Best of Summit 2026 — customer experience orchestration and the agentic era.

We’re at a critical juncture in customer experience. AI has long supported personalization behind the scenes. But at Adobe Summit 2026 in Las Vegas this April, we saw it step into the center of the action. It’s helping marketers design, build, and launch experiences in real time. And then adapt them based on how customers respond, determining what they see, how they decide, and how interactions unfold.

We’ve entered a new era of engagement, and it’s playing out across many different fronts: humans interacting with humans, humans collaborating with AI agents, and AI agents acting on behalf of customers. AI brings speed and scale, but it also means fewer moments of direct control.

Discovery, evaluation, and engagement now happen through AI‑driven channels, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. In a zero‑click world, disconnected marketing can’t keep up. And while CMOs and marketing leaders are still responsible for attracting and engaging customers in meaningful moments, those moments are increasingly shaped, accelerated, and delivered by AI.

This is where customer experience orchestration (CXO) comes in. CXO brings content, data, decisioning, and trust signals together across journeys so brands can show up with clarity and confidence for both humans and AI agents. And agentic AI is expanding the scale of orchestration, changing how experiences are personalized and how work gets done across the customer lifecycle.

In my last blog, I explored how AI agents are beginning to act on behalf of customers, transforming the rules of engagement. Here, I want to focus on what this momentum means for marketers, as agentic AI moves from possibility to practice.

Introducing Adobe CX Enterprise.

I've been coming to Adobe Summit for years, but this year marked a turning point. AI and agentic technologies are changing how work gets done, how marketing teams amplify their efforts across content, channels, and audiences, and how humans and AI work together to improve every customer touchpoint and interaction.

At Adobe Summit we unveiled Adobe CX Enterprise, an end-to-end agentic AI system designed to orchestrate the entire customer lifecycle, from first interaction to lasting loyalty. It empowers teams to create content, engage customers, and show up consistently as a brand, without fragmentation or manual workarounds. Just intelligent orchestration built for how modern marketing operates.

We also introduced CX Enterprise Coworker — an AI agent that fits into your existing workflow and acts on its own when needed — and Adobe Brand Intelligence, which turns static brand guidelines into a living system that keeps your brand consistent as AI-powered content scales.

CX Enterprise Coworker enables organizations to move beyond experimentation and into real, repeatable execution. Teams can set up AI Coworkers with clear roles, permissions, and guardrails, configuring them to assist specific workflows or to run in the background to deliver trusted, on-brand experiences in real time.

And Adobe Brand Intelligence helps maintain brand integrity as more AI, teams, agencies, and regions get involved. It’s an always-on shared source of truth for how your brand should show up, keeping humans and AI aligned as work moves faster. The system trains itself on approved content, brand guidelines, and past decisions, and then applies that intelligence across every experience. The result is less need for manual reviews, less brand drift, and more confidence that everything in market reflects your brand as intended.

The new rules of brand visibility.

Marketers are used to the rules of engagement changing — but this time, they’ve been torn up, tossed aside, and totally rewritten. What matters now to AI-driven discovery is accuracy, trust, and representation, because brands are no longer always speaking directly to customers. AI agents now decide what information customers see by selecting, summarizing, and explaining content on the brand’s behalf. Readiness for AI‑led discovery is now a core brand responsibility.

At Adobe Summit, we got an inside look at how Adobe LLM Optimizer helps marketers understand how their content appears in AI-powered experiences, and how that visibility stacks up against competitors. Teams can identify where their content is falling short, detect inaccuracies that could harm brand trust, and make targeted improvements to optimize performance.

And now, with Semrush joining Adobe, marketers can take what they learn about discoverability and use it to create content that helps brands not just be discovered but chosen by both customers and the AI agents guiding them.

Visibility is only the first step. The real change happens when AI takes that understanding and starts interacting with customers on the brand’s behalf. That's exactly the role Adobe Brand Concierge plays. It takes the brand-ready experiences you’ve created and interfaces with customers, anticipating their needs and shuttling them through their journeys.

At Adobe Summit, I sat down with Emily Silver, SVP, Chief Marketing, eCommerce and Athlete Experience Officer and Vlad Rak, EVP and CTO, DICK'S Sporting Goods, to learn how DICK’s marketers are using AI agents to deliver immersive conversational experiences in the mobile app — recommending products and offering tailored training tips based on individual athlete needs. I highly recommend checking out the Day Two Keynote.

Human content delivered at AI speed.

Information now moves at the speed of AI. Brands need enough relevant, on-brand content to match that speed and to scale personalized interactions across all channels. That level of creation isn’t possible through traditional content creation effort alone. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be.

Adobe’s integrated content supply chain embeds AI directly into creative and production workflows, grounded in brand standards and shared governance. That foundation gives teams the confidence to move faster, with trust intact.

Xfinity is a great example of how teams are building and scaling content supply chains. To meet the growing demand for content across channels, Xfinity embedded Adobe Brand Intelligence into its creative workflow. Governance is built into every step of creation and review — not as fixed rules, but as a connected system that evolves through feedback, approvals, and real‑world use.

We also saw how agentic AI capabilities accelerate adaptation. With Firefly Enterprise, teams can reframe video for different channels, generate dynamic graphics, or create shorter formats without rebuilding assets from scratch. Through Adobe’s partnership with NVIDIA, new innovations like 3D digital twins — high-fidelity representations of physical products — can be used to create digital scenes, environments, and merchandising experiences. Brands can launch campaigns faster, exercise greater creative flexibility, and keep ecommerce experiences connected at every interaction.

The marketing leader’s takeaway.

What stood out at Adobe Summit is this: Agentic AI isn’t just helping us move faster. It’s changing what customer experience orchestration can deliver for the business — moving it from something we manage to a system that drives outcomes through everyday work.

For years, customer engagement was measured in transactional moments, but that’s no longer how customers experience brands. Agentic AI makes it possible for brands to engage every customer like they’re the only customer by interacting in the right way at every moment of the journey. The leaders who succeed won’t just adopt AI. They’ll design for it — creating experiences that resonate with humans and AI agents alike, scaling creativity while protecting trust.

In my next blog, I’ll take you inside the Agentic Marketing Garage and share how agents are transforming tools, teams, and targets.

Rachel Thornton is Adobe’s chief marketing officer for the enterprise business, helping organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences at the intersection of marketing, creativity, and AI. She leads strategies and activations that position Adobe as the leading marketing and AI platform, while energizing and empowering CMOs and experience makers worldwide.