Meet Adobe’s Latest B2B Marketing And Lead Generation Tools

Is Adobe’s Feature Release Roadmap a Bellweather for B2B Marketing?

Adobe used Summit 2026 to lay out their view of where marketing technology is heading. Or more accurately, how they see Marketing Operations (MarOps) evolving.

It’s happening in three stages. In stage one, humans do the heavy lifting supported by the marketing automation tools we’re all familiar with. Stage two transitions to AI agent-led workflows, so by the time we get to stage three, we’re all comfortable with agents taking the lead on orchestration and decision-making.

Most B2B marketing teams are somewhere between stages one and two. Adobe’s product release roadmap is built around closing the gap. They aren’t the only vendor moving in this direction (Salesforce, Microsoft, Braze and others are making similar moves), the capabilities they’re shipping are getting concrete enough to plan around.

Marketers Are Feeling the AI Adoption Pressure

Adobe shared data from their 2026 Digital Trends survey that puts some context behind what most marketing leaders are already feeling:

• 63% of organisations expect agentic AI to give employees more time for strategic and creative work
• 57% say AI is changing work faster than employees can adapt

There’s real optimism here, alongside real anxiety. AI can free up time and resources, as long as teams can keep up.

Clearly, Adobe intends its new and upcoming B2B marketing and lead generation tools to be the answer to that tension.

Marketo Engage Isn’t Retiring. It’s Evolving.

There’s been a bit of chatter about Adobe winding down Marketo Engage. I’m certain that’s not on the cards – Adobe said so explicitly on stage.

Instead, they’re pushing the platform forward as the foundation for AI-powered B2B marketing.

That’s good news for teams with significant investment in Marketo’s data model, campaign architecture, and operational workflows.

Adobe is building AI directly into the platform. Here are the features I’m most excited to see.

MCP Server: Connects Marketo to AI Ecosystems

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server is a new integration layer that connects Marketo to external AI tools and ecosystems. It bridges Marketo and (some of) the AI tools your business already uses.

This means you can pursue AI agent initiatives without dismantling existing Marketo workflows or deploying any new software.

• Connects Marketo to AI assistants
• Enables your AI assistant to perform 100+ operations
• Hosted on Adobe’s servers so you don’t need to install or download anything
• Supports multiple Marketo instances (e.g. staging and production) and users

The MCP server is currently in a closed beta release with some caveats:

• Available for Claude Desktop and Code, Cursor, and VS Code with GitHub Copilot and “Any AI tool that supports the Model Context Protocol over HTTP”(as of April 2026)
• Adobe Experience League documentation includes heavy disclaimers on security and reliability

Still, if you’re comfortable with the risks and reliability issues, it’s likely to be immediately useful for all Marketo users when Adobe turns it loose.

The Spectrum of AI in Marketo

Adobe introduced a four-level framework for how AI agents will be available in Marketo, ranging from off-the-shelf to fully custom:

• Callable agents for Smart Campaigns: AI agents that can be triggered directly within Smart Campaign flows, enabling automation of complex decisioning within existing campaign logic.
• Purpose-built, pre-configured agents: Designed specifically for marketing operations tasks such as programme QA, lead investigation and data normalisation.
• Product knowledge: Built-in agent that answers questions about how Marketo works, without raising support tickets or searching documentation.
• Build-your-own agents: Use the Marketo MCP Server to connect Marketo data to your own AI tools via HTTP and build custom agents from scratch.

Think of this as a spectrum rather than a switch. You don’t have to jump to the most complex option. You can start where your team is ready and move up from there.

The AI Ops Team: A Permanent MarOps Resource Working Round the Clock

This was probably Adobe’s most ambitious announcement for Marketo. The AI Ops Team is a group of five specialised AI agents called “Marketo Associates” that are assigned to your Marketo instance.

They work on your marketing operations 24/7, communicating via a private shared memory channel that’s logged and auditable. You can trigger tasks on-demand or schedule them in advance.

Each agent has a defined role, and you can reach them via Adobe Workfront, email, Jira or Slack.

The agents learn from your instance over time, picking up context like personas, programme history, and announcements.

What This Means for MarOps Teams

Adobe frames the AI Ops Team as a bandwidth multiplier. Stretched MarOps teams can take on more work, delegating the repetitive and routine tasks to AI.

More capacity, no new headcount. It’s a compelling pitch.

However, it’s still a Labs feature and not generally available. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one – let us know if you want to be notified when AI Ops is ready for release.

Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition (AJO B2B)

Less than two years after releasing Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, Adobe is doubling down by investing in orchestration.

A suite of new AI features continues a trend we’re seeing in a lot of B2B marketing and lead generation tools, adapting the B2C playbook for B2B customer experience management.

