The coordination trap.
Here's the paradox we're seeing across every industry: marketing teams have never been more talented, and they've never spent more time on work that doesn't require talent.
A brief lands. Production happens. Approvals route through a separate tool. Assets live in another system. Performance data sits somewhere else. Each handoff requires a human — to export, upload, notify, track status, chase approvers, incorporate feedback, repeat.
By the time a campaign launches, 40-50% of the approval timeline was consumed not by creating, but by moving things between systems.
Your marketing team isn't slow. They're drowning in coordination.
The solution isn't to work harder, hire more people, or add another point solution to an already fragmented stack. It's to architect a system where intelligent agents handle the busywork — and your humans focus entirely on what they actually bring to the table: strategy, creativity, and judgment.
That's what an AI Agentic Operating Model does. And it's what Adobe and Omnicom built together.
What Adobe and Omnicom built — and why it's different.
Earlier this year, Adobe and Omnicom announced the co-development of an AI Agentic Operating Model (AAOM): a unified operating model built on Adobe's connected technology infrastructure and deployed directly within your environment.
The honest question any experienced marketing leader should ask is: why does this partnership matter?
Adobe brings AI-connected technology infrastructure. Together, Adobe Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager Sites Optimizer, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Brand Visibility, Adobe Brand Intelligence, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, and Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker for enterprise agent orchestration form a unified foundation for data, creative orchestration, and marketing technology. One integrated ecosystem. One source of truth. No vendor fragmentation.
Omnicom brings vertical mastery and execution at scale. Omnicom's specialized agencies carry deep expertise across Retail, Financial Services, Pharma, and Automotive. Included in that are the industry nuances of compliance frameworks, workflow configurations, and change management that determine whether an operating model transformation actually lands. They know what good looks like in your industry, and how to operationalize it.
Together, they solve the integration problem most brands face. Rather than assembling a dozen point solutions that operate in silos, AAOM provides industry-specific configurations of Adobe's technology stack paired with pre-built workflows, embedded governance frameworks, and agentic and generative AI designed for your sector.
This isn't a generic platform requiring expensive customization. It's a configured, vertical-specific operating model, and that distinction matters more than it might sound.
What an agentic operating model actually does.
An agentic operating model isn't designed to replace people. It's designed to replace coordination.
Think about what agents do: they observe context, make intelligent decisions based on rules and data, execute actions, and report outcomes. That's perfect for the 80% of marketing operations that shouldn't require human deliberation — routing work, managing metadata, scaling volume, and synthesizing data.
What agents can't do is what your creative team does every day: imagine something new, understand the brand's soul, make the strategic call about which direction feels right, or know when to break the rules.
When you separate the two — when intelligent systems handle the coordination and humans handle the thinking — something meaningful happens. Your team moves faster and does better work.
Here's how that plays out across your stack:
Campaign orchestration
Adobe Workfront stops being a project tracker and becomes an intelligent orchestration layer. It understands your approval workflows, routing rules, and decision criteria. Legal reviews happen simultaneously with brand, not sequentially. Relevant context surfaces automatically. Your ops team stops chasing approvers and starts solving strategic process problems.
Smarter asset management
Adobe Brand Intelligence learns from performance data and proactively surfaces the right assets when your team needs them. Your creatives don't manually hunt through thousands of files, or prompt endlessly finding the words that describe your brand. With Simulation skills, your creative assets can be tested against synthetic audiences to see if your campaign will land. The system understands what has worked and makes it findable, brand compliant, and performant.
Scaled production
Creative Cloud and Firefly become intelligent production partners. Given your brief, your brand guidelines, and your market rules, the system generates on-brand variants at scale. Your creative directors aren’t replaced, they're amplified. Instead of spending two weeks creating variants, they spend two hours reviewing intelligent suggestions, riffing on new ideas, and making strategic calls about art direction.caas:content-type interactive-experience, caas:products/marketing-campaign-analytics
Unified data foundation
Adobe Experience Platform with Real-Time CDP serves as the foundation that unifies customer data, behavioral signals, and content performance across all channels. Omnicom also brings in Acxiom, the industry’s most comprehensive consumer data to enrich audience targeting. Real-Time CDP brings this all together, making your audience intelligence actionable—it understands who your customers are, what they've engaged with, where they are in their journey, and what they're likely to respond to—instantly. Every other agent in your stack gets smarter because they're fed by this unified, real-time data layer. Your production agents know what has performed. Your orchestration agents route work based on real customer insights. Your activation agents make decisions based on actual behavior, not assumptions.
Intelligent audience activation
Adobe Journey Optimizer combined with Omnicom’s ArtBot content automation system become your agents for intelligent activation. It understands your audiences, their behaviors, their journey stage, and their channel preferences — and makes intelligent decisions about which creative asset, personalized how, through which channel, at which moment. Your strategists define the journey and brand guardrails. Journey Optimizer handles orchestration and personalization at scale. A single piece of approved creative can be intelligently activated across dozens of audience segments without your team manually setting up each variation.
Continuous campaign optimization
With GenStudio for Performance Marketing and Omnicom’s Affinity Hub, performance data becomes a continuous feedback loop — learning from campaign results and feeding insights back into your entire system in real-time. Your production team sees what creative approaches resonate. Your activation team sees which moments and channels drive conversion. Your strategists see emerging patterns and customer intent signals. The data informs human creativity, orchestration, and activation faster. Insights become actionable immediately, not after the campaign ends.
