere

If you work in B2B marketing operations, there was reassurance on the Marketo Engage front. The message was explicit: Marketo isn’t being wound down or absorbed into something else. It’s being pushed into an AI-first future.

The most concrete example was the Marketo Engage MCP Server – a way to connect Marketo into broader AI ecosystems and the everyday tools teams already use. Alongside that, Adobe introduced the Marketo AI Ops Team: five AI associates running 24/7 across marketing operations, integrating with Slack, email, Jira, and Workfront. They share context, learn from what happens, and can be triggered or scheduled. The pitch is more capacity without adding headcount or burning out the people you have.

Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is also continuing to evolve with smarter decisioning, richer personalisation, and tighter connection between planning and execution. The trajectory is clear: we’re moving from campaign-by-campaign execution toward something more like orchestrating an always-on system

The Broader Shift: AI & Humans Marketing to AI & Humans

One of the more thought-provoking moments in the keynotes came from Jensen Huang of NVIDIA. His point – using radiology as the example – was that AI isn’t replacing professionals, it’s making them busier. Radiologists aren’t being replaced; they’re processing more because AI handles volume. Marketing is moving the same way.

The volume and speed of content that AI enables raises the bar for how experiences are created, managed, and delivered. We’re also, increasingly, creating content that needs to be found and understood by AI systems, not just humans. That’s a shift in how you think about what “good” looks like.

The gap most teams face isn’t awareness of this direction. It’s execution. Knowing where things are going is the easy part.

The Question That Kept Coming Up: Build vs Buy

If there was one theme running through conversations with clients and peers across the week, it was this. Some organisations are going deep on the Adobe stack, committing to a single integrated environment. Others are building selectively where they want more control or differentiation, and buying where they don’t.

Neither is inherently right. The answer depends on how the Adobe stack meets your organisation’s requirements, and where AI fits in your competitive advantage. It’s hard to make that decision coherently when every platform in your stack (CDP, CEP, CRM, CMS) now has an AI layer and claims a central role.

The truth is, Adobe isn’t the only option. Salesforce has been building out its Einstein and Agentforce capabilities across Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Data Cloud. Microsoft is layering Copilot throughout Dynamics and the Power Platform. Platforms like Braze, Segment, and HubSpot are all moving in the same direction. The question of which platform owns AI-driven decisioning isn’t one any single vendor gets to answer unilaterally – and for most organisations, the stack is already mixed.

The risk is ending up with overlapping capabilities, unclear accountability, and integration debt that slows everything down. That’s as true for a full Adobe shop as it is for anyone running a best-of-breed mix.

The Less Glamorous Reality

A lot of what was discussed at Summit is genuinely impressive. The direction is clear and the pace of development is fast. But the organisations that will get the most from it are the ones that have sorted out the basics first.

Disconnected data. Content that doesn’t scale. Journeys built around internal structures rather than how customers actually move. AI doesn’t resolve those things, it tends to amplify them. If the underlying foundations are weak, agentic AI surfaces that faster, not slower.

So the real work is a bit less headline-worthy:

• Getting data in order.
• Making deliberate calls on where you’re happy to cede control and where you’re not.
• Working out how to govern a stack where every vendor now wants to be the AI layer.
• Running it without things breaking.

That’s a significant part of what we’re working through with clients right now. The opportunity is substantial. So is the complexity. The two tend to arrive together.

Worth Saying: This Isn’t New To The Industry

For anyone who’s been watching this space, the direction Adobe is moving will feel familiar. Salesforce was making similar announcements at Dreamforce two years ago, with autonomous agents, AI-driven journey orchestration, platform-level intelligence. Other vendors have followed since. What’s notable about this moment isn’t that Adobe is doing something no one has attempted before; it’s that the capabilities are maturing, the implementations are more concrete, and the expectation that your platform should behave this way is becoming standard.

That matters for how you approach it. The teams best placed to take advantage aren’t necessarily the ones who move first, they’re the ones who’ve thought clearly about what they’re trying to achieve, have the data and content foundations to support it, and have made considered calls about which platforms to trust with which decisions.

We work across Adobe, Salesforce, and a range of other platforms, and the underlying questions are the same regardless of which vendor you’re working with.