5 forces that will shape customer experiences in 2025
Each year, Adobe’s enterprise customers unlock ways to create, personalise, and drive value from their customer experience, and 2025 will be no different. In fact, this year might represent the greatest evolution in digital content creation, marketing, and technology adoption I’ve seen since joining this company.
Enterprises today understand that every digital experience they deliver must be personal if they want to build brand loyalty. Personalisation at scale requires inspiring content – lots of it – that’s delivered to the right person on the right channel at the right time. It requires data and insights to make that content relevant and to offer meaningful customer journeys according to their preferences. That puts a huge amount of pressure on marketing and creative teams to create massive volumes of tailored content while staying on brand and acting on data in real time.
With Generative AI, Adobe is helping enterprises solve these challenges, making true personalisation at scale possible. What's more, we're doing it with the same solutions we’ve been putting to work for our own business. By unifying content and data at scale with AI, we're making it possible for brands to bring generative AI out of the playground and into production.
From IBM, to Pfizer, to Riyadh Air, it is a privilege to work with pioneering brands who are transforming their digital experiences with support from Adobe. Looking ahead to 2025, we are excited to help our customers navigate a new wave of opportunities and challenges in the year ahead. In that spirit, here are the trends that will shape customer experiences in 2025 and my take on how to capitalise on each of these.
1. Exploring CX strategies for a new generation of consumers
Generation Z has immense spending power. According to Nielsen IQ, Gen Z is projected to reach $12 trillion in spending power by 2030, overtaking Boomer spending by 2029. To make the most of this enormous opportunity, brands are rethinking their approach to customer relationships with this younger and idealistic demographic.
To serve a more digitally savvy and omnichannel generation, businesses are becoming digitally savvy themselves. From new technologies that help them to create, personalise, and roll-out content more quickly, to real-time analytics that reveal what audiences need and want in the moment, to forward-thinking digital experience strategies that align with their customers’ consumption habits. Businesses will continue to up their CX game across the board to connect with a new generation of consumers and earn their trust. In this context, brands of any kind need to act fast to stay relevant with their consumer and to remain competitive.
2. Generative AI: a transformative force that will change how organisations work today
Nearly every leader I speak with today is experimenting with AI in their organisation, with some testing hundreds of concurrent models. Many Adobe customers have already implemented generative AI use cases and are reaping unprecedented rewards. Take IBM, they used Adobe Firefly to create landmark campaigns, which drove an impressive 26 times higher engagement, while improving time-to-market by 60%.
One of the biggest advantages of generative AI is that it frees us from tedious, time-consuming tasks, so creative teams can focus on being more creative and productive. And according to McKinsey, the technology will help the sales and marketing function achieve between $.8 trillion and $1.2 trillion in productivity gains across content creation, personalisation, and sales. That said, Adobe understands that our customers want to use AI responsibly, which is why our technologies are designed with governance and transparency top of mind, and why we are leading the charge to standardise AI safety practices in our industry.
3. Achieving the Holy Grail of personalisation at scale
Personalisation is the key to engaging customers and building long-term trust and loyalty. The challenge for marketers, until recently, has been to collect, analyse, and act on customer data quickly enough to achieve this level of hyper-personalisation for millions of customers across multiple geographies.
The advances we saw in analytics and generative AI in 2024 have finally put personalisation at scale within reach. With the ability to create and update audience profiles in real-time and use these insights to inform their sales and marketing efforts, brands can focus on what matters most: building emotional connections with their customers that inspire them to act.
4. Connecting and accelerating the content supply chain
Demand for high quality content is exploding. An Adobe survey found that two-thirds of marketing professionals expect demand for content to grow between five and 20-fold by 2025. I’m proud to say that Adobe’s Global Marketing Organisation (GMO) has been customer zero by putting to work our solutions within our business. For example, by using GenStudio for Performance Marketing, we empowered our creatives and marketing teams to build and test five versions of an Adobe Photoshop email in record time, resulting in a 57% increase in click rates. The generative AI-powered email tests allowed us to test new subject lines for a campaign every two weeks, resulting in 8.5% higher open rates. Testing scale and speed transformed our approach to content optimisation, significantly accelerating our marketing performance and efficiency.
Faced with limited budgets and resources, brands are streamlining and unifying their content supply chain to drive new levels of efficiency while making their campaigns more creative and impactful. Adobe’s latest technologies are helping companies like Deloitte and IBM to modernise their entire content supply chain, from planning, to production and approvals, to delivery and performance analytics. That includes Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, our revolutionary AI-first solution that allows marketers to create on-brand content at scale and personalise every asset to their target audience across channels. Publicis Groupe Middle East recently announced PxA, a bespoke digital marketing practice for the region powered by Adobe GenStudio to provide businesses with a seamless framework to manage and optimise content creation and workflows across their entire supply chain. I’m excited to see this pioneering practice launched in a dynamic region for customer experiences.
5. Empowering creators and championing content safety
We have entered a golden age of creativity. Empowered by access to new technologies and digital distribution platforms, more people are becoming content creators and sharing their stories with the world. In 2025, AI-based tools will help artists and brands to work more efficiently than ever and express themselves in ways that were never possible before.
They must be careful, however. While creators are eager to use the technology, they are rightfully concerned about legal issues such as copyright and IP infringement. That’s why Adobe Firefly, our generative AI model, is IP friendly. So that our customers can use our latest generative-powered solutions knowing they will not infringe on copyright or other IP rights like trademarks and logos.
We believe that generative AI can be developed responsibly, and that starts with respect for creators' rights. To that end, we also launched the Adobe Content Authenticity Web App last year, which allows creators to easily attach Content Credentials to their digital work. This helps them control how their content is used, while showing attribution, enabling creators to gain recognition for their work and better connect with audiences who come across their work online.
If 2024 was the year generative AI hit the mainstream, 2025 will be the year the technology hits its stride. Emboldened by the success of early movers, more businesses are now moving their AI initiatives out of the playground and into production. It will be a year that will see more Adobe customers than ever unlock the power of AI to unleash their creativity, accelerate document productivity, and deliver digital experiences that inspire their customers to act.
For more about how Adobe is helping brands across Europe personalise customer experiences, click here.