Add real-time optimisation to Adobe Marketo Engage with an AI-native application for B2B marketing automation in the era of AI.

In our many conversations with the Marketo Engage community over several months, a common theme kept emerging. One that gets at a question that every B2B marketer is asking right now. What does marketing automation look like in the era of AI? It's a question that inspired Adobe to launch Marketo into the future.

We responded by building Adobe Marketo Optimizer. Built on the Adobe Experience Platform, this AI-native application complements Marketo Engage with AI optimisation, omnichannel orchestration, account and buying group intelligence and agentic prospecting, with no new data foundation required so you can deploy it in less than a day. It's an AI reasoning layer that runs on your existing Marketo Engage data and supplements the precise execution Marketo Engage is known for. It's built to enable a powerful shift in B2B marketing — the one from marketing automation to marketing orchestration.

The problem — your buyers are moving at the speed of AI.

Your buyers are changing how they buy. They research, compare and form opinions using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or internal AI long before they ever talk to sales. By the time they land on your site, they’re already educated and deep in their decision process — leaving you with little insight and few data points to act on.

This means the window to influence buyers is shrinking and every touchpoint matters more. Interactions are happening faster, carrying more context and playing out at a more individual level than ever before. If buyers are moving with the speed and intelligence of AI, your marketing systems need to as well — acting on every signal in real time, without a marketer manually reviewing every step.

This shift is what Marketo Optimizer was built for.

The shift — enhancing rules-based logic with autonomous AI optimisation.

Rules-based marketing isn't going away. Workflows such as compliance-mandated unsubscribe, fixed-cadence renewal reminders and trial onboarding sequence need rules-based precision. Those should fire exactly the same way every time. However, marketers need new ways to keep pace with today’s buyers. Marketo Optimizer layers intelligence on top of the rules, letting marketers take a blended approach — one that adds probabilistic reasoning on top of marketing automation for more adaptive journeys that offer next-best engagement and personalisation that scales.

Marketo Optimizer evolves your rules-based campaign logic with AI optimisation workflows. Instead of hard coding the rules, you define a business goal, set your guardrails and describe what you want in plain language. The AI builds the journey from there, continuously adapting and optimising it as your customers engage. It does this by constantly analysing and updating its own understanding of each lead in your database — reasoning and deciding across the signals and data you already have, always with human oversight in the loop.

At the centre of Marketo Optimizer is something we call the "story" — a contextual understanding of each buyer that’s generated and maintained in real-time and allows AI to understand, categorise and act. AI analyses the raw data of every lead record in Marketo Engage — engagement history, intent, journey and audience membership, CRM data, firmographic, technographic and demographic signals — and forms its own contextual understanding of who that person is and what they need next. The more data you have, the richer the story. But even with a thin profile, AI can infer, categorise and recommend the next-best action.

The "story" is the foundation that allows AI to make accurate decisions and offer next-best actions. With it, AI can automatically take care of many of the manual processes that slow teams down and personalizaion challenges that are historically hard to scale.

For instance, leads often qualify for multiple campaigns, giving marketers the task of manually configuring campaign inclusion and exclusion rules based on a prioritisation matrix. With Marketo Optimizer, AI works with the story to automatically include and suppress journey actions based on continuous contextual analysis of each lead and your business goals, eliminating conflicting experiences and reducing opt-outs.

It can personalise email copy at an incredible scale. Instead of manually selecting personalisation tokens to personalise copy for an audience segment, Marketo Optimizer auto-generates personalised one-to-one messaging using AI-powered personalisation tokens that are applied at send time, ensuring every message is based on the latest customer context. Marketo Optimizer also automatically creates, maintains and infers personas based on the most recent information and understanding of each lead, including records with only a first name and an email address. This saves your team from manually creating and updating personas across all your products using limited data.

4 capabilities add up to 1 powerful approach to scaling B2B marketing.

AI reasoning and personalisation. This is what makes true one-to-one personalisation real. With AI reasoning and the continuous profile, even if you have an audience of 50,000 people, all 50,000 can receive a personalised email, generated and delivered at the optimal moment for each person.

Omnichannel orchestration. Marketo Optimizer lets you design and run inbound and outbound marketing, sales and advertising channels from a single journey canvas. This is powerful for two reasons. The first is that you can see every channel in one place. But more importantly, every channel is driven by the same AI orchestration engine, sharing the same context. No more disconnected tools and conflicting decisions. Just coordinated paid media, email and more, all working from the same understanding of the buyer.

Combined lead, account and buying group intelligence. For the first time, you can bring your lead generation strategy and your account-based strategy together in one tool — and add buying group precision. This means your acquisition, cross-sell, retention and growth strategies are powered by the same data and optimisation. No more juggling multiple tools for multiple motions.

Agentic prospecting. Marketing context often grows cold at the handoff. Marketo Optimizer helps solve this by providing agentic account research, insights and CRM integration for your BDR teams, so they spend less time looking for context and more time engaging. The real-time contextual understanding of each person ensures that they have the full story on every lead marketing sends their way.

The payoff is real and the optimisation is measurable. Teams can now drive more precise personalisation, faster time-to-market, higher quality opportunity creation and better conversion rates.

An AI-powered Marketo suite to drive impact.

For maximum flexibility and impact, Marketo Optimizer integrates with Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Marketo Qualifier to give you the most intelligent and unified approach to driving demand and creating pipeline. And all of it integrates with Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker — our signature agentic engine that connects all your Adobe applications, letting you execute advanced use cases. With CX Enterprise Coworker, you can use natural language to build and launch end-to-end omnichannel journeys, explore data and insights, autonomously execute tasks and orchestrate Marketo Optimizer with your other Adobe applications — all from a single interface.

Built for Marketo Engage customers — and ready on day one.

Marketo Optimizer was built specifically to give Marketo Engage users next-generation capabilities using the Marketo Engage data they’ve spent years building — the clicks, downloads, page views and lead scores. Marketo Optimizer taps into that data and layers on real-time context and reasoning — one story for each person feeding every channel, each interaction sharpening what comes next, no new data foundation, no migration, no CDP required.

Best of all, it stands up in less than a day, so your teams can start optimising straightaway — no waiting weeks or months to configure.

We're excited to welcome Adobe Marketo Optimizer to the Marketo family of products and the powerful impact of AI-native workflows to your marketing automation. Learn more about Adobe Marketo Optimizer or book a demo.

https://business.adobe.com/fragments/resources/cards/thank-you-collections/marketo-engage