The conversation at Adobe Summit has fundamentally shifted. In the past, the focus was on features—a new module here, a deeper integration there—with AI largely positioned as experimental. This year was different.
The 2026 announcements weren’t product updates. They were a clear thesis on where enterprise marketing is going and the role Adobe intends to play in shaping it.
With Jensen Huang joining Shantanu Narayen on the Day One keynote stage, the signal was unmistakable: AI-native marketing is now the expectation.
But despite billions in platform spend, only 15% of organizations achieve positive ROI from their marketing technology investments (Gartner). Brands are no longer wrestling with whether they should adopt AI. They’re asking why they’re not seeing returns yet, and what it takes to get there.
That’s the conversation we leaned into at Summit. Here are the five insights shaping what’s next:
Insight #1: The Upside Is Already in Your Adobe Stack
Your next wave of performance doesn’t require more tooling investment; it comes from activating what you already have.
What we saw at Summit:
Across sessions and client conversations, including leaders like Vanguard, one theme was clear: underperformance isn’t driven by platform limitations. Only 49% of martech capabilities are actively used (Gartner). Most organizations are sitting on meaningful, unrealized value within their existing Adobe investment.
Unlocking that value requires alignment across people, process, data, and tech, not bolting on incremental tools. Merkle’s Content Supply Chain Maturity Diagnostic reinforces this, reframing transformation as an organizational challenge with multiple dimensions and unique starting points for every business.
Merkle’s POV:
Your platforms are incredibly capable. The upside is well within reach. Organizations driving outsized results have moved beyond implementation and embedded continuous optimization into their operating model. That’s where Merkle helps clients unlock measurable impact.
Adobe CX Enterprise was introduced not as a product, but as an agentic AI operating system that integrates AI agents, governance, and the Model Context Protocol to orchestrate the entire customer lifecycle.
By embracing open standards and supporting models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Adobe signals a clear shift: the model is no longer the differentiator. The advantage lies in the quality of your data and identity foundation.
Insight #2: The Next Growth Lever is Operationalizing Agentic AI
The opportunity isn’t only in deploying AI agents; it’s in scaling them responsibly with the right guardrails in place for your business.
What we saw at Summit:
Agentic AI has moved well beyond concept and is now embedded across the Adobe ecosystem, from GenStudio (Workfront, Firefly, AEM) to AJO and AEP (RT-CDP, CJA).
The shift from experimentation to a real, enterprise-ready capability is clear.
Sessions with Lenovo and Cox Communications showed AI evolving from automation into true intelligent and autonomous decisioning. With Vanguard, we saw agentic content assembly scale within a highly regulated environment, demonstrating this is not only possible, but repeatable.
The role of the practitioner is evolving as well. Teams are no longer just executing—they’re directing at scale. Marketing teams must act as “agentic directors,” guiding AI systems, setting guardrails, and shaping outcomes rather than managing every step manually.
Merkle’s POV:
The brands winning with agentic AI are building with intention. Governance, oversight, and operating model design are becoming true differentiators, especially in regulated industries like finance, pharmaceuticals, high-tech, and healthcare.
Merkle is proud to be building many of these agentic capabilities alongside Adobe today, with more innovations coming in the months ahead, helping clients scale AI with confidence while keeping humans firmly in the driver's seat.
Insight #3: Content Supply Chain Is Now a Board-Level Conversation
Content is shifting from a cost center to a measurable driver of business growth, efficiency, and ROI.
What we saw at Summit:
Content operations are becoming enterprise infrastructure. Adobe’s expansion of GenStudio, Firefly, AEM, and Workfront reflects a fundamental shift: content demand is expected to grow 5x over the next two years, and incremental process improvements won’t keep pace. The decision is no longer whether to automate production, but whether to do so with the right governance and control.
At the same time, discoverability itself is changing. Brand visibility is moving beyond traditional search, with increasing emphasis on how brands appear in AI-generated answers. This structural shift is already underway. Organizations that establish an AI-answer presence strategy now will create a compounding advantage.
With the introduction of Brand Intelligence, GenStudio becomes an always-on engine, fueling content with real-time market, competitive, and social insights. In parallel, CX Experience Orchestrator elevates global operational orchestration by bringing strategy, content, and channels into a unified system. It’s continuously infused with in-the-moment social listening and real-time signals, as demonstrated in the keynote with Ulta Beauty.
The result is a content supply chain that can create, adapt, and deploy at scale across media, email, and web. The value of content is now measured in speed, scale, relevance, and business impact, not just output.
Merkle’s POV:
As one of only two Premier Adobe partners for GenStudio transformation, we’re working with clients to operationalize this shift in real time.
