As marketers, we know our craft is in a constant state of reinvention. We adapt to changes in customer behaviors or industry shifts, but are steadfast in our belief that at its core, marketing is about connecting with the customer. That remains true today, even as a dynamic new agentic audience emerges. I introduced this idea in the first article in this series, From adoption to orchestration — marketing to humans and agents for an agentic-powered future. In my follow-up article, the Best of Adobe Summit, I explored how Adobe CX Enterprise agentic capabilities are making agentic marketing operationally real with CX Enterprise Coworker.

This third installment explores the three modes of engagement transforming the future of marketing: human-to-human, human-to-agent, and agent-to-agent. There's no need to choose between humans and AI. Brands will orchestrate both to reach the right people, in the right moments, at a scale that wasn’t possible before.

That future came to life at Adobe Summit, where we debuted the Agentic Marketing Garage, a live, hands-on experiment that paired marketers with AI agents. The agents built and deployed campaigns, identified audiences, produced assets, and recommended content strategy. It was exciting to see agents working with other agents to build out campaign frameworks, while the marketers orchestrated the entire customer journey, maintaining brand judgment and principles at every step. The marketers loved the chance to collaborate with and learn from the AI agents, and the agents got sharper with every interaction.

Inside the Adobe Agentic Marketing Garage.

The Agentic Marketing Garage brought together 145 marketers and 16 AI agents to solve real-world marketing challenges using Adobe technologies — from Adobe CX Enterprise to Adobe Firefly.

Attendees built their own agents, giving them names, voices, and roles, then rotated through five demo pods covering use cases that some of the biggest enterprises struggle to scale, including content strategy, personalization, creative automation, content architecture, and campaign delivery. Marketers designed product launch pages, built content migration plays, and ran cross-instance validations. At each pod, they debated problems with agents, building marketing artifacts on the spot. In fact, the most powerful moments were when attendees pushed back, redirected agents, and discovered they could move faster than ever before. The agents even went head-to-head, debating and grading each other to see which agent did it best.

The numbers tell the story: 60 sessions, 1000+ assets, 26 custom challenges created by attendees, 61 personalized agents, and 415 lessons learned. It’s proof that agentic marketing works.

And for marketers, it invites a bigger question: what else is possible?

Elevating the human experience in an AI-driven world.

As “AI slop” and digital saturation have increased, customers have responded by seeking out more authentic brand experiences, which means relevance, transparency, taste, and authenticity are now non-negotiable. In an AI‑powered world, the human difference is not diminished. It’s actually what sets brands apart.

What is the future of human-to-human marketing?

The future of human-to-human marketing must go beyond delivering the right message at the right time. Content needs to feel relatable, genuine, and original at a scale that matches the speed and expectations of today’s customer.

Experiential activations, like the Sharpie Analog Throwback Booth at Adobe MAX and Adobe Summit, allow for incredible in-person engagement with our customers. These kinds of participatory marketing moments are so important for connecting the customer directly to an experience that is personalized to their exact interests.

It is imperative for marketers to show up in person at events, roundtables, and customer meetups. This in-person connection has become even more valuable with the rise of AI. Customers want the confidence and connection that comes with experiences that span multiple surfaces but go beyond just educating them on what a brand offers.

Brands can’t just show up for customers. They have to connect with and delight them. Our interactive fan zone activation with Sport Beach at Adobe Summit did just that by building connections in the moment while showing customers the full power of Adobe’s customer experience and creativity products in action. These types of well-thought-out, well-executed brand experiences build lasting engagement that leads to long-term loyalty.

Human creativity is the differentiator here. Marketers should use AI to automate repetitive tasks, gain insights, and manage individual steps along the customer journey. But humans must remain in the center, orchestrating the overall journey and the emotional connection between brand and customer. Great marketing will remain a human-led art, enhanced by AI’s speed and scale.

The rise of the algorithmic audience.

Brands are no longer speaking only to people. They are also engaging AI assistants and algorithms that filter, rank, and recommend on a customer’s behalf.

