Marketing visionaries reveal how brands can succeed in the era of AI.

The world’s marketing leaders are revolutionizing their organizational structures, workflows, and skillsets to succeed in the era of AI. Adobe Experience Maker Awards winners and finalists are leading the charge. They’re helping their companies achieve new levels of efficiency, scalability, and personalization to better serve customers and drive growth for their organizations.

With more brands implementing and expanding their use of AI each day, we invited eight of these pioneers to take the stage at Adobe Summit 2025. They revealed how technology is transforming the marketing function as adoption accelerates. It was an honor to host them and learn how AI is enhancing the marketing function on every level — from the way we create and tell stories to the marketer’s role in shaping business strategies.

• Wilson Faure, Cox Communications
• Tim Furlow, Lenovo
• Betsy Rohtbart, IBM.com
• Moria Fredrickson, Lumen Technologies
• Shekhar Gowda, The Coca-Cola Company
• Ashley Cheretes and Gregg Klein, Prudential Financial
• Ankur Tandon, Hero MotoCorp

As an Adobe Experience Maker Awards finalist and two-time Adobe champion, Wilson Faure set the tone for our discussions on AI by inviting the audience to imagine a future where marketing is not just a tool for persuasion, but one that can dynamically give customers what they need before they even realize it.

“AI is not just a buzzword,” he said. “It’s the answer to achieving speed and precision and to adapting your marketing to customers’ needs.” Faure strengthened his point by referencing insights from Gartner, which has predicted that 90% of online content will be produced by AI by 2026 and that the technology will impact 97% of marketing interactions by 2027.

Faure also stressed that to succeed, marketing leaders cannot just “flip an AI switch” and expect their investment to pay off. They must transform their teams and processes as well, empowering and upskilling their employees to master AI solutions. Only then will they unlock the power of AI to enhance their analytics, automate their workflows, and deliver personalized customer experiences on a global scale.

In closing, Faure called on his fellow marketers to embrace AI to do what they do best — get closer to customers. “The future of AI is here. We cannot deny it,” he said. “That said, our main goal as marketers remains the same. Connecting with people.”

Lenovo has always been at the forefront of innovation, from its computers to its mobile phones, to the way it empowers customers to use technology in their daily lives. With AI tools emerging everywhere, Lenovo is thoughtful and intentional about its investments, ensuring they match Lenovo’s strategic objectives as capabilities evolve constantly.

AI is rapidly changing the way teams operate. The global ecommerce marketing team at Lenovo is using Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing in their daily operations to improve the consistency, scale, and speed of content production — all while adhering to brand and persona guidelines and maintaining a consistent thread across formats and channels. All of this allows them to move faster on the things that matter — strategy and insights.

To illustrate this principle, Furlow revealed how Lenovo used GenStudio for Performance Marketing to rethink its content supply chain. From creating personalized website imagery, static banners, email, and social assets Lenovo uses Adobe’s generative AI capabilities to categorize and analyze how customers interact with its website assets. Crucially, GenStudio for Performance Marketing allows Lenovo’s marketers to use metadata to learn more about customer behavior, better inform their strategies, and break down silos between creative teams and marketing analytics functions.

Jennifer Downes, global ecommerce CMO at Lenovo said, “We are looking across tech, talent, and process as we improve our performance marketing with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing. Tech is the enabler, but it’s not going to solve the challenge by itself. The bigger part is the people and process. The right skillset and growth mindset are critical.”

What can marketers do for their business? The answer to this question changes constantly. And, in the era of AI, Betsy Rohtbart believes marketers will need to rethink the way they drive transformation in their organization. Instead of implanting large-scale digital transformations in their marketing stack all at once, success with AI will require brands to adopt many small changes across their organizations over time.

Rohtbart analyzed the rise of AI through the lens of Geoffrey A. Moore’s bestselling book, Crossing the Chasm. Moore’s key insight was that there is a significant lag in purchasing behavior between early adopters of a technology — who take risks, sometimes at any cost — and the early majority — who wait for more proven solutions at more reasonable costs.

“Innovation has been so rapid that AI skipped right over the chasm. We blinked and it’s here,” said Rohtbart. “So much so that marketers now need to think about which tasks we can automate and which tools we can use when developing every new process and strategy.”

For example, teams that previously spent up to 80% of their time converting campaign creative into derivative assets to use across different customer channels can now use AI to do this at scale in a fraction of the time. “Even if we don’t use all those assets, there’s no harm in creating them because the waste is minimal,” Rohtbart explained, adding that instead of spending a lot of time on repetitive tasks marketers can focus on creating new, unique, original experiences.

As the trusted network for the world’s leading AI platforms and service providers, Lumen Technologies has a global view of how AI is transforming the way businesses operate. When it comes to marketers, Moria Fredrickson explained that the success of an AI initiative doesn’t necessarily depend on which technology a team uses, or even on executive support. It comes down to the individuals on that team, their views on AI, and whether they are empowered to succeed.

That’s why Lumen Technologies has invested in building excitement for AI across its marketing organization. For instance, Fredrickson encourages employees to partake in Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions about AI so they can wrap their heads around the technology and the role it will play in their working lives.

