This morning at the Forrester B2B Summit, I shared with a room full of marketing leaders that the most important acronym in our industry has just been quietly rewritten.
As B2B marketers, we all know and love ABM, Account-Based Marketing. It’s been the backbone of how we go to market in B2B and enterprise for the better part of a decade. For some of us, it's been a strategy, an innovation agenda and a GTM platform that propelled our marketing leadership and careers forward. We built the playbooks, the tech stacks, the org charts and the KPI's that made ABM the clear best practice. We learnt to personalise for the CMO, the CIO, the CFO, the decision makers and the practitioners inside the same account, because we understood that no enterprise decision gets made by a single person, but by a buying group.
And for a while, we were right about all that. But today, we'll be wrong unless we redefine who (or what) counts as a member of the buying group.
Because the new ABM is Agent-Based Marketing.
And it’s not a future state. It’s already here.
The shift… by the numbers.
Let’s get concrete about the realities we, as B2B marketers, are currently facing.
One. Bain & Company found 80% of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches, cutting organic web traffic by up to 25%. Meanwhile, AI-driven traffic to U.S. sites grew 269% year over year in March (Adobe Digital Index). The old front door is closing as a new one opens. If you're not visible through it, you're invisible. And if you’re not ready, you may be irrelevant.
Two. 1 in 4 customers now turn to AI answer engines as their primary way to research, discover and decide (Adobe AI and Digital Trends 2026). The trendline is steepening every quarter and what was a fringe behaviour 18 months ago is fast becoming the default. AI referral traffic to your site also exhibits 48% longer engagement time on site for AI visits compared to visits from other channels (Adobe Digital Insights, March 2026). Buyers aren't just using AI to start their journey; they're using it to finish it.
Three. Forrester found that 68% of B2B buyers already have a front-runner at the very start of their buying process and 80% of the time, that front-runner wins. By the time a buyer lands on your site, they’ve already consulted an AI agent, filtered out alternatives you’ll never know existed and have arrived pre-sold and more informed. Smaller traffic, sharper intent, shorter runway to win or lose them.
Read these three numbers together. The front door has moved - or morphed. Buyers are walking through it faster, flush with intent and expressed context. And by the time they show up on your owned property, the decision is mostly made.
This is not a blip. This is a structural shift in how B2B marketing works.
What’s changing and what isn’t.
The B2B buyer journey isn't disappearing. Discover, consider, evaluate, decide — those stages are still recognisable. What's changed is who is doing the discovering and where. Who is doing the considering and how. And increasingly, what is doing the evaluating.
For the last decade, we built ABM around a simple premise: identify the accounts that matter, map the buying group inside them and personalise the experience for every human in that group. The tactics evolved — intent data, signal-based plays, account and people-based scoring — but the underlying model assumed a human on the other end of every interaction.
That assumption is now broken.
The buying group is now hybrid. It still includes the CMO, the CIO, the CFO, functional decision makers and the procurement lead. But it also includes ChatGPT. And Perplexity. And Gemini. And the Copilot embedded in their Microsoft suite. And, increasingly, the customised agents their own IT teams are deploying to do the first-pass research before a human ever opens a tab or conducts a search themselves.
Just as we learnt to personalise differently for a CMO than a CIO, we now have to personalise differently for ChatGPT than for Gemini. Each of these systems seeks than surfaces information in its own way. Each has its own weighting, its own citation preferences, its own quirks. They are, functionally, a new audience segment — one that is actively influencing decisions inside the accounts you already care about.
That's Agent-Based Marketing.
The “Three ‘Gents”.
Here's the lens I've been using with my own team, with peers and on stage at Adobe Summit earlier this month to make this feel actionable instead of abstract.
There are three relationships every marketing leader needs to build with agents right now. I like to call them the “Three ‘Gents”:
Agents as tools. Increasingly, agents are scaling what's possible inside our own teams. They're helping us produce content, generate variants, analyse performance and break out of legacy workflows that were never designed to operate at agentic speed. The marketers and marketing teams who learn to wield these tools as a force multiplier will outpace those that do not.
Agents as teammates. This is the one most leaders haven't fully internalised yet. Agents aren't just a new audience and they're not just tools. They are collaborators — capable of running a workflow alongside you, against goals you set, with checkpoints you control. The role of the marketer shifts from production to design and governance. From doing the work, to honing the strategy and setting the conditions under which the work gets done well.
Agents as a target audience. This is the one that keeps me up at night. If your brand isn't structured for machine readability — if your content, your metadata, your third-party signals aren't shaped for the way LLMs synthesise answers — you are invisible in this next wave of brand discovery. The front door isn't your homepage any more. It's an answer in a chat window. And no two are created alike.
Tools. Teammates. Targets. Three relationships. One playbook to rewrite.
Why this needs a new playbook, not an evolved one.
The most common misconception of this conversation: that agentic AI is "just" another channel, another optimisation layer, another tactic to bolt onto what we're already doing. This simply isn't true. I think this requires an honest, ground-up rethink of four things every B2B marketing leader is responsible for:
- Signal and data. Prompts give us richer context than clicks ever did, but they are happening more on channels we don’t own and cannot directly pay for. Thus, our 360-degree view of the customer just got blurrier and more interesting at the same time.
