Innovations in Adobe Journey Optimizer for Adobe Summit.

Customer expectations aren’t just rising — they’re splintering. People move fluidly across channels, expect brands to “remember” context in real time, and increasingly prefer fast, conversational interactions over one-way messaging. Marketing, growth, and customer experience teams are being asked to move faster while elevating AI from a tool to an everyday companion. Teams must manage competing targets to launch more journeys, personalize more content, prove business impact faster, and keep everything on-brand and compliant. This creates the need to scale while simplifying processes and workflows.

At this year's Adobe Summit, we unveiled the latest innovations in Adobe Journey Optimizer across four key areas:

• Agentic AI embedded in every workflow
• End-to-end engagement that spans marketing, customer experience, and loyalty
• Optimization for business outcomes, not just marketing KPIs
• 1:1 personalization at scale with generative AI

Within Journey Optimizer, Adobe Journey Agent serves as the agentic intelligent layer designed to support the ideation, generation, simulation, monitoring, and optimization of customer experiences. This year, we are unveiling new surfaces for interacting with Journey Agent and introducing a range of new jobs that Journey Agent can fulfill, further enhancing how teams can drive customer engagement and operational efficiency. Innovations include:

• In-line and embedded Journey Agent workflows (coming soon). Beyond engaging Journey Agent via conversational prompts, practitioners will soon be able to iterate on journeys and other objects with side-by-side AI guidance. Embedded actions deploy deterministic, in-line execution via optimization buttons, smart defaults, and auto-applied recommendations.
• Autonomous alerting and optimization (coming soon). Automated, headless agent workflows that are configured against specific monitoring thresholds that execute a response autonomously once conditions are met.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server (coming soon). Leverage the MCP Server to build and connect agentic tooling with a universal Adobe-governed infrastructure layer, integrating Journey Optimizer to any surface, such as the in-app experience, Adobe’s AI Assistant interface, and externally hosted agents like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to understand Journey Optimizer insights and activate changes.
• Journey analysis (coming soon). Detect anomalies, journey health, and conflicts. New capabilities in Journey Agent identify significant deviations from established patterns, such as the average number of profiles entering a journey, and surface operational issues to fast-track troubleshooting.
• Journey discovery (coming soon). A strategic AI marketing advisor that helps marketers go from business intent to journey execution via conversational goal-based assistance. Journey discovery provides always-on monitoring of live behavior and performance data to detect emerging opportunities.
• Journey simulation (coming soon). Generate test users and event values to quickly simulate how users flow through a journey. View journey flow visualizations, personalized content previews, simulation summaries, and receive recommended next steps before publishing the journey.

The future of customer engagement is conversational — fluid, always-on, and designed to move with people across moments, channels, and devices. Journey Optimizer was purpose-built to bridge traditional and brand-initiated batch marketing campaigns with customer-initiated, real-time 1:1 journeys. It expands the orchestration surface area across departments from marketing journeys, customer service interactions, loyalty experiences, support and recovery flows, through conversational interactions. The following innovations are making this possible.

• Adobe Journey Optimizer Loyalty (coming soon). Built as an AI-first solution, improves how loyalty programs perform, orchestrating loyalty experiences that help marketers motivate key actions and recognize progress in the moment to grow customer lifetime value. Using agentic AI, it continuously analyzes loyalty signals such as member tier status, transaction history, and engagement patterns to surface what matters most. Design gamified loyalty experiences that motivate specific behaviors using the Intelligent Challenger Builder.
• Conversation designer (coming soon). A no-code canvas for designing rich, two-way conversations with tools to manage keywords, craft responses, and define branching logic paths for each conversation. The Conversation Designer will support both Adobe-initiated conversations and device-initiated conversations.
• RCS rich media designer (coming soon). Expanded, native RCS authoring with a new, intuitive designer to configure, author, and publish rich, interactive RCS messages with out-of-the-box formats including basic, media, card, carousels, and location.
• Inbox (available now). Store and manage content in a dedicated inbox, giving customers a single place to discover, access, and revisit promotional and transactional messages on their own terms. Easily apply setup and display controls to deliver persistent, on‑brand messages that improve relevance and overall user experience.
• iOS Live Activities (available now). Deliver real‑time updates — from order tracking and flight status to event countdowns, live scores, and delivery progress — directly to the mobile lock screen and Dynamic Island, keeping users informed without opening an app.

