The annual Adobe Summit is all about looking to the future of marketing and commerce through the lens of Adobe’s rapidly evolving product suite. This year, that future was one defined by what Adobe calls Customer Experience Orchestration (CXO), a convergence of AI, creativity, and data which Adobe sees as unlocking the holy grail of modern marketing and CX - personalization at scale.
As a long-standing strategic partner of Adobe’s, VML empowers some of the world’s biggest brands to unlock the full potential of Adobe’s solutions across customer experience, marketing, content supply chains, commerce and more. We take a keen interest in the evolution of Adobe’s products (and are actively involved in shaping them through participation in Adobe’s advisory boards), and we are always looking to translate Adobe’s innovation into tangible benefits for our customers.
In this article, we sum up the key developments that stood out from this year’s Summit, with insights from our experts who were in Las Vegas, and pointers as to what all this could mean for our clients.
Adobe Summit 2025: Key Product Announcements
A highlight of the Adobe Summit every year is the unveiling of new additions to the Adobe suite of solutions. Here’s what stood out for us this year:
Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator: The flagship product launch of the whole summit was new agentic AI capabilities for AEP. The solution consists of 10 new AI agents designed to help with workload, workflow and decision-making in areas such as Audience management, Content Production, Website and Workflow Optimisation, Data Engineering and Data Insights. The intention is to harness next-gen AI reasoning to help teams overcome bottlenecks and other barriers to productivity. All of this is managed via an Agent Orchestrator app within AEP, with Adobe touting multi-agent collaboration to help break down silos and the ability to customise agents by creating your own proprietary small models.
Adobe GenStudio Foundation: Having been involved directly in piloting the most recent expansion of Adobe’s flagship AI content supply chain platform, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, we see this as another exciting development for enterprise content production. GenStudio Foundation offers a unified interface bringing together data from Adobe’s full suite of content supply chain solutions, furthering the integration of Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service & Adobe Commerce Optimizer: From June 2025, Adobe Commerce will be available as a full SaaS product, simplifying access and operational management for e-commerce customers. We’re equally excited by Commerce Optimizer, an innovative solution that will allow clients running legacy commerce platforms to get all the benefits from Adobe as a Cloud via a front end that sits on top of existing infrastructure, without the need for a complete overhaul. Full disclosure - we’ve been involved in the beta program for Commerce Optimizer, too.
From Generative to Agentic AI: Welcome to the Era of Customer Experience Orchestration
So what do these product launches potentially mean for VML clients? Let’s start with the biggie, the unveiling of Adobe’s Agentic AI offer.
Agentic AI is the next frontier in AI evolution beyond Generative AI. While Gen AI has ushered in a step change in productivity and scalability of output (tell ChatGPT what you want, click a button, get your results), it still depends on a person to give the prompt and click the button. Agentic AI is the (semi) autonomous vehicle of the enterprise software world. It is designed to make decisions autonomously, to navigate, plan and execute complex tasks with minimal human input. This ‘third wave’ of AI therefore promises to bring together the productivity of Gen AI with the benefits of advanced automation.
David Sealey, Director of Growth and Partnerships at VML, believes Agentic AI marks another transformative moment in content and marketing capabilities. And he sees Adobe’s launch as the latest step in a journey the company has been on in aligning content production, CX and data more and more closely.
CX orchestration puts the customer in the driving seat. Connecting the data people provide to the content they see means their actions, habits, preferences and needs get reflected back in their experience. It’s like a pick your own adventure story. And what that’s doing is humanising the interaction between brand and individual.
David Sealey
Director of Growth and Partnerships, VML
What you can do now to get ready for Agentic AI
Before you can orchestrate great experiences for your customers, you need to understand who the customer is to define what the journey you want to deliver is.
This level of transformation won’t be achieved through a six-month project. You need to be prepared for multi-year developments across technology, data, and changes in operating model.
What Agentic AI unlocks is highly sophisticated levels of automation for your operations. Analyse what you are struggling with and identify where (and which) AI agents can deliver the best value.
A New Era for Personalization
Making genuine one-to-one personalization at scale possible emerged at the Summit as the north star guiding Adobe’s latest product strategy. Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, described the company as being on a “mission to transform the world through personalized digital experiences.”
Adding to that, VML’s Adobe Alliance lead, Harley Stevens, said customers are increasingly expecting personalization. “They’re expecting it immediately, they’re expecting it to be individually relevant to them,” she said. However, up until now, brands have found it all but impossible to deliver.
Creating and delivering personalized content has to date been a very manual process. It confronts brands with having to create content for each platform, for each channel, for each customer segment. The scales involved are enormous. Personalization has felt weak because the execution was often the lowest common denominator. People just haven’t had the capacity to do any better.
Harley Stevens
Adobe Alliance Lead, VML
Driving Personalization at Scale
Personalization is already central to VML’s work. For example, our Adobe Summit panel explored how VML helped T-Mobile integrate 21 data sources through Adobe Experience Cloud to enable personalized experiences built on comprehensive customer and prospect profiles. Combined with journey optimization across channels, this saw click rates on campaigns increase by 20+%. It’s an exciting prospect for us to work with Adobe to learn how agentic AI and CX orchestration can unlock even more value through personalization.
Personalization at scale places significant demands on delivering the right content to the right place. VML has extensive experience working with global brands on optimizing content supply chains and creating exceptional customer experiences using Adobe’s tools, particularly Adobe Experience Cloud.