Success with human‑to‑agent marketing depends on clarity, credibility, and a structure that AI systems can interpret and act on, without losing the human intent behind the message. This is not about optimizing for machines but about designing experiences that take into consideration audience and intent. If we consider agents as an audience, as we must when thinking about how brands show up in areas like answer engine optimization (AEO), then we can start mapping the journey needs for both human and agent audiences.

What is the future of human-to-agent marketing?

As we saw with our Agentic Marketing Garage initiative, human-to-agent marketing lets a marketer delegate part of their decision-making process to an AI agent. Brands must shape preferences before that delegation occurs. This moves brand awareness upstream, from influencing at the moment to being embedded in the criteria that guide it.

The brands that will succeed know the importance of establishing early brand awareness and product knowledge that leads to brand preference. This requires reimagining what brand awareness actually means. It’s no longer just broad, impression-led campaigns. Every brand needs to be top of mind with their customers, whoever those customers may be. Retail brands like Dick’s Sporting Goods or Ulta want that with their athlete and beauty product customers. But so do Cisco Systems and Dow Chemical. Customers need to know and trust your brand long before an agent delivers an answer.

When AI agents mediate discovery, content must be designed for interpretation as much as persuasion. Content needs to be accurate, well structured, and easy for AI to parse, while still reflecting human intent. This article, from SVP of digital marketing and customer engagement Nathan Etter, highlights how Adobe is rethinking agentic AI engagement.

AI agents can scan thousands of signals in seconds, evaluating consistency across third‑party validation, customer sentiment, and authority beyond owned channels, which means brand reputation is now a real-time operational challenge.

Operational orchestration is essential. Brands must coordinate how reputation is built and maintained across marketing, public relations, social, and customer experience. Using agents as teammates and coworkers can help enterprises achieve the speed and scale agent decisioning now requires, without losing human judgment or brand intent. I’ll go deeper into this topic in my next post.

Marketing for decisions that happen at machine speed.

Discovery, evaluation, and preference are no longer unfolding at human speed or waiting for human intervention. These decisions now happen continuously across systems, often without a person in the loop, which means marketers need to decide, with intention, what we delegate, what we govern, and where human judgment still matters most.

What is the future of agent-to-agent marketing?

The future of agent-to-agent marketing moves brand engagement beyond campaigns or messaging into systems-driven interactions. How information is structured, how signals are governed, and how decisions are allowed to occur on a brand’s behalf all determine whether a brand shows up at all.

There is little tolerance for ambiguity. Enterprises must be explicit about what decisions can be automated, where constraints apply, and where human judgment must remain in control. Incomplete information or disconnected systems do more harm than merely slowing performance. They can eliminate a brand from consideration because agents act on what they can verify and interpret in the moment.

Agent-driven engagements depend on your data governance, system interoperability, and the enforcement of brand standards in automated interactions, so marketing organizations will need to make structural adjustments.

In this new agent-to-agent marketing world, the most valuable brands are often the most helpful ones. They offer smarter guidance, better constraints, or value-added services that improve outcomes for their customer agents. Relevance is earned by being the most trusted, reliable participant in the system.

This is where customer experience reaches a new level of orchestration, where your brand is not controlling every interaction. Instead, your technology and systems are able to operate independently in moments when humans cannot intervene, while still expressing the intent and values behind the brand.

Powering the future of marketing with customer experience orchestration.

Human-to-human, human-to-agent, and agent-to-agent aren't three separate targeting strategies. They are three modes of engagement addressing one challenge: how do you show up with relevance and trust across audiences that experience your brand in fundamentally different ways?

The answer lies in customer experience orchestration (CXO). With CXO, your systems connect insights, decisioning, and action into a continuous system of engagement instead of disconnected touchpoints. In the final article in this series, I'll explore how CXO is the connective tissue that makes all three modes of engagement possible — and what it takes to make it work for your business.

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.

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