In a world dominated by fleeting video clips, bite-sized updates, and AI-generated content, a not-so-surprising trend is emerging — long-form content is making a powerful comeback! A recent study revealed a 68% increase in long-form content production in the last year alone.

But are the teams responsible for creating this in-depth content finding success today — and are they ready to up their game?

At Adobe, we wanted to find out. Earlier this year, we surveyed over 400 business professionals across 31 countries to understand their real-world experiences, goals, and challenges with long-form content management. Most respondents were technical communications professionals focused on product documentation (77%), knowledge content (60%), support, and learning and training content (54% each).

The result? 2025 Adobe Survey: State of Long-form Content Management in the Age of AI — a report that isn’t just another download. It's a comprehensive review of current content management practices — covering key areas such as project management, cloud migration, and AI adoption. It shares eye-opening insights from industry peers that may inspire you to rethink your strategy. Here’s a look at some of the highlights.

What challenges did these teams have in common?

A surge in demand is great news for producers of long-form content seeking a strong return on investment (ROI), as explored in our recent paper Technical Content – Assessing Business Value and Impact.

But achieving strong ROI takes more than simply publishing more words — it requires scaling both quality and efficiency. Our survey revealed that many organizations are still struggling with fundamental challenges in their content creation, management, and delivery processes:

• Lack of a unified content strategy — cited by 53% of respondents as their biggest challenge.
• Maintaining content accuracy across channels — identified by 51% as a major quality control issue.
• Migrating legacy content — remains a hurdle for 49% of respondents, highlighting ongoing inefficiencies.

But while the top challenge is mainly a human-factor issue regardless of technology stack, we found something interesting across the respondent profiles: nearly 60% do not use a Component Content Management System (CCMS) to manage content or a professional project management solution to organize their work — and it shows in many of their survey responses.

The surprising state of project and task management.

Digging deeper, we found that the tools and processes used to manage content projects are often a major source of friction. Many professionals rely on general-purpose productivity tools instead of dedicated project management platforms.

• Email is the most common tool for project and task management, used by 58% of respondents.
• Excel or Google Sheets are used by 54%.

This reliance on fragmented, personal productivity tools creates a host of problems, particularly for project managers:

• The top challenge, cited by 57%, is managing dealing with fragmented tools and processes.
• 51% of project managers struggle with a lack of visibility into content workflow and audit trails.
• 49% report a lack of dashboards and reporting capabilities.

Interestingly, while project managers are acutely aware of the problems caused by fragmented tools, the adoption of dedicated project management solutions remains a lower priority — at 31%. This highlights a disconnect between the needs of project managers and the habits of content teams. The data suggests that many content professionals are focused on personal productivity — managing their own tasks within projects — rather than coordinating work across projects and teams.

These insights also reveal a gap within the technology stack itself. Few content authoring tools include enterprise-grade project management features, whereas most project management platforms are designed for generic use cases or extensive customization — rather than for content lifecycle management.

In fact, bridging this gap is the reason we recently released an integration between Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager Guides.

The pragmatic embrace of AI and the cloud.

As organizations look for ways to overcome these challenges, many are turning to AI and cloud-based solutions. However, our survey demonstrated an increasingly pragmatic approach to adopting these technologies.

For example, while the lack of generative AI capabilities was a concern for 43% of respondents, and most users of content management systems (CCMS) have already moved to the cloud, migration is not always viewed as the immediate answer. For the 18% of all current CCMS users who are still on-premises and don’t plan to move, it’s all about the operational business case. A business case that prioritizes security, cost, and satisfaction with existing solutions over potential benefits that could justify the investment and enable readiness for AI.

But for those who have migrated to the Cloud, the benefits — as shown in Figure 1 — are clear and primarily practical.

In contrast, when it comes to AI, the top benefit is squarely focused on improving productivity:

• Improved productivity is the most important AI benefit for 74% of respondents.
• Faster content delivery is a priority for 67%.

When looking at most AI use cases in demand, they are more feature- and capability-focused:

• Generative AI content discovery is the most in demand, viewed as important by 77% of respondents (Figure 2).
• Authoring copilots are highly sought after, with 62% of respondents expressing interest.
• Content reuse (57%) and chat-based search on published output (55%) are also high on the list.

However, it’s no surprise that some barriers to AI adoption remain:

• Similar to cloud migration, governance, compliance, and security are the top concerns, cited by 58% of respondents.
• Output quality and AI hallucinations follow closely at 57%, indicating where organizations are in the overall technology maturity cycle.

These findings — and many more in the report — suggest that while the potential of AI is recognized, organizations are moving beyond experimental pilots and proceeding to deployments with optimism for new solutions, but also with a clear-eyed focus on the business case — prioritizing risk management and ROI.

The opportunity for learning and training content.

We also discovered a large opportunity for current CCMS users and those evaluating new systems. While 57% of respondents want to use a CCMS for e-learning content, only 22% currently have that capability.

And with this type of long-form content tied for third place at 54%, integrating its production and management into CCMS systems could be a game-changing to streamline operations and boost efficiency.

There's more to discover.

This is just a glimpse into the rich data and insights shared in our full report 2025 Adobe Survey: State of Content Management in the Age of AI. In the complete report, you'll find:

• More charts and survey results.
• A deeper analysis of the challenges and opportunities in long-form content management.
• Detailed recommendations for how to modernize your content strategy and operations.

Don’t miss out on the full story — and explore how an Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) approach can transform your content management.

Register now to download your complimentary copy of the report and gain the insights you need to build a long-form-ready content management strategy.

Rohit Bansal is a Principal Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, where he leads global go-to-market strategy for Adobe Experience Manager Guides. With over 15 years of experience, Rohit has led marketing for product and services firms in the B2B space and managed key functions including product marketing, digital marketing, thought leadership, demand generation, and partner relations. A passionate data-driven marketer, he is also a strong advocate for exceptional customer experiences.

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