Boosting marketing efficiency with AI.

How ZEISS Meditec mastered the shift to customer centricity.

Up to 80%

cost reduction through automation

Minutes

for campaign creation using automated translations, standardized briefings, and reusable templates

Seamless

processes end-to-end, combining Adobe Workfront, Adobe Firefly, and the ZEISS GenAI Marketing Hub

Featured products:

Adobe Workfront

Adobe Marketo Engage

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform

Adobe Firefly

**Dr. Jochen Tham**
*Head of Digital Customer Experience, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG*

Tradition and innovation in medical technology.

At first glance, the career path of Dr. Jochen Tham, Head of Digital Customer Experience at Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, may seem unconventional — from zoologist to sales, and eventually to global marketing in a medical technology company. Yet, that diverse background makes him a key bridge-builder within ZEISS Meditec today. “My sales experience helps me understand our customers’ needs so we can create impactful and memorable experiences along the entire customer journey,” explains Tham.

Tham’s approach reflects ZEISS Meditec’s culture of embracing new perspectives and driving change. Today, the company is one of the world’s leading providers in the field of medical technology. As a pioneer in the precision mechanics and optics industry, it offers a diverse portfolio across multiple specialties — from microsurgery and ophthalmology to medical imaging. Its longstanding tradition is defined by a deep understanding of customer needs and a continuous drive for improvement. Today, ZEISS Meditec combines cutting-edge technologies with a strong focus on patient health to deliver customized products and services worldwide.

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Defining a common marketing language.

When the GenAI in Marketing project began, ZEISS Meditec’s marketing teams were far from being truly customer-centric. Seven independent business units, a broad product portfolio, and highly diverse target groups — from surgeons and service technicians to hospital IT managers — meant that orchestrating consistent and effective global marketing was virtually impossible. Local marketing teams were often understaffed and lacked the necessary technical resources. Content was sometimes distributed manually via email, translations were outsourced to agencies, and approval processes dragged on for weeks.

“We had up to four different asset management systems. Some materials were simply sent by email and then never seen again,” recalls Tham. Added to this was a fundamental disconnect between headquarters and the local teams. While high-quality content was being created centrally, the local offices often lacked the capacity to use or reuse it effectively. This created a cycle of inquiries, delays, and missed opportunities, which ZEISS Meditec described as the Wheel of Pain.

But how could they change course with so many stakeholders and processes involved? For Tham, it was clear that a complete reset was required. In a wide-ranging workshop involving both headquarters and international markets, and supported by consultants from BCG (Boston Consulting Group), the team developed a shared understanding of roles, workflows, and terminology. It quickly became clear that AI — based on a uniform, reliable, and robust dataset — would play a key role in streamlining processes, supporting local requirements, and reducing time-to-market. The outcome: the ZEISS GenAI Marketing Hub, an organizational and technical framework that enables local teams to manage marketing activations independently.

A single source of truth rather than scattered data points.

At the heart of this transformation is Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP), which unifies customer data from all business units into one centralized instance for the first time. This allows ZEISS Meditec to precisely segment its target audiences and deliver personalized communications — a crucial advantage in the complex B2B environment. “In B2B marketing today, we are speaking to a multifaceted buying center with many people involved in the purchasing process. From the surgeon to the hospital IT manager, everyone has different needs. With Adobe Real-Time CDP, we can tailor our communication accordingly,” explains Tham. The platform also gives local teams valuable insights into how many qualified contacts are available for a specific target group (for example, ophthalmologists in Brazil) and helps them understand which content is performing best. This creates a holistic view of the customer — data-driven, usage-focused, and in real time.

Adobe Workfront builds on this foundation, serving as the central platform for campaign orchestration and connecting every stage of the content supply chain. Local teams, for instance, can complete structured briefing forms for the in-house ZEISS GenAI, a proprietary model developed specifically for the company’s needs. This system generates and localizes text, provides a chat interface for local marketers, and uses a dedicated AI language model to ensure regulatory compliance. To streamline visual asset production, ZEISS Meditec uses Adobe Firefly, which allows marketing teams at headquarters to quickly create image variations — adjusting factors like ethnicity, background, or gender while aligning with brand guidelines.

Once the assets are finalized, they are automatically transferred to Adobe Marketo Engage via an integrated interface. There, they are immediately available for activation, as ready-to-send emails or landing pages, for example. Tham and his team have been using the marketing solution as a flexible customer contact database for several years now. This end-to-end process minimizes manual work steps, accelerates implementation, and ensures that content is consistent, compliant, and always on-brand.

Measurable change through integrated processes.

The results speak for themselves. In the first pilot countries, campaign production times were cut by more than half, while costs fell by up to 80% — mainly through savings on translation and agency services. Even markets that were previously nearly inactive can now easily run their own campaigns. A welcome side effect of this is a threefold increase in global visibility for key topics such as cataracts — the world’s most common cause of age-related vision loss — on the corresponding product pages.

ZEISS Meditec also achieved measurable personalization gains by integrating Adobe Real-Time CDP. In more than 15 test use cases, personalized content drove a 57% average increase in conversion rates. Today, different roles across the buying center can receive information that is directly relevant to their needs. “For surgeons, for example, we highlight innovations in the operating room, while service technicians are reminded about upcoming maintenance contract renewals,” explains Tham.

The next step: Becoming a learning organization.

The transformation doesn’t end with the technical rollout. ZEISS Meditec views its GenAI Marketing Hub as a learning system and a central driver of continuous feedback. By integrating analytics data from Adobe Real-Time CDP, the company can not only identify which content performs best, but also feed those insights directly back into the content development cycle. Each iteration adds to an optimized, data-driven content cycle the company now calls its Wheel of Gain. “With this, we are returning to what Carl Zeiss started 176 years ago: discovering what really moves our customers. Today, we do that in real time and on a global scale — with intelligent tools, structured processes, and a team that is actively shaping change,” says Tham.

More information about ZEISS Meditec’s success story is available here.