Every customer interaction is an opportunity — but only if you deliver the right experience, through the right channel, at the right moment. That's why we're bringing a new wave of AI-powered capabilities to Adobe Journey Optimizer. It’s designed to help marketers move beyond mere intuition, towards more informed, outcome-driven decision-making at every stage of the customer journey.

Whether you're looking to boost engagement, drive conversions, or deepen loyalty, these new features work together to help you optimize journeys for the business outcomes that matter most.

• AI model monitoring (available now): Monitor the health, training status, and performance of AI models in decisioning. Verify training success, troubleshoot failures, and understand the impact on outcomes to select the best offers for each customer using AI.
• AI journey arbitration (limited availability, general availability coming soon): Ensure customers enter the most relevant journeys using AI arbitration, which leverages ranking formulas or an AI model to automatically boost a journey’s priority based on customer profile attributes and contextual factors.
• AI channel and path optimization (coming soon): Use individual preferences and prior observed behavior to choose the best outbound communications channel — email, SMS, push, and more — for a given message by combining multiple messages in a single journey action or to select the best path based on ideal next best action or declared business goals.
• AI subject line prediction and inbox rendering optimization (coming soon): Predict open rates for authored and AI-generated subject lines and receive actionable suggestions with reasoning. Use generative AI to automatically optimize plain text emails for AI assistants in inboxes that highlight the right offer or message where the emails are read.
• Decisioning jobs in Journey Agent (coming soon). Guided AI assistance helps create, analyze, simulate, and adjust decisioning eligibility rules, offers, collections, ranking methods, selection strategy, and decision policies.
• Agentic experimentation management (coming soon). New agentic AI skills streamline experimentation planning, test design, and creation by automating critical steps such as metric selection, sample size estimation, and test setup. AI-powered hypothesis generation continuously optimizes customer journeys by quickly cycling through new experiment ideas that prove effective in impacting the business.

Generative AI is rewriting the rules of content velocity and unlocking hyper-personalization opportunities for every channel. As foundational models mature and usage expands, the focus crystallizes to ensuring brand-safe experiences that reliably interpret and enforce brand voice, style, and visual identity.

Our latest innovations enable practitioners to expand the use of foundational models in Journey Optimizer while putting more tools at their fingertips to govern the use of generated content at scale.

• Content generation with Firefly Custom Models and Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (available now). Leverage Firefly Custom Models trained on your proprietary brand assets by selecting them in-line to generate content across emails, push, SMS, RCS, web, landing pages, and more. Also generate content with high-speed, high-quality partner models, including Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana).
• Composable content (coming soon). Reduce manual steps and boost workflow velocity by accessing external CMS, DAM, loyalty, pricing, weather, and recommendation systems directly in Journey Optimizer. Pre-wire API connections to create plug-in content sources that are configured once and reusable across the enterprise. Run-time API calls enable individualized content that reflects the customer's context.
• AI content quality checks (available now). Automatically evaluate marketing content quality before launching to catch issues early and ensure messages are polished, readable, and effective across channels. Quality checks and brand scores are evaluated across multiple dimensions, including overall readability and tone analysis, subject line effectiveness, brand guideline alignment, and spelling and grammar.

Catch up on all of these updates and more here: Sneak Peek: Journey Optimizer Roadmap and Future [S520].

Learn more about Adobe Journey Optimizer and book a demo today.

Jason Hickey is the Director of Product Marketing for Adobe Journey Optimizer. For almost 20 years, he has been immersed in the personalization and real-time engagement space — first as a marketing practitioner, and then as a technical solutions architect, strategic consultant, and product marketer. Jason is highly passionate about data-driven decision-making and is now sharing all things Journey Optimizer with the world.