A new Prime tier has also been announced that runs directly on Marketo Engage data, lowering the barrier to entry for existing Marketo customers.

AI Decisioning

Adobe says that AJO B2B can ingest data, infer semantic understanding, generate contextual profiles, then use all of that to route, personalise, and optimise B2B customer journeys in real time.

We saw three core capabilities described at Summit:

1. Next best journey: AI scores leads across multiple dimensions and routes them to the optimal journey, with a confidence score attached. Auditable, not a black box.
2. Personalisation: Get AI tokens to generate per-recipient content at send-time using prompt templates. Variables include persona, industry, and role.
3. AI decisioning engine: Dynamic routing, smart qualification, send-time optimisation, and personalisation by person, role, and industry. Brand Concierge (below) plugs into this layer too.

Journey Agent

Journey Agent B2B is a natural language AI assistant built into AJO B2B.

You describe what you want. It builds, optimises, and monitors the journey. That’s a big win for non-technical marketers.

There are currently two available skills:

1. Journey Build: Create journeys, recommend improvements, optimise based on performance, and manage overlapping journeys and message delivery.
2. Journey Observability: Answers questions about how accounts and people are moving through active journeys in real time.

The more context you give it, the better the output. Journey Agent can translate your objectives, engagement strategy, and KPIs into a complete B2B customer journey, or even a multi-stage journey.

Journey Agent could be the most rewarding tool for AI-savvy B2B marketers who dare to push things a little further and experiment. It’s highly capable, but the reliability and usefulness of results will depend heavily on prompt quality and context. That could deter the more risk-averse marketers, or those with overly manual journey processes.

Hamish Levein

Sales Qualifier

Sales Qualifier is a separate add-on app to AJO B2B built specifically for business development reps. Meaning there’s huge potential for sales-marketing alignment and account-based marketing.

At its core is the Account Qualification Agent (AQA) which reads your accounts and determines which are ready for the next step.

It’s currently in limited availability, with features slated for release later this year:

• Buying group insights (H2 2026): Identify the full buying group within a target account and pull prospect profiles, recent engagement, and intent signals
• Buying group actions (H2 2026): Recommend and draft outreach for each member of the buying group
• Integrations (H2 2026): Connect to CRM and sales engagement tools (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, ZoomInfo, BuiltWith, and your email inbox)
• Autonomous engagement (H2 2026): Engage prospects autonomously based on signals, without waiting for a rep

Brand Concierge

Brand Concierge is an always-on conversational AI agent that represents the brand across digital touchpoints.

Over the coming months, Brand Concierge will become more tightly integrated with AJO B2B:

• Sales Meeting Booking and Live Chat (expected H2 2026)
• Conversational channel for AJO B2B decisioning and insights
• Lead and profile enrichment and personalisation
• Content recommendations based on engagement and intent
• Knowledge and support agent for self-serve buyer queries

Essentially, this integration will turn AJO B2B’s decisioning layer into a live conversation. It’ll engage web visitors with context-aware chat using real-time data, then guides them toward the next best action.

Engagement signals from those conversations – meetings booked, forms filled, content clicked, documents viewed – feed back into journey triggers, scoring updates, and multichannel retargeting.

Anonymous visitors can be converted into known leads, matched to buying groups, and enrolled in the right account journeys automatically.

BYO Agents

If you’ve built AI agents outside of Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B’s, you can plug them into the decisioning layer. Your existing work connects rather than getting replaced.

We’re already seeing teams combining proprietary intelligence with Adobe’s journey orchestration.

Good news for teams that haven’t gone all-in on a single vendor.

What This All Means for B2B Marketers

61% of organisations agree that employees should now consider AI an indispensable coworker rather than just a tool. Yet only 45% say they have sufficient AI training and upskilling programmes in place, and 44% believe employees are comfortable using AI in their roles.

Al adoption in B2B marketing isn’t a future problem anymore. But there’s no prize for moving fast on a shaky foundation.

The teams that will gain the most from this new crop of B2B marketing and lead generation tools are the ones who’ve sorted their data, built journeys around how customers actually behave, and have content that can scale.

Al amplifies what’s already there. If the foundations aren’t solid, agentic Al will surface those gaps quickly.

The good news: you don’t need to have everything perfect before you start. You just need to know where you are and what to tackle first.

Now’s the Time to Review Your Roadmap

We work with marketing teams across Marketo, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and a range of other B2B marketing automation and lead generation platforms.

We can help you work out which capabilities are relevant to your setup right now, what your foundations need to look like before you layer on Al, and how to build a roadmap that actually fits your business.

Get in touch and let’s talk it through.