Customers don't think in channels. They open an email first thing in the morning, tap into your app at lunch, ask a question over chat, and buy from their laptop at home that night. Through it all, they expect you to know who they are, showing up with connected experiences that aren’t repetitive or impersonal. Meeting that expectation across every channel and in real time is hard work, but it’s a challenge marketing teams live with every day. That challenge is exactly what a multichannel marketing hub (MMH) is meant to help tackle, and it's the category Gartner® evaluated in this report.

Today I’m proud to share that Adobe has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. We see this recognition as a reflection of the work behind Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Real-Time CDP, and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, and of the enterprise teams using it to build more impactful and engaging experiences for their customers.

The multichannel marketing hub becomes an operating model, not a tool.

Marketing has entered a new chapter. AI assistants and agents are no longer the differentiator because nearly every platform now has them in some capacity. What sets a platform apart is control: how well it governs what both people and AI are allowed to do, and how reliably it makes the right call at the moment a customer is actually paying attention.

The Gartner® 2026 report describes exactly this shift. It states that AI assistants and agents are commonplace in multichannel marketing hubs in 2026, and that:

“What separates platforms now is control: advanced decision-making algorithms that optimize journey, offer, and consent state at the moment of action, governing what both humans and AI can do in service of engagement.”

Meeting this moment takes more than adding AI to a marketing tool. It takes unified data, real-time decisioning, and AI agents that can reason across all of it inside a single, governed system. That is what Adobe built.

Why we believe Adobe was recognized.

Journey Optimizer keeps the customer profile, the decision about what to do next, and the delivery of the message in one place. It runs on the Adobe Experience Platform, so a journey draws on the same data your analytics, personalization, and audience teams already work with. When the data is shared from the start, a team can move from what it learns to what it does without wiring systems together first.

Here's what Gartner® found.

Gartner® evaluated vendors across their ability to execute and their completeness of vision. We believe Adobe's position as a Leader is grounded in how the report describes this year's Leaders:

“Leaders provide comprehensive support for all MMH critical capabilities and consistently meet customer needs across core use cases, including implementation, journey building, multichannel optimization, and customer journey analysis. In 2026, Leaders increasingly distinguish themselves through convergence: unified suites that bring CRM, customer data, personalization, and journey orchestration together in a single operating model, with agentic capabilities demonstrated in production rather than confined to a roadmap. Leaders exhibit high market visibility, strong penetration, and sustained momentum, and they pair a well-articulated strategic vision for future MMH growth with evidence of shipped delivery against it. Leaders also succeed in attracting and retaining a diverse customer base across industries and geographies.”

What this means for marketing and IT leaders.

For CMOs, we believe this recognition reflects a real shift in what is possible. The advantage no longer comes from owning the most tools. It comes from a platform that builds on shared data, so a team can act on what it knows about a customer in the moment, on the channel that customer is using, without losing the brand and compliance standards the business depends on.

For IT and digital leaders, an integrated approach reduces fragmentation and can lower total cost of ownership. It also keeps consent, privacy, and access controls consistent across every channel because they're enforced by the platform itself rather than rebuilt tool by tool. And because Federated Audience Composition in Experience Platform can activate audiences without moving data out of the warehouse, teams can pursue ambitious personalization while keeping data residency and compliance requirements intact.

Looking ahead.

We believe being named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs reflects the strength of the Adobe Experience Platform today and the direction the market is heading. As agentic AI moves from experiment to infrastructure, Adobe is investing in customer profiles that capture richer context, including conversational signals, so AI agents can make better decisions across the platform. Our commitment is to help enterprises orchestrate customer journeys at scale, responsibly and intelligently, in service of experiences that move the business forward. To see how Adobe helps teams deliver more personal experiences across every channel, explore Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Download a complimentary copy of the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, Audrey Brosnan, Suzanne Schwartz, Tia Zervas, Julia Multedo, 22 September 2026.

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

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