One of the most common questions submitted by Lumen’s marketers is “Am I being replaced by a robot?,” a sentiment shared by many in the modern workforce. Fredrickson’s response reflects Lumen’s commitment to using AI as a tool to enhance, not replace, human creativity: “My answer is that I was asking you to work like a robot for the last two years. What I want you to do is go back to the work that you love and come up with big, bold ideas that will make Lumen stand out in the market,” she said.

Finally, Fredrickson stressed the importance of setting clear goals for AI adoption and encouraging marketers to collaborate on innovative use cases. Lumen’s first attempts at implementing AI created tons of excitement but, without direction, different teams across the organization found themselves running similar AI projects in silos with little to show for their efforts. Since removing these silos and putting its marketers in the driver’s seat, Lumen has watched its teams take ownership of AI and develop innovative use cases and workflows that have set the business up to thrive in an AI-powered future.

AI has transformed everything marketers do, from content creation and design to campaign execution, to audience insights and personalization. But this is just a taste of what’s to come, according to this year’s Adobe Experience Maker Executive of the Year winner, Shekhar Gowda. “AI adoption has reached a crossroads,” he told the Summit audience. “The question now is where do we go from here?”

The Coca-Cola Company aims to answer this question by exploring AI from multiple angles. In 2024, Gowda and his team devoted themselves to experimenting with the technology and discovering what it can do. They have since unlocked countless applications for AI, but one of their most powerful revelations was the ways in which generative AI could help Coca-Cola create magical experiences for its consumers.

To celebrate the holiday season, Coca-Cola created a generative AI model that allowed consumers to “speak” in real time with an animated avatar of its iconic Haddon Sundblom Santa Claus. Following each discussion, the model would combine and process insights from the conversation to create personalized snow globes for each customer that reflected their interests — be it sports, food, or a bit of childhood nostalgia. Just as impressive, the model was able to process speech in 45 native languages.

“We learned a great deal from the experience. We learned how to scale our AI experiences, how to embed images and video in our mobile experiences, and so much more.” said Gowda. That was perhaps the biggest takeaway from his session — that learning how to use AI is not just a means to an end. It is a way to keep evolving and stay connected with customers in an increasingly fast-paced world.

With the Rock of Gibraltar as its logo, Prudential Financial has always represented security and stability in the financial services market. But that doesn’t mean the 150-year-old company is afraid to innovate. In 2024, Prudential invested heavily in AI transformation, adopting the technology across its creative, compliance, data analytics, and UX functions. It also hired Ashley Cheretes as its first director of generative AI and provided all its marketers with AI tools to use in their daily operations.

According to Cheretes and her partner in crime, Head of MarTech Strategy and Product Management, Gregg Klein, this combination of executive sponsorship and enablement helped Prudential to make major enhancements across its content supply chain, from planning to delivery. Its teams can now create first drafts of marketing assets 70% faster and edit and revise campaign imagery four times more quickly than they could before implementing AI solutions. Prudential’s web content has also become more impactful, driving a 135% boost in engagement.

To achieve these impressive wins, Klein and Cheretes had to be very strategic in their approach to rolling out AI and driving adoption among Prudential’s employees. That meant looking beyond tactics and performance metrics and rebuilding the company’s marketing processes from the inside out. “We changed the culture at Prudential to embrace AI. People who were fearful at first are now embracing the technology and asking for more,” said Klein.

Looking ahead, Klein and Cheretes outlined three key AI trends that will deliver the most value for marketers in the coming years. First, they expect to see more companies adopt AI agents to accelerate everything from content creation, to campaign execution and optimization, to data analysis. Secondly, digital twins will enable advanced customer segmentation and new levels of personalization at scale. Finally, marketers will let AI take on administrative tasks so they can shift their focus to more creative and strategic pursuits, like planning and connecting with customers on an emotional level.

Rounding out our speakers was Ankur Tandon, whose team scales personalized customer interactions for India’s leading motorcycle and scooter manufacturer. According to Tandon, the digital revolution that has dominated marketing for the past decade has been leading brands to this moment, with AI promising to completely transform the industry.

“Digital is the stage, but AI is the evolution. It’s the main act,” he told the Summit audience, before recounting how Hero MotoCorp used generative AI to create 2.5 million unique videos for its customers to drive engagement and sales during its busy winter season, which accounts for 25% of its annual sales. The videos were a hit, helping Hero MotoCorp to grow its business nearly two-fold.

When asked how marketing will change in the era of AI, Tandon was refreshingly humble. “I don’t know, but my team and I are working very hard to figure it out,” he shared. His guiding principle is to ensure Hero MotoCorp’s marketers continue putting customers at the core of everything they do.

“It’s easy to get distracted by different AI models and technologies. Don’t. Design around the customer, not just the gimmick,” he cautioned. Wise words from Tandon, and an important reminder for the Summit audience that while technologies like AI are immensely powerful, success in marketing will always come down to human creativity and to the ingenious ways in which experience-making brands use these solutions to unlock their full potential.

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