ServiceNow’s playbook for agent-based marketing.

For decades, marketers have been optimising for human audiences. Whether engaging individual customers or targeting B2B buying groups, the goal has been to understand people’s needs and deliver personalised experiences that feel relevant, timely and useful.

That work is not going away. But marketers now must account for another layer of influence: AI agents that help people discover, evaluate and act on information before they ever reach a brand directly. At Adobe, we’ve repurposed a familiar acronym to capture this shift: ABM or agent-based marketing.

As agentic AI advances, marketers need fresh ways to think about the roles AI can play. I find it helpful to frame AI in three ways — as a tool, a teammate and a target audience. The brands best positioned to succeed will bring humans and AI together to better serve both.

ServiceNow is one of the brands that put this approach into practice. With Adobe’s connected AI platform, including Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, the Fortune 500 company is transforming content operations, customer engagement and marketing workflows to deliver more adaptive experiences at scale.

To understand what this shift looks like in practice, I sat down with Jenny Tobener, global vice president of digital at ServiceNow, who leads digital marketing and experience strategy, to discuss what success looks like in this new era of agent-based marketing.

The AI frenzy is very real. As the buzz continues to grow, how do you separate noise from what is actually impactful?

For us, efficiency is table stakes. Sure, AI can streamline workflows, but what else can it do?

We’ve been doing as many pilots as possible — dozens on my team, hundreds across ServiceNow — and we’ve developed a three-question litmus test that helps us to decide what’s overblown and what’s worth investing in:

1. Does the AI reliably improve the quality of our work?
2. Does it unlock capabilities for us?
3. Does it give us leverage by making us smarter?

If it checks these boxes, we believe that it has the potential to be transformational, not just useful. And we’ll invest in it.

With that clarity, how are you ensuring ServiceNow shows up in the right places as AI increasingly reshapes how audiences discover and engage with brands?

Historically, companies had control over their brand narrative. Now, AI is telling that story for them. And if brands don’t adapt their content strategies, they’ll struggle to remain visible.

While this may seem like a channel problem, I believe it’s actually a content problem. Fragmentation in your content becomes fragmentation in how AI represents your brand. So it’s vital to make content simple, accessible and powerful. Ask yourself: “Are we telling a compelling story to our audience in a way that both humans and agents can respond to?”

Brands need thoughtful strategies for Reddit, YouTube and other channels to build credibility with AI tools while winning over human decision-makers.

At Adobe, we think a lot about helping brands turn audience signals into personalised experiences that drive meaningful impact. How is your team tapping into AI as a curator of these experiences?

Understanding and acting on audience signals is one of those areas where I do consider AI to be a superpower, because AI is making a better kind of personalisation possible.

Traditionally, we’d research static traits of audience members — firmographics, psychographics and so on — and then churn out countless content permutations. As you’d imagine, it became impossible to account for every variable, to serve up the perfect experience for every audience member at every stage.

Now, we focus on signals. AI helps us to interpret and prioritise the flood of incoming data, both human and agentic and tailor experiences based on audience intent, context and the problems they're trying to solve.

We no longer waste energy building every possible experience. Instead, we invest in the systems that help us to bring together the right experience at the right moment and make it as meaningful as possible.

That shift requires content that can move as quickly as the signals do. What does a more modular, “composable” approach to content look like in practice and how does it give your team an edge?

At ServiceNow, we embrace composable content because it gives us the flexibility to assemble experiences around audience needs and context. Content blocks, including headlines, images and CTAs, can be broken apart, reshuffled and snapped back together into an entirely new digital experience.

That said, AI can only curate experiences that are as strong as its input. That’s where humans come in — all our talented marketers, strategists and creatives. We pour our collective knowledge into what we call “message houses,” which our AI pulls from to dynamically assemble the best experience for our audience.

The collective wisdom and skill of humans, plus the curating power of AI, is a hard combination to beat.

As a leader, what cultural norms are you building into your team to get the most out of AI as a teammate, not just a tool?

First things first: We don’t rush to automate everything. We don’t stick AI onto existing systems just because we can. That’s how you get confusion, frustration and workflows that are clunkier than they were pre-AI.

Instead, I encourage our teams to take a step back and understand how the process ought to work. What is our goal? How do we scale and what guardrails do we need to scale sustainably?

With AI, handoffs between teams happen fast and everyone stays aligned. That saved effort and talent can be repurposed to govern and train the AI engine.

Humans bring taste and judgement. AI sharpens our work and workflows. Win-win.

We hear a lot of excitement about AI’s potential to remove low-impact, manual work from people’s plates. How have you seen it become a positive, disruptive force?

Fewer in-between tasks.

As we’ve investigated where AI can usefully disrupt workflows, we’ve discovered just how much time our teams have been spending shuttling work from one place to another. It’s a lot.

At ServiceNow, we’re committed to putting AI to work for people, freeing them up to focus on truly impactful work. That commitment doesn’t just apply to the businesses we serve — it’s an internal commitment as well.

Fewer in-between tasks mean more freedom to strategise, create and innovate. That’s my vision for my team.

See how Adobe AI helps brands deliver more relevant, adaptive experiences across every channel.