Adobe is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2 2026.
The results are in. Adobe has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2 2026. We were evaluated among the eight most significant vendors in the market and recognized for the strength of both our current offering and strategy. But what does this recognition really mean for the organizations we serve? And why does it matter now, at this particular moment in the evolution of analytics?
The moment has changed. Analytics must change with it.
For years, customer analytics meant something specific: collect data, build reports, surface insights, and share findings to support the management of customer experience. Useful, but fundamentally backward-looking and time-consuming to execute on. By the time those insights reached a decision-maker, the customer moment had already passed. That era has ended. We are now in the era of AI.
Forrester's research is clear about the direction of the market: “What has changed is the shift from static, retrospective insights to dynamic, in-the-moment orchestration.” We believe that the analytics tools that win will be the ones that bridge the distance between "what the data says" and "what happens next," ultimately shrinking decision cycles for personalization at scale, next-best-action, and experience orchestration that responds as customers engage, not after the fact.
This is precisely where Adobe has been investing and why we believe this Forrester recognition reflects something more than a point-in-time score. It reflects a philosophy about what analytics is for — automatic intelligence in the moments that matter.
What Forrester found.
Our strategy centers on unifying data, content, journeys, and AI so that insights don't just live in a dashboard — they flow directly into the systems and channels where customer interactions happen. This is what we mean when we talk about closing the loop between intelligence and experience.
In its evaluation, Forrester assessed customer analytics technology vendors across three categories: Current Offering, Strategy, and Customer Feedback. A few highlights from Forrester’s assessment of Adobe:
- Enterprise-scale profile unification. According to Forrester, “Adobe stands out with enterprise-scale profile unification, stitching interactions across channels, including anonymous sessions before a customer logs in. AEP [Adobe Experience Platform] resolves complex behavioral attributes at the profile level, so they’re ready to use at the point of decision.” We believe this is the foundation that enables real-time action.
- Raw event-level analytics. Forrester notes that “Unlike others that aggregate journey data into sessions or summaries, CJA [Adobe Customer Journey Analytics] works on raw event-level data, giving users the ability to reconstruct interactions through a self-serve interface.” What this means is that customers can reconstruct any interaction through a self-serve interface with the granularity to ask questions that summary-level data simply can't answer.
- Flexible intelligence for activation. The report also calls out that “…derived fields allow users to build and store custom logic directly on the profile for use across segmentation and activation.” For our customers, this means bridging the gap between insight generation and downstream action.
- Strategy. In the report, Forrester notes that “Adobe's vision centers on unifying data, content, journeys, and AI to support enterprise-grade experience orchestration, anchored by a modern, AI-enabled platform. Its roadmap emphasizes expanding analytics use cases and embedding intelligence across its customer experience applications while advancing openness through standards like model context protocol (MCP) that allow customers to build their own agents.”
Making AI intelligible: From black box to clear action.
We've heard directly from customers that data teams want AI-generated insights they can stand behind. This is why Adobe has invested heavily in making AI intelligible, not just intelligent.
Data Insights Agent in Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is one of the clearest expressions of this commitment. It's a conversational AI interface that lets any user, regardless of analytics fluency, ask questions in plain language and get answers in plain language. Here's what sets it apart:
- From reactive to proactive. Data Insights Agent doesn't wait for you to know what to ask. It surfaces high-confidence insights, meaningful patterns, and opportunities users might not think to explore by continuously analyzing cross-channel data.
- Transparent and confident. When something changes in your data, the agent instantly identifies the top factors behind that change, complete with statistical significance and impact quantification. You go from "something happened" to "here's why" and "here's how confident we are" in minutes without waiting for an analyst.
- Analyst-approved, business-ready. Built-in controls let analysts validate, curate, and enrich AI-generated insights before they reach business users, building trust across the organization instead of bypassing it.
- Data storytelling at scale. The system can automatically generate stakeholder-ready slide presentations from Analysis Workspace reports, translating analytical findings into executive narratives that drive decisions rather than just documentation.
- Where you already work. Data Insights Agent is now integrated with other LLMs and AI systems, such as Microsoft Copilot, enabling users to access data from Customer Journey Analytics through natural language prompts directly within Microsoft Teams, Microsoft PowerPoint, and more.
This is what it looks like when AI is designed to serve the full breadth of an organization's analytical needs.
Adobe's roadmap reflects the conviction that the future of customer analytics isn't a dashboard — it's an intelligent system that acts on your behalf. We're advancing:
- Agentic AI across the analytics lifecycle, including the Adobe AI Platform for orchestrating multi-step, goal-oriented analytical workflows.
- MCP servers for Adobe CX Analytics, enabling external AI agents, assistants, and custom applications to connect directly to Adobe CX Analytics, so intelligence can flow wherever decisions are made.
- Adobe Marketing Campaign Analytics, an AI-powered marketing intelligence solution, delivers a full-funnel view of campaign performance by combining ad platform connectivity and causal AI to drive closed-loop optimization and maximize ROI.
- Adobe Content Analytics, which uses AI and machine learning to extract content attributes into structured metadata profiles, helps marketers understand which specific assets and experiences drive outcomes.
- Adobe Customer Journey Analytics B2B Edition, which extends the platform's power to account-level analysis and B2B go-to-market orchestration.
Each of these reflects the same underlying belief that the most valuable thing analytics can do is get the right intelligence to the right person at the right moment and, increasingly, to trigger the right action automatically.
Built for organizations serious about experience.
We agree. Forrester's evaluation isn't just about product capabilities — it's grounded in real customer feedback. Our customers consistently report that the cross-channel insights they unlock and the speed from data to decision justify the investment. We're also actively working to reduce implementation complexity. Simplified stitching in connections, intelligent onboarding agents that automate schema creation using LLMs, and a dynamic implementation guide are all designed to make Adobe CX Analytics deliver value faster for every customer.
A thank you to our customers.
We wouldn't be here without the organizations that have partnered with us, challenged us, and pushed us to build something better. Every customer who has shared feedback on what's working, what's not, and what they need next is reflected in this recognition.
The shift from static reporting to intelligent experience orchestration isn't a distant aspiration. It's what our customers are doing right now with Adobe CX Enterprise and the solutions in Adobe CX Analytics, such as Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.
We're proud to be named a Leader. We're even more excited about where we're going.
Access The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2 2026 here.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester tools, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.
Nate Smith is the Director of Product Marketing for the Adobe suite of Analytics products. In his role, he oversees strategic marketing for Adobe Analytics and works with several of the top brands in the world on their analytics use cases, challenges, and business opportunities. He has been involved in digital marketing for the past 15 years and holds a BS in information systems and an MBA from Brigham Young University.