We extend these platforms into a true marketing operating system of record—connecting data-driven content optimization, creative strategy, and localization at scale, while bridging CX and media and driving the organizational change required to make it sustainable.
For organizations looking to demonstrate ROI from their platform investments, we help translate operational improvements into measurable business outcomes, positioning content supply chain as strategic infrastructure for enterprise growth.
Insight #4: Real-Time Data Is the Unlock, and Identity is the Foundation
Your platforms can only perform as well as the data behind it.
What we saw at Summit:
Real-time data activation is delivering on its promise, but only when built on a strong identity foundation.
Our session with Vattenfall showcased what this looks like in practice: 450+ commercial offers activated through AJO with real-time decisioning, driving personalization at scale in a complex, regulated market.
At the same time, Adobe’s architecture continues to center around Real-Time CDP as the connective layer across AJO, CJA, and GenStudio, bringing data, insights, and activation into a unified system. The pressure to unify data has only accelerated. This is no longer a future-state ambition; it’s a current-state requirement to compete.
Merkle’s POV:
We’re one of a select group of global partners with deep specialization across Adobe Real-Time CDP, AJO, and CJA. But more importantly, we bring the identity layer that makes it all work.
As a data-founded consultancy, we leverage Merkury—our proprietary identity platform spanning 1.4B+ profiles and 98% of US consumers—to ensure data is not just unified, but actionable.
For organizations looking to unlock real-time personalization at scale, success starts with a simple question: are you building around what you want to sell, or how you grow customer relationships over time?
Insight #5: B2B buyers have changed. Most B2B systems haven’t.
B2B growth is shifting from campaigns to coordinated, account-based experiences across the full journey.
What we saw at Summit:
The shift to B2B 3.0 is well underway. What started as a vision is now a real architectural opportunity. AI-driven, full-funnel account orchestration is becoming the new standard.
Buying has fundamentally changed. B2B journeys are now dynamic, multi-stakeholder, and signal-driven—requiring real-time coordination across marketing, media, and sales. Yet most organizations are still operating on disconnected, channel-based architectures and lead-centric models that weren’t designed for this reality. The result: less than 40% of B2B buyers feel brands truly understand their needs, and 77% of buyers describe their journey as complex or difficult (Gartner).
At the same time, the content model is evolving. Modular content can now be intelligently assembled through AI-powered MCPs in AJO and Marketo, delivering personalized experiences to key members of buying committees. The future isn’t 19 versions of the same campaign. It’s a single, coordinated experience that delivers a continuous, account-level journey across stakeholders.
This shift is forcing tighter alignment across marketing, sales, and service, requiring shared data, shared orchestration, and shared accountability across the full account lifecycle.
Merkle’s POV:
Account-based is no longer a tactic. It’s the operating model that drives B2B growth. We help organizations re-architect for this reality, built on unified account and buyer identity, AI-driven orchestration, and connected activation across web, AJO, media, and sales.
As Adobe continues to advance AJO B2B capabilities, organizations like Lumen Technologies are already leading the way in operationalizing this model.
For organizations ready to move beyond campaigns, the opportunity is to design a coordinated system that simplifies complexity and delivers consistent, personalized engagement across every stage of the account journey, turning a fragmented buying process into a competitive advantage.
Next Steps — What Should You Do?
If you’re not sure where to start:
Schedule an Intelligent Work Orchestration Diagnostic. This acts as a navigator, pinpointing your greatest growth and operational opportunities across strategy, content, data, and activation, and providing a clear, actionable path to address them immediately.
Questions to Discuss with Your Teams:
- Where are we seeing the biggest breakdowns across teams, workflows, and tech?
- Are we operating in a coordinated system, or still in silos?
- What’s slowing down our ability to execute and scale? What barriers can I remove to help you accelerate?
If you’re already on the journey:
Focus on accelerating value realization from your Adobe investment—whether across GenStudio (Workfront, AEM, Firefly, Express, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Content Analytics) or Adobe Experience Platform (RT-CDP, AJO, CJA).
Questions to Discuss with Your Teams:
- Where can we unlock incremental performance without additional investment?
- Are our teams aligned around a shared orchestration model?
- How are we measuring and optimizing across the full experience lifecycle?
If you were at Summit and want to go deeper:
Access the session recordings and presentations or connect with our team to continue the conversation and explore what this means for your organization.
Questions to Discuss with Your Teams:
- Which use cases can we activate in the next 90 days?
- Where can we move from experimentation to operational scale?
- What would it take to embed these capabilities into our operating model?
The Summit conversation is just the starting point. Connect with our team to exploe what these shifts mean for your business and where to move first.
