As marketers, we've watched the world around us change at lightning speed, with seismic shifts shaping the future of customer engagement and dictating how brands need to respond. In this series, we’ve explored the expectation for hyper-personalized experiences, the rapid rise of LLM-powered searches, and the agentic technology that is transforming engagement, allowing us to connect with customers on a deeper level.

Now, we’re going to lay out the steps you need to take to be a frontrunner in this AI-driven future of marketing. This includes building a toolkit that unlocks new capabilities, aligning your colleagues to your cause by showing marketing’s ROI, and keeping humans at the center of your strategy. Your goal? To become a brand that people think of first. A brand that doesn’t rely on traditional search. A brand that builds experiences that resonate with your audience, nurturing long-lasting, positive engagement, with customers so loyal, they become evangelists. Think of your own online shopping journeys — brands that remember you at each visit, engage you through inquisitive dialogue, and deliver relevant and unforgettable experiences stand a better chance of winning and keeping your loyalty. This is what it will take to prosper in this new era.

As Chief Marketing Officer for Adobe’s enterprise business, I’ve spoken with customers across industries and around the world. I’ve learned that consistent personalization at speed and scale is out of reach for many who have yet to bridge the gap between customer expectation and marketing execution. Mired in outdated systems, siloed data, disconnected teams, and manual content production, only 34% of brands can deliver the relevancy customers want. And only about half of the marketing execs I speak to can demonstrate the impact of their investments on business outcomes. It's a make-or-break moment for many.

I believe the tide is turning. We’re entering a golden age of marketing, led by innovations in martech, customer experience, and agentic marketing. AI, in all its forms, has presented an extraordinary opportunity for companies to fuel marketing and creativity and redefine customer engagement with greater speed, precision, and efficiency. Not in competition with humans but as a collaborator, amplifying human ingenuity to turn creativity into connections that drive sustained growth.

At Adobe, we're harnessing the combined energy of AI, marketing, and creativity to meet this new era of customer experience head on. Let's explore how you can too.

Reimagine marketing with a modern toolkit.

To reinvent your marketing strategy and thrive in today’s landscape, you’ll want a toolkit that blends human creativity with AI-powered optimization.

• Agentic AI to unlock the value of your teams. AI agents help marketers expand their capacity. They can dig into insights to help make decisions, refine content, and adjust audience segmentation and customer journeys on the fly. Marketers can focus on higher-value work like customer strategy, design, and experience on behalf of customers.

• Connected data to build unified customer experiences. AI delivers its best personalization returns when data is consolidated and insights are based on customer signals and behaviors. You'll understand context — the influences driving a customer’s decision-making — so you can craft meaningful experiences that build on one another for seamless journeys.

• Generative AI that forges connections through creativity. With responsible and brand-safe generative AI tools, you can build a high-performant content supply chain to curate real-time customer experiences that build long-term loyalty. At Adobe, we were able to reduce our content production life cycle from months to weeks and produce three times the content to help scale our personalization efforts across multiple audiences, industries, and geographies, all in service of our iconic brands, like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat.

• Solutions that supercharge productivity. AI-first marketing applications are designed to maximize how you spend your time by simplifying workflows, scaling resource-intensive processes, and accelerating creative output to drive productivity across teams and your enterprise.

We've been investing in AI for more than a decade across Adobe’s internal marketing workflows. With a connected data foundation, agents embedded across our platform, and generative AI powering our content supply chain, we're delivering personalization at scale to customers around the world. And our teams are operating at peak speed and efficiency. That reduction of campaign asset delivery time I mentioned above was for our annual Black Friday campaign — we were able to produce more than 50,000 assets in just days instead of weeks. As we approach the holiday season once again, we’re poised and ready to quickly scale a new campaign with AI as our tailwind.

The key here is to pair this functional transformation with a culture of experimentation and get your teams comfortable breaking the mold and trying new ways of doing things. It's helpful to start with a proof of concept and a team that’s comfortable leaning into experimentation, developing and testing new ways of working and delivering campaigns. For example, at Adobe our experimentation starts with creating our pilot concept, documenting the inputs and outcomes we’re looking for, determining how we’ll measure progress, and identifying what success looks like. Then, once the team has executed in a real-world production environment, we document the learnings, both good and bad, the things that surprised us, and whether we hit our milestones and goals. We share the documentation with the broader team and determine where and how quickly the learnings can be incorporated into current workstreams and processes.

As I reflect on how we approach transformation, our biggest unlock has been the importance of leaning in with these experiments. We know that the most important part is applying the data from all our learnings to future transformations so we can innovate faster for our customers.

Prove marketing ROI to rally support and drive growth.

Today's marketers are under pressure to lead performance-driven growth faster and more efficiently, but with fewer resources. A couple of sobering stats:

• Most marketers — 93% — are expected to contribute directly to sales and pipeline, according to a recent Adobe survey.

• Nearly a third of CFOs don’t believe the CMO role is a critical part of their company.

• Marketing budgets dropped from 9.1% of revenue to 7.7% over the last year.

You can evolve the narrative here, reaching (and exceeding) marketing’s ROI expectations and driving growth with new customer acquisitions. To do this, you must become the brand that customers think of first. That requires data collection that is unified, labeled, and governed. And you must empower creative and marketing teams with commercially safe AI that can deliver high-value content at speed and scale so you can create personalized journeys for every customer. The brands that win will be the ones that balance automation with warmth and earn trust through transparency.

As you build that new toolkit to achieve these goals, include an analytics tool that delivers dynamic and detailed insights, clearly connecting investment to outcome. You can measure granular details, like which content elements moved the needle, which channel delivers the most qualified leads, and the CTAs with the most clicks and conversions.

For example, we developed Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing to empower our marketers to quickly generate multiple content variations and measure asset performance. In one of our first GenStudio for Performance Marketing tests for an Adobe Illustrator campaign, our team was able to produce five versions of an email and measure the attributes that resonated with the audience. We sent out the highest performing selection and got a 57% increase in click-through rates — an incredible gain in ROI.

When you go into your quarterly business review, lead with insights like these. You'll quickly garner support from your CFO and build a strong alliance with your CIO, who will help source the agentic technology needed to execute your vision.

Keep marketing all about humans — even with AI.

The future of marketing is not just about investing in new technology. I firmly believe that marketing is, and will remain, people connecting with people, even as we continue to integrate AI into our workflows. For AI-powered marketing and creativity to generate real value, we must keep humans at the center of all we do.

The NFL is a great example of an organization that’s effectively leveraging AI to work faster and smarter while remembering it’s all about the people. The most watched sports league in the US, with hundreds of millions of fans, the NFL has been rooted in American culture for more than 100 years. Despite its legacy, it takes a modern approach to fan engagement. With Adobe as an official AI experience partner, the NFL uses tools like Adobe Workfront, Adobe Firefly, and Adobe Journey Optimizer to bring greater efficiency to their marketing game, build fan excitement, and fuel their international expansion with localized content. They can deliver in-the-moment experiences so fans can follow their favorite teams anytime, anywhere. By bringing AI into its marketing and creative strategy, the NFL is building next-gen experiences and Super Bowl-sized engagement all year long.

The future of marketing that once seemed uncertain has now come into focus. Enterprises must create a bold new vision for engaging customers — one that is human-centered and AI-powered — to fuel that initial spark, so businesses can move from brand marketing to brand leading.

In case you missed them, be sure to read parts one, two, and three of this series to understand where marketing has been and the exciting future that awaits.

Discover how AI-powered marketing and creativity drive growth like never before.

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.

https://business.adobe.com/fragments/resources/cards/thank-you-collections/thought-leadership