How this gives time back to your team.
When intelligent systems handle coordination, something shifts:
Your creatives spend more time on strategy, less on status updates. They're not managing spreadsheets or chasing approvals. They're thinking about what the market actually needs.
Your ops team moves from "coordinator" to "architect." Instead of manually routing work and re-entering data, they're optimizing process, identifying bottlenecks, and building better systems.
Your approvers have better context, so decisions happen faster. They're not digging through email for background information. Everything they need is there, organized, ready.
Your campaigns scale without burning out your team. You can go from 200 to 600 variants per quarter without proportionally adding headcount. The agents handle volume. Your humans handle intelligence.
Your brand consistency becomes automatic. When metadata, approvals, and asset distribution are agent-driven, you're not relying on heroic effort to stay on-brand. Consistency becomes the default.
Real scenarios: agents at work.
Financial Services: Global campaign launch
You're launching simultaneously in twelve markets. Your team needs localized creative that respects regional nuance while maintaining global brand consistency.
Without an agentic model: Primary market creates, approves, launches. Regional teams then manually adapt. Approvals happen independently. Regional competitors see your move and respond first. Rollout lag between regions costs you first-mover advantage.
With AAOM: Workfront establishes a unified brief with localization rules upfront. Firefly's production agent creates base assets. Regional teams begin localizing immediately, not sequentially, with real-time visibility. Workfront's orchestration agent routes all localizations through a single approval layer with clear handoff criteria—different approval rules for different markets, but all transparent. Performance analytics agent learns from early-launch regions and feeds insights to later regions. Your global team makes one strategic call about global brand direction. The agents handle making sure it's executed consistently across markets.
Result: Simultaneous launches, 40% faster time-to-market, team focused on strategy rather than coordination.
Retail: Scaling seasonal volume
You're managing 500+ SKUs and seasonal promotions. You need to scale from 200 to 600 quarterly variants without proportionally scaling your team.
Without an agentic model: Each variant requires individual creation, individual review, approval chaos. Adding people doesn't help — it just adds more people to the approval queue. Total timeline: 4-5 weeks.
With AAOM: Standardized brief templates are established upfront. Firefly's production agent scales to 600 variants intelligently—each tagged with SKU, season, channel, compliance tier, automatically. Workfront's orchestration agent moves all 600 through parallel approval workflows based on complexity and risk—not everything needs full legal review. Adobe Experience Manager's asset agent learns what's performed well and suggests similar directions for similar SKUs. Your team's best creative director reviews concept direction and makes strategic calls about tone and positioning. Your ops person spends two hours monitoring rather than 40 hours coordinating.
Result: 600 variants in the timeframe that used to take 200. Cost-per-asset drops meaningfully. Creative quality improves because the infrastructure finally got out of the way.
The benefits for customers.
AAOM isn't a generic platform requiring expensive, open-ended customization. Here's specifically what the engagement delivers:
- A configured Adobe and Omnicom ecosystem tailored to your industry's workflows, compliance requirements, and customer dynamics — not a blank canvas
- End-to-end workflows from planning through creative production through activation through measurement, designed for your vertical's unique requirements
- An integrated data foundation that unifies audience insights, behavioral signals, and performance data across your entire marketing organization
- Embedded agentic intelligence: AI agents handling briefing, audience orchestration, content generation, experimentation, and insights — so your team focuses on strategy
- Industry-specific governance, compliance, and risk frameworks already embedded in the operating model, not bolted on afterward
The ownership model matters.
You own your strategic assets: your customer data, your brand strategy, your customer relationships, and your business outcomes. Omnicom and Adobe power the operating model: orchestration, agentic infrastructure, industry expertise, and execution support.
One honest note on implementation: this is not a flip-the-switch deployment. Enterprise operating model transformations take real work. What AAOM compresses is the timeline and the risk — because the vertical-specific configurations, pre-built workflows, and embedded compliance frameworks eliminate the months of discovery and customization that typically precede any value realization. You're not starting from scratch. You're starting from a working model designed for your industry.
The flexibility is built in.
AAOM can be deployed as a standalone operating model sitting on top of Adobe systems, enhanced with Omnicom's services to unlock vertical expertise, accelerated deployment, and scaled execution. You can even implement it modularly, starting with one part of the workflow (planning, creating, activating, measuring) and expanding as capabilities mature. The value of our partnership is the acceleration and vertical specialization.
What this unlocks.
- 40-50% reduction in approval cycle time (based on industry benchmarks for agentic orchestration deployments; client-specific results will vary)
- 25-55% reduction in cost-per-asset
- Campaign velocity that scales with business complexity, not linearly with headcount
- First-pass compliance rates that eliminate rework cycles in regulated industries
- Real-time responsiveness to market signals
- Increased traffic through optimized, personalized customer journeys
- Enhanced customer satisfaction driven by consistent, relevant brand experiences
See it in action at Cannes.
We're showcasing AAOM at Cannes Lions this year (June 22-26) — including a live demonstration of an end-to-end workflow running on the platform.
Ready to see how an agentic operating model actually works? Join us for a topical panel on Agentic Operating Models at the Omnicom Cove on Tuesday, June 23 at 2 p.m. Reserve your spot.