- Content strategy. Because LLMs cite third-party, peer-reviewed, social networks and community sources more than they cite your homepage, the proliferation of content isn’t just more, it’s different - different surfaces, different formats and different forms of influence.
- Brand. In a world where LLMs synthesise answers from what other people say about you, the brands that win will be the ones customers actually love enough to talk about. This is the most underappreciated implication of the entire shift and the one I’m betting hardest on, underpinned by our launch of and investment in our Adobe CX Enterprise brand campaign, “It starts with Adobe.”
- Operating model. None of the above works if our org chart, our teams’ skill mix and our relationship with risk are still optimised for a probabilistic-assist version of AI. The leaders who win are designing for deterministic, end-to-end workflows where humans and agents have explicit role clarity.
I look forward to exploring and expressing these ideas in more depth in upcoming posts.
Where Adobe sits in this.
This is more than a personal POV for me. Adobe CX Enterprise was built around three use cases — brand visibility, content supply chain and customer engagement. Those weren't picked at random. They map to the three places this shift is hitting enterprise marketers the hardest.
Brand visibility addresses the front door moving. Our websites are no longer the sole entry point to our products and services and marketers need real solutions to show up across the agentic web and conversational UIs where customers are increasingly going first to get informed. Adobe's brand visibility solution brings together Adobe Experience Manager with apps purpose-built for the agentic web: Adobe LLM Optimizer, Adobe Brand Concierge and Adobe Experience Manager Sites Optimizer.
And as of yesterday, we are thrilled to share that we have completed Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush, a leading brand discoverability and visibility platform. This acquisition expands Adobe’s ability to serve your business with data-driven SEO and AI search solutions — at a time when brand visibility is more critical than ever.
Content supply chain is where marketers are reimagining what's possible with content - not just scaling production, but elevating quality and relevance so they not only reach their customers, they impress them. An agentic content supply chain helps that happen exponentially faster, with more iteration, testing, variation and insight than we thought possible. Generative AI becomes commercially safe to use at enterprise speed and scale and on-brand stops being a tradeoff against on-time. Adobe Brand Intelligence is the connective tissue — a continuous learning system that keeps every asset true to the brand, no matter how many variants you produce or how fast.
Customer engagement is where the buyer journey is being rewritten in real time. Personalisation used to mean the right message to the right segment at the right moment. Today it means orchestrating connected, real-time experiences across every channel while anticipating intent, responding to signal, continuously optimising for outcomes that matter. Adobe's customer engagement solution is now extended by Adobe Engagement Intelligence and Adobe CX Analytics.
Tying it all together: Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker. This is the announcement from Adobe Summit last week that I'm most excited about — and the one that brings the “third 'gent”, agents as teammates, to life. You define the outcome. CX Coworker builds the workflow, pulls in the right data, activates the right specialised agents, sequences the steps and monitors performance against the goal in real-time. It co-ordinates across Adobe applications, third-party AI platforms and the enterprise systems you already use, with humans firmly in the loop on the decisions that matter. It isn't just faster execution. It's better outcomes and a shift from campaign-based execution to continuous, intelligent engagement. CX Coworker is generally available in the coming months and it's the clearest expression I've encountered of what it actually looks like to put agentic AI to work for and with an enterprise marketing team.
Brand visibility. Content supply chain. Customer engagement. CX Coworker tying them together. That's how Adobe shows up and helps you bridge the old and the new ABM - from account-based marketing to agent-based marketing. It's the CXO operating system I'm betting my team's playbook on.
What we’ll explore in this series.
Over the next several weeks, I'll explore a few other topics about what Agent-Based Marketing actually looks like in practice, pulling in peers, customers and experts along the way.:
- Part 2: Marketing to Machines: Why content strategy needs a ground-up rethink, not an SEO upgrade.
- Part 3: Prompts, Not Clicks: Rethinking signal, intent and the customer journey when the most influential moments happen in conversations you can't see.
- Part 4: The Great Equaliser? Why brand matters more in an agentic world and the bet I'm making with my own budget.
- Part 5: Building the Agentic Marketing Org: Operating model, mindset and the work ahead.
If you've been feeling the ground move under your B2B playbook and haven't quite been able to name it — that's what this series is for.
The acronym is the same. Almost everything else has changed.
Welcome to the new ABM.
Marissa Dacay is Global Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at Adobe, a leader who turns big ambition into measurable impact.
Marissa leads global enterprise field marketing and campaign execution with a distinctive blend of creative instinct, data-driven discipline and fearless innovation. She's relentlessly focused on what works - and why. Her approach fuses data intelligence with bold storytelling driving enterprise marketing strategies that consistently outperform. She leads with both edge and empathy, challenging her teams to think bigger, execute smarter and raise the bar every time. Marissa isn't just driving results; she's cultivating the next generation of bold marketing leaders along the way.
