The future of marketing in the era of AI — part 1.

Every great evolution in marketing has a spark — the moment when bold ideas and powerful technology come together to create entirely new possibilities. Right now, that spark is AI. It’s redefining how brands connect, communicate and create value and reshaping the workflows that deliver hyper-relevant experiences. In this series, I’ll explore how innovations like generative and agentic AI are shaping the future of marketing and what it means for marketing and IT executives who are considering how, where and when to deploy AI solutions.

Let’s start back in 2022 — which feels like forever ago. At the time, Adobe was working closely with customers worldwide to understand how they were scaling personalisation to meet rising customer expectations — and how these efforts were affecting business outcomes. Fast forward three years and much has changed, especially with AI’s growing influence. But some things remain constant: the need to personalise customer content and experiences, the importance of a strong data foundation and the ability to turn insights into action quickly and effectively.

AI is a powerful force multiplier for marketers and creative teams. Now, with the integration of customer data and AI solutions, the promise of personalisation at scale has become a reality. Personalisation at scale used to mean serving up information to customers based on a few simple criteria —like date, time and airline preference. With today’s AI agents, it means an entire holiday curated and booked for you, with flights, hotels and local experiences tailored to your preferences across location, dates, timing, loyalty programmes and more. Our digital strategy team is working with a leading hotel brand to do exactly this using a conversational interface powered by Adobe Brand Concierge. It's the difference between feeling like one of millions and one in a million. This is finally true personalisation at scale and for marketers, AI unlocks so much more opportunity to create compelling, completely unique experiences that drive acquisition, build loyalty and cement brand preference.

To better understand how buyer sentiment around personalisation and AI are changing — and how organisations are adapting — Adobe collaborated with Forrester to survey over 1,800 B2C and B2B buyers across the globe. Top line results show that personalisation is a strategic imperative. Eighty per cent of decision-makers said their organisation plans to continue increasing internal and external investment in its personalisation strategies by 10% or more over the next two years. But with customer expectations at an all-time high, challenges remain. Nearly 75% of customers surveyed by Forrester expect brands to understand their preferences, including when, where and how they want to connect. Brands need to ensure that they nail the context for personalisation so that outreach doesn’t feel invasive or irrelevant. A timely gate-change notification as you move through the airport is useful. An SMS offer for a hotel you just checked out of? Not so much.

Building personalised experiences with data, content and AI-powered journeys.

Personalisation works when it’s relevant and well-timed. Only then can it build trust and deliver strong returns. To enable true personalisation and connect with customers on their own terms, marketing leaders should activate this three-part strategy:

1. Data-driven insights — using data to understand what customers need and when they need it.
2. Personalised content creation — developing content that speaks directly to customers’ wants.
3. AI-powered customer experience orchestration — orchestrating customer experiences across a variety of channels with content created based on individual preferences.

Let’s explore each of these in greater detail.

Data-driven insights.

Without a robust customer data platform, content won’t perform and customer journeys fall flat. When data is unified, teams can instantly access real-time insights across all touchpoints and then use that data to create targeted content and experiences that align with each customer journey.

For example, Ulta Beauty, the nation’s largest speciality beauty retailer, turned to Adobe Experience Platform — the data and AI foundation for powering personalised, seamless customer experiences across channels — to activate real-time insights from more than 44 million loyalty members. By unifying data across every touchpoint, Ulta can instantly respond to preferences, delivering timely offers, product recommendations and content tailored to each guest. Instead of siloed efforts, customer segments are created in real time and managed in one place, improving efficiency and guaranteeing a cohesive experience across all channels. It’s now possible to personalise every interaction wherever it happens — whether a customer is browsing the web, using an app or shopping in-store.

Personalised content creation.

Having a content supply chain that can personalise messaging and scale content is a game changer for marketers. An AI-infused content supply chain solution like Adobe GenStudio gives creative and marketing teams a single place to plan projects, produce and deliver content and measure results, feeding insights back to drive improvement.

One of the best examples of this in action is our collaboration with The Coca-Cola Company. We worked together to develop an AI-powered designed system to manage more than 200 brands across 250+ countries, helping them to create more high-quality content at scale. The system, called Project Fizzion, uses AI-enhanced StyleIDs to capture designers’ creative intent into every asset, keeping the brand consistent while designers get to focus on storytelling. Fizzion lets teams and agency partners generate hundreds of on-brand campaign variations quickly. This connected workflow helps teams move faster, stay aligned and produce content that’s ready for personalisation at scale.

AI-powered customer experience orchestration.

Personalised customer experiences must be delivered across both digital and physical channels in a seamless, connected way. With the support of AI, marketing leaders can develop the most relevant experiences for customers at the exact right time. This approach, known at Adobe as Customer Experience Orchestration, combines intelligent decisioning with real-time data to guide each customer along a customised journey, no matter where or how they engage.

AAA Northeast is proving the value of AI-driven personalisation by using Adobe Experience Platform to orchestrate better customer experiences. They started with Adobe Experience Cloud to understand and improve their digital channels. Once they saw results, they expanded to Adobe Experience Platform and AI tools to connect with members across all channels more effectively. By bringing together data from multiple sources into one place, AAA Northeast could better understand their members — and by orchestrating connected experiences at every interaction, they could act on those insights quickly. Their personalised web offers converted three times higher than standard segmented offers and targeted emails reached the right members at the right time, boosting conversions by 60-80% and sales by 30-70% all while trimming down email lists. It’s proof that orchestrated personalisation isn’t just a nice idea. It’s a scalable reality.

The future of personalisation and customer experience orchestration.

Experience innovators like Ulta Beauty, The Coca-Cola Company, AAA Northeast and Adobe recognise that customers are taking in content all day, every day. The pieces that catch our attention do so instantly because they speak to our needs and feel personally relevant. That kind of resonance is only possible when companies have a content supply chain accelerating content creation for every customer and a customer orchestration solution that understands context in real time. With these two components in your marketing stack, you can deliver personalisation at scale and create seamless customer experiences across channels. The right content, delivered in the right context, turns interest into loyalty and loyalty into evangelism.

I encourage you to read the full personalisation report we developed with Forrester, How To Improve The ROI Of Personalisation In The Era of AI. It offers valuable insights and action plans for building greater brand trust with relevant and meaningful experiences that drive business impact.

Don't miss the next post in this series, where I’m sharing some thoughts on how brands can find their footing with large language models and conversational discovery. Hope you’ll join me there.

Rachel Thornton is Adobe’s chief marketing officer for the enterprise business, helping organisations 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 energising and empowering CMOs and experience makers worldwide.

With more than 25 years in B2B technology marketing, Rachel has held leadership roles at Amazon/AWS, Salesforce, Cisco and Microsoft. She has built and scaled enterprise marketing, driven customer acquisition and revenue growth and led go-to-market strategies across field marketing, advertising, sports marketing and events.