Inside Marketo AI: Five ways marketing operations teams are getting time back.

B2B marketing operations teams are being asked to do more than ever. Campaign volumes keep rising, timelines keep shrinking and each programme is expected to have a measurable impact.

Marketo AI was designed to dramatically improve the productivity of marketing ops teams through AI intelligence and campaign workflow automation. Built as an agentic-first experience for Adobe Marketo Engage, it helps marketing ops teams automate some of the most time-intensive tasks without taking away their oversight and control.

With Marketo AI now generally available, teams are already working more effectively with Marketo Engage and are able to spend more time focusing on strategy, quality and performance. Adobe has seen promising results since rolling out Marketo AI through a limited beta release, which reached nearly 2,800 Marketo Engage subscriptions earlier this summer. Here are some of the key capabilities and benefits of Marketo AI.

Ask for what you need, instead of clicking for it.

Marketo AI delivers an agentic-first conversational workspace, accessible directly from My Marketo. Instead of navigating through multiple screens to complete a task, teams can simply describe what they need in plain language and let Marketo AI handle the work.

That means marketing ops teams can easily access the skills they use most often, like importing leads, validating programmes, investigating leads and more. And since the experience is already grounded in your existing Marketo Engage data, teams can move more quickly without giving up the context they need to make confident decisions.

Delegate time-consuming import, QA and investigation work to AI.

The core of Marketo AI is powered by agentic AI, which helps teams execute tasks in Marketo Engage using purpose-built agent skills, each designed for a specific function. These agent skills include:

• Lead importing. Automatically flag duplicates, standardise values and clean up thousands of records in seconds during lead list import.
• Campaign planning. Upload a campaign brief in any format and generate a complete set-up document.
• Programme build-out. Create complete programmes and run Smart Campaigns from a brief with the right programme structure and organisation rules in place.
• Programme validation. Test programmes against organisational best practices, workspace-specific rules and uploaded test plans.
• Lead investigation. Diagnose why a lead didn’t reach a milestone by reviewing common scenarios and receiving an evidence-based answer in seconds.

Importantly, none of these agentic skills run unattended. Your team reviews and approves everything before it goes live inside Marketo.

The time savings can add up fast. One team used the agent skills in Marketo AI to audit over five years of email performance across a database of more than 200,000 leads, generating a comprehensive root-cause report in minutes — a process that had previously required 30 to 45 hours.

Catch bad data before it moves through your programmes.

For marketing ops teams, data quality is not a background problem. It is an operational issue that can affect routing, scoring and segmentation — which ultimately affects engagement and revenue. For instance, if a lead submits a form, a triggered campaign and flow steps run immediately. If there’s a problem with this data, the lead may be routed incorrectly or counted in the wrong segment before any clean-up can happen. Overall campaign performance improves when bad data is addressed as it’s coming into Marketo Engage.

In Marketo AI, callable agents run as real-time flow steps within Smart Campaigns, checking and correcting bad data as each lead progresses. Five templates are available and ready to use in Marketo AI, including:

• Job title standardiser. Clean up inconsistent job title variants into a standard format that your scoring and segmentation rules can recognise.
• Company name normaliser. Standardise company names for more accurate routing and reporting.
• Phone formatter. Format phone numbers to a consistent standard as leads move through your programmes.
• Bot activity detector. Flag clicks from security scanners before they inflate your engagement scores.
• Bot and spam lead detector. Flag gibberish names, disposable email addresses and other patterns typical of bad form fills.

Teams are not limited to just the pre-built agents. They can create customised callable agents using plain language — Marketo AI builds the agent and configures the webhook, just as it does with the built-in templates.

Solve complex problems quickly.

Some issues are so complex, they require hours to solve. Marketo AI is like a new team member that knows more than your most experienced admin. For example, one team was troubleshooting a Google Display retargeting campaign that never initiated, even though the campaign logic looked correct and leads were submitting the form successfully.

Rather than stopping at the obvious, Marketo AI systematically narrowed down the problem — from validating the referral logic to comparing the campaign filters with the data written by the form. From this, it uncovered the real issue: The Smart Campaign was filtering on legacy Marketo Engage UTM fields while the form populated Salesforce-synced __c fields. By identifying this hidden field mismatch, Marketo AI quickly restored the campaign, which prevented qualified leads from being missed and ensured retargeting efforts and follow-up experiences worked as intended.

Get product answers without leaving Marketo.

With Marketo Engage’s depth and flexibility, it can be challenging to figure out the best way to do something new or irregular or to help onboard new hires quickly. Product knowledge in Marketo AI is a powerful inline coach — letting users ask questions in plain language and get step-by-step instructions right where they're working. Questions like, "How do I build a nurture campaign?" or "How do I create a Smart List?" are answered instantly instead of waiting for someone’s response. Every answer is based on official Adobe documentation and includes citations so your team can trust and verify the guidance it gets. This also means more of your marketers can work like Marketo Engage power users, even if they’re new to the platform or tackling an unfamiliar task.

Built for the way marketing ops teams work now.

Marketing operations teams need speed, but they also need control, consistency and confidence in every programme that goes live. Marketo AI is built to support this. It helps teams reduce repetitive work, improve data quality and get trustworthy answers faster, while keeping review and approval in the hands of the team.

And for teams that want to bring their own AI tools into the workflow, like Claude or Microsoft Copilot, the Marketo Engage MCP server adds another layer of flexibility in Marketo Engage, with its deep customer engagement data, helping keep Marketo at the centre of marketing operations.

Marketo AI is designed to take on the repetitive work your team does every day, so marketers can spend more time on the work that drives growth.

Learn more about Marketo AI in Adobe Marketo Engage or keep in touch to your Adobe account representative to sign up for access today.