2026 AI and Digital Trends in High Tech | Adobe

How High-Tech Organizations Are Operationalizing AI to Drive Growth

The high-tech industry has made significant strides in AI maturity, investing in the infrastructure, alignment, and operational capabilities needed to scale the technology across the enterprise. But many organizations have not yet translated that maturity into customer-facing and buying-group experiences. The next phase of growth will come from extending AI beyond internal workflows into the buying journeys that drive strong customer engagement and GTM outcomes.

This overview explores the Adobe 2026 AI and Digital Trends findings across three critical areas for high-tech organizations: operationalizing AI at scale, building toward agentic B2B engagement, and overcoming the barriers to measurable GTM impact.

AI is already embedded in daily operations and strategy.

66 percent say their teams and processes are routinely automated by AI.
71 percent have identified practical, high-value AI use cases.
74 percent say senior executives and day-to-day practitioners are aligned on strategic AI priorities.

Organizations report “significant” or “moderate” improvements from generative AI in these key workflows:

Volume and speed of content ideation and production at 76 percent, finding information within the organization at 73 percent, and customer experience at 69 percent.

The industry is readying agents for a bigger role in customer engagement.

63 percent say the ability for their AI agents to interact seamlessly with other agents is a crucial factor in the AI vendor selection process, vs. 48% survey average.
67 percent expect agentic AI to handle half to all conversational customer engagement within 18 months, vs. 62% survey average.

The industry has established the necessary data and tools for generative AI.

77 percent have invested in shared platforms for customer data to support generative AI use.
71 percent have invested in tools for connecting different systems to enable the widespread adoption of generative AI.

The next hurdle is strengthening that foundation for agentic AI.

39 percent have a unified customer data foundation that enables them to extract insights from all the data created by AI agents and conversational interfaces.
37 percent have the system and integration tools needed to widely adopt agentic AI.

Organizations are shaping AI around audiences, from new segments to agent personalities.

47% are using AI to uncover new audience segments within their customer base.
47% plan to design distinctive AI agent personalities for different audiences.

With 56% of B2B organizations struggling to track and engage buying-group decision-makers, agentic AI orchestration is the industry's next frontier.

62 percent

expect agentic AI to coordinate sales, marketing, and service journeys in real time.

42 percent

plan for a future where buyer journeys include agent-to-agent interactions.

Most organizations still struggle to define the value of what their AI delivers.

71 percent cite unclear ROI or business case as a top challenge implementing agentic AI.
57 percent struggle to demonstrate measurable returns on their AI investments using CX-related metrics.
Only a minority have developed a clear ROI measurement framework for generative AI (37%) or agentic AI (31%).

Agentic AI efforts are concentrated on internal workflows.

Expected uses of agentic AI within the next 18 months:

80 percent Employee research, insights, and knowledge retrieval
74 percent Backend operations, including supply chain, compliance, and analytics

But customer-facing agentic AI lags as a strategic priority.

23 percent say agentic AI is embedded organization-wide or integrated across multiple functions for customer support today.
46 percent expect agentic AI to support sales with autonomous product recommendations or lead qualification within 18 months.
52 percent expect agentic AI to automate routine customer service tasks (e.g., FAQs, returns, order tracking) within 18 months.

The path forward requires extending the industry’s operational strengths into customer-facing and buying-group workflows — areas where AI has yet to be broadly deployed.

Organizations that pair this expansion with value measurement will turn today’s AI maturity into durable impact. Here are the top three action items for high-tech organizations:

View more insights from the 2026 AI and Digital Trends research.

APPENDIX

Research Methodology

For Adobe’s 16th annual AI and Digital Trends research, Oxford Economics, in partnership with Adobe, conducted global surveys of 3,000 executives and practitioners and 4,000 consumers to better understand how organizations are leveraging AI to capture customer interest, build brand loyalty, and augment customer experience (CX) workflows — and how customers are responding to these changes. The surveys were fielded online and via computer-assisted telephonic interviewing (CATI) from October through November 2025. “High tech” refers to a global set of executives and practitioners from organizations in the high-tech industry. This group makes up 17% of respondents and represents a wide range of business sizes. “B2B organizations” refers only to B2B and B2B2C organizations within the high-tech industry. View the 2026 AI and Digital Trends report for more on the full research methodology.