Fifteen years, fifteen Magic Quadrants. I’m proud to share that Gartner has once again named Adobe* a Leader in the 2026 Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs). In this blog, we share how we see the market shift, our point of view on what’s next, two ways to get there with Adobe, and all the latest innovations available to our customers today.

Where we see the market shifting.

The 2026 Magic Quadrant for B2B MAPs highlights several shifts related to what B2B marketers need from their platforms:

• Agents are becoming teammates, not just assistants. AI is moving beyond drafting copy to helping teams achieve specific goals — planning audiences, building journeys, and tuning campaigns while marketers stay in charge of approvals and oversight.
• Marketing platforms are becoming reachable from any AI surface. Teams want the option to run marketing operations from the AI tools they already use. Connecting LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot directly to marketing automation platforms through MCP servers is now essential.
• The focus of marketing continues to shift from the lead to the buying group. Understanding and acting on those influential connections help teams to create better experiences and accelerate buying cycles.
• Buyers are discovering vendors through AI. Research that once started on a search page now often begins with an AI answer engine, which is changing how and where brands need to show up.
• AI is on every CMO’s agenda. In its report, Gartner states, “B2B marketing teams and leaders are under pressure to perform. Whether successful performance is defined as increased pipeline, growing revenue, or ongoing business transformation, AI is part of every CMO’s current responsibility at some level. In a 2026 Gartner survey of B2B CMOs, 59% responded that their top strategic priority is effectively integrating AI into marketing programs and strategies.”

We agree the pace of change is significant, and that’s why we’ve focused on new ways to get teams there.

From marketing automation to marketing orchestration.

The window to influence a purchase decision is shrinking. By the time a buyer identifies themselves to a brand, they have often finished their AI-assisted research, formed opinions, and looped in colleagues who will have a say in the decision-making process. The signal a vendor finally receives isn’t the kickoff. The game is already well underway.

In a window that short, waiting is expensive. Moving from marketing automation to marketing orchestration requires using AI reasoning to go beyond reacting to one signal at a time. The system should interpret and weigh everything known about a person, their account, the wider buying group, decide what to do next, and then execute it.

Our approach builds a contextual intelligence layer on top of your existing Adobe Marketo Engage data foundation, which contains your customer data, signals, and other ingested data. This layer interprets those details and develops them into continuously updated semantic stories. Those stories give the system the understanding it needs to anticipate and decide the next-best action across journeys, channels, and content, continuously and at scale.

Two ways to get there with Adobe.

Adobe customers operate at different scales, with varying data needs and starting points, so we offer two options for putting marketing orchestration to work.

Option 1: The expanded Adobe Marketo portfolio, no customer data platform required.

Adobe Marketo Optimizer and Adobe Marketo Qualifier extend Adobe Marketo Engage with AI reasoning and agentic workflows. Both run on the Marketo Engage data foundation, allowing teams to share a contextual understanding of each person, buying group, and account without needing to buy a customer data platform (CDP) or migrate their data. This lets existing Marketo Engage customers get up and running quickly.

• Adobe Marketo Optimizer is built for marketing teams to bring their lead, account, and buying group journeys together using powerful AI reasoning that enriches customer context with continuously updated semantic stories and scales engagement with next-best actions across marketing, paid media, and BDR channels.
• Adobe Marketo Qualifier helps BDR teams to unify inbound lead qualification and outbound prospecting into a single agentic workflow that’s deeply connected to the demand lifecycle and a common customer context. It was built to close the problematic “last mile” between demand generation and pipeline creation.

Option 2: Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition on Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform B2B edition.

For enterprises that need deeper data unification, identity resolution, and multi-instance or multi-CRM support that only a CDP can deliver, Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform B2B edition bring account, buying group, and lead journey orchestration together with more unified, actionable profiles from across enterprise data for more advanced activation needs.

Either way, the goal is the same — providing a credible, well-defined path to demand marketing AI maturity that meets your teams where they are today.

Innovation available now.

