Accenture Song CTO Joy Bhattacharya and Varun Parmar, SVP & GM of Adobe GenStudio and Firefly for Enterprise, discuss how customer experience is changing in an AI-first world, why traditional personalization is no longer enough, and what it takes to build more relevant, real-time, and trusted experiences. Together, they also share what makes the Accenture-Adobe partnership uniquely suited for this moment.
Bhattacharya: We’ve spent years helping brands improve personalization, but the pace of change now feels very different. From your perspective, what has fundamentally shifted?
Parmar: The big shift is that AI is no longer sitting on the edge of the experience. It is becoming the environment where discovery, evaluation, and decision-making happen. For a long time, personalization meant improving pre-defined journeys, segments, and content variants. That still has value, but customers now expect something more immediate. They are informed, they move quickly, and they expect brands to respond to intent in the moment rather than route them through a journey designed weeks or months earlier.
You and your team often talk about moving beyond traditional personalization toward what you call “unrepeatable experiences.” How do you explain that shift to clients?
Bhattacharya: We use that phrase to describe experiences that are assembled in real time, based on context, intent, history, and business rules. They are not one-size-fits-all and they are not meant to be repeated in exactly the same way. The goal is not simply to serve a slightly better version of the same journey. It is to create the right interaction for that person, in that moment, through the channel they are using, with the right level of relevance and trust built in.
And in many ways, that means the old model of experience design starts to break down. What do you see as the biggest limitation of that traditional approach?
Parmar: Traditional systems were built for repeatability. They relied on fixed journeys, rule-based segmentation, linear funnels, and content supply chains optimized for scale. But customer behavior is no longer that tidy. Discovery often starts in AI interfaces, interactions jump across channels, and expectations change in the middle of the journey. That is why experience composition matters. Instead of designing every path in advance, brands need systems that can assemble experiences dynamically.
One question business leaders always ask is what this means for growth. When you speak with CMOs and commercial leaders, where do you see the real impact?
Bhattacharya: Growth is being rewired. It is less about content volume or campaign throughput on their own, and more about how well a business understands customer intent, makes decisions in real time, and governs AI responsibly. The companies that win will be the ones that treat enterprise intelligence as an asset, not just data they store somewhere. They will be able to orchestrate content, decisions, and actions safely, at speed, and learn from each interaction over time.
That is where the operating model becomes critical. From Adobe’s perspective, what actually has to change inside marketing teams to make this real?
Parmar: Marketing teams move from building campaigns to configuring systems. Instead of treating content as the end product, they start treating brand rules, product truth, and customer context as inputs that can be used by AI to shape each interaction. That means more modular content, stronger governance, better orchestration, and tighter connection between data, creativity, and execution.
We often come back to three capabilities that really matter in this shift. How do you frame those when you work with clients?
Bhattacharya: First, brands need to codify what they know, so that brand guidance, product facts, policies, and claims can be understood and used by AI. Second, they need to carry context across interactions, so the system can recognize intent, history, and business constraints. Third, they need to compose the moment, meaning they can assemble the right content, action, or offer in real time. When those three things work together, the experience becomes more useful, more consistent, and more trusted.
And that brings us to Adobe. In this new environment, what makes Adobe such an important player?
Parmar: Adobe brings together the pieces that many organizations struggle to connect — customer data, content, workflows, journeys, and measurement. With Adobe Experience Platform, GenStudio, Firefly, and the newer agentic capabilities around orchestration, Adobe is creating an environment where teams can move from isolated tools to coordinated systems. That matters because experience transformation is rarely blocked by a lack of ambition. It is blocked by fragmentation.
And, just as importantly, this is not a technology story alone. Joy, when clients ask why Accenture matters in this equation, what do you tell them?
Bhattacharya: I tell them transformation is not just a technology question. It is a business, operating model, and change question. Accenture brings strategy, industry depth, implementation scale, and responsible AI expertise to help clients turn Adobe’s technology into real outcomes. That includes redesigning workflows, modernizing content supply chains, integrating data and platforms, and helping organizations adopt new ways of working rather than simply installing new tools.
Parmar: If we leave leaders with one thought, what should they take away from this moment?
Bhattacharya: The next wave of advantage will not come from simply producing more content or launching more campaigns. It will come from owning the intelligence beneath the experience — the context, the orchestration, and the governance that allow a brand to act in real time. That is why this moment matters. And that is also why the combination of Adobe’s platform and Accenture’s ability to make transformation real is so powerful.
What comes next?
In an agentic world, brands can no longer just deliver experiences. They need to assemble them in the moment. The organizations that build for this shift will move beyond personalization to something far more powerful: unrepeatable experiences that drive repeatable growth.
But what does that actually look like in practice? And where should brands start?
In the next article, we’ll break down the new customer experience model — and the practical steps organizations can take to begin the transition today.