Gartner notes, “Leaders possess capabilities that enable them to provide deep support across nearly all B2B MAP solution requirements, generally separating themselves from other vendors, most significantly across the following capabilities: email marketing, data ingestion and activation, and generative and agentic AI.” Beyond the new offerings, here is what’s available now.

Agentic AI and open access in Adobe Marketo Engage.

• Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker for Marketo Engage. A native, agentic experience inside Marketo Engage that lets teams build and maintain workflows, as well as analyze and draw insights from data, by prompting agentic AI in natural language.
• Marketo Engage MCP Server. It offers more than 100 platform capabilities to external AI tools, such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot, so teams can build custom agents and run workflows beyond Adobe’s ecosystem while preserving existing permissions and governance.
• Built-in data governance. Callable agents, triggered by webhooks within smart campaign flow steps, normalize data, enrich missing fields, and suppress bots before a lead ever enters the nurture or routing phase. Out-of-the-box agents also include a workflow agent for campaign orchestration and a data agent for program quality assurance, lead import, and data standardization.

Account and buying group orchestration in Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition.

• Account insights dashboard. It uses AI-powered first-party intent to surface surging accounts, contact coverage and overlap, and buying group highlights, so teams can prioritize accounts and optimize journeys.
• Conditional content and customizable fragments. These help personalize emails by person, account, and solution interest using a drag-and-drop condition builder, as well as reuse fragments with editable fields, labels, URLs, and images across account-based campaigns.
• Sales actions and sales users. These features give sales teams access to account, buying group, and customer insights within their CRM and allow them to send pre-approved emails from the account details page.
• AI Assistant Content Accelerator. It helps generate multiple variations of full email copy, images, and subject lines using a prompt library. However, Adobe doesn’t use customer data to train or fine-tune the Azure OpenAI Service.

Content, conversations, and analytics in Adobe Marketo Engage.

• New email designer. It is an advanced WYSIWYG editor with out-of-the-box templates, preview and simulation, reusable fragments, conditional content, and content locking to keep emails on brand.
• Adobe Express in Marketo Engage. It offers quick actions for cropping, resizing, background removal, and format conversion, plus an embedded experience with Adobe Firefly, Adobe Stock, templates, and brand controls, all inside the email and landing page designers.
• Connected content supply chain. Integrations with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing and the Adobe Experience Manager Assets Dynamic Media live-link connector keep content up to date and reduce rework between creative and operations teams.
• Dynamic chat. Sales agents can score live conversations as warm, hot, or very hot, and use those scores as smart list filters and triggers.
• Generative AI on-demand webinar experiences. This capability automatically generates summaries and video chapters and allows marketers to track chapter clicks in smart lists. Webinar attendance, poll responses, and Q&A interactions now flow into Marketo Sales Insight. The blog generator feature can also turn webinar recordings into on-brand blog posts.
• CRM sync monitoring. A new Salesforce sync dashboard that helps teams resolve backlogs and common errors.
• Refreshed ad hoc reporting. This capability lets marketers undertake ad hoc drill-down and drill-through exploration of their Marketo Engage data, achieve up to five times faster performance on large datasets, and share to PDF and PowerPoint.

The right partner for B2B teams driving efficient growth.

Being named a Leader for the 15th year in a row is meaningful, but what excites us most is what it means for the teams building their demand engines on Adobe today. Whether you’re just getting started with AI or already running agentic workflows across your buying groups, we’re building for where B2B marketing is headed next. We’re grateful to the thousands of customers whose partnership and feedback inspire us every day and motivate us to keep earning their trust.

You can download and review the Magic Quadrant report here.

You can also learn how Adobe can help you connect with customers and drive better performance in the age of AI by exploring Adobe Marketo Optimizer, Adobe Marketo Qualifier, and Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker for Marketo Engage.

*Adobe was previously known as Marketo from 2012 to 2018.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Jeff Cohen, Upasna Chandna, Martin DeWitt, Julian Poulter, September 22, 2026.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.

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