Mark Deal, Technology Strategy Director at VML, highlights why Adobe Experience Cloud is such a good tool for addressing the challenges of personalization at scale:
Adobe Experience Cloud gives marketers the ability to both develop contentat scale and respond in real time, from production through to activation. It gives you the ability to do things much more quickly and deliver on immediate marketing needs, including meeting people where they are in the moment, which is essential for personalization. It brings together and unlocks the processes needed to do that.
Mark Deal
Technology Strategy Director, VML
However, Mark also cautions against viewing any technology as a simple plug-and-play solution for personalization, no matter how impressive the AI credentials might appear. He points out that generative AI doesn’t automatically resolve the fact that AI-generated content typically falls short of human standards.
The danger then when you let an automated AI content system churn out thousands of variations of an asset is that, personalized or not, they might fail to engage. It’s the CX equivalent of trying to sell fake designer goods - people see the difference, and people want authenticity.
What you can do now to prepare for personalization at scale
The operational changes associated with embracing personalization at scale are huge. In this new emerging world, you need to be clearer than ever about who you are, what your goals are, and what your governance models are.
Marketers might gleefully embrace being able to offload the monotonous, mechanical aspects of content production at scale to AI. But the key strategic and evaluative decision-making should still fall to people. No matter how clever agentic AI gets, it needs human oversight, by the right people.
Personalization at scale isn’t possible without handing over the reins to AI to some degree. Human oversight aside, you need to be able to trust the capabilities of the machine. That depends on the quality of the data you feed into it. Start to look at where data sits in your organization, what its value is, and how you can break down silos.
Unleashing Creativity
Another part of Anil Chakravarthy’s definition of CX orchestration that really chimed with us is the part about ‘creativity and marketing coming together’. In fact, the role and value of creativity was another key theme of Summit. Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, referred to this being a “golden age for design” and labelled “creativity the new productivity” in marketing.
With our unique blend of expertise in creative, marketing and tech, VML has long evangelised for bringing the three tightly together. So it’s heartening to see our partner explicitly aligning its product suite strategically in this direction. Adobe is positioning GenStudio Foundation as a ‘unified interface for marketers and creatives’. VML’s own work piloting GenStudio for Performance Marketing has been focused on exploring the possibilities of AI in campaign creative. In fact, at Summit we spent time building demos of how these AI capabilities might work within GenStudio for Performance Marketing for a major international CPG brand we have been working with.
But wait a minute, we know what you’re thinking. Isn’t AI meant to be killing creativity? What’s with all this buddying up?
Our experience working with Adobe AI toolsets like Firefly and GenStudio for Performance Marketing, as well as AI in general, actually leads us to conclude the opposite. Used the right way, AI can very much augment and empower creativity, rather than kill it.
It does so in two key ways:
AI Democratizes Reactivity: Just like no-code HTML builders allow everyone to build websites these days, the ease and accessibility of Gen AI tools help more people get creative. "With AI, you don't need to be a marketer, creative, or copywriter to create cool stuff now,” says Luis Fernandez, Executive Director, Technical Solutions at VML. “However, that doesn't mean we won't still need great marketers, creatives, and copywriters. AI is a tool available to everyone."
AI Unlocks Creativity at Scale: As with personalization, AI automates some of the time-consuming, laborious manual tasks that can hold creativity back. “Even for the most creative people, AI helps us be more creative”, says Harley Stevens. “It doesn’t take work away from people. It makes work easier by taking away the bulk production and processes.
The caveat we included above was that AI doesn’t kill creativity when used the right way. However, Mark Deal says creatives face a learning curve with AI.
The risk with AI being used in the wrong way is creativity withering away in favor of quantity or uniformity. Decisions on quality still have to be human-led. In the context of content production, two guardrails matter in particular: the classic sign-off process and control of the inputs the AI models you use, effectively previous and inspirational creative, aligning with brand.
Mark Deal
Technology Strategy Director, VML
What you can do now to start driving more value from creative through AI
There are no hard and fast rules for how AI can benefit creative processes. And if there were, that would likely prove stifling. Embrace an experimental approach built around short interactive cycles to learn what works, and what brings uniqueness and value to your brand, fast.
Creative assets are used in lots of multifaceted, complex ways, across different channels and markets, to suit different personas etc. There’s a lot of creative skill in making assets that can be used flexibly in lots of different ways, and that should be considered from the very start.
AI isn’t there to replace the spark of human creativity. It is a poor substitute in lots of ways. Focus on applying it to the mundane, repetitive aspects of production that tend to bog people down, allowing people to focus on the big ideas and what keeps them happy and inspired.
The Arrival of Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service
Compared to all the fanfare around Agentic AI, the announcements of Adobe Commerce as a Cloud and Adobe Commerce Optimizer went somewhat under the radar. But at VML, we see them as big news.
"We have a lot of Adobe Commerce customers, so this is a big launch for us,” says Harley Stevens. “What we’re seeing with Commerce as a Cloud Service is that Adobe Commerce is moving away from a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model to a full SaaS solution.”
Furthermore, the launch of Commerce Optimizer opens significant opportunities for customers with complex, legacy backend commerce platforms that they can't easily migrate from. It lets these customers access Adobe Commerce’s front-end capabilities while still integrating with their existing systems.
This new approach from Adobe reduces the upfront capital expenditure associated with commerce platforms significantly, moving to a manageable subscription model. Customers will no longer face costly, complex upgrades, no more manual updates, all of that will be handled as part of the subscription.
Luis Fernandez suggests that the soft launch feel around Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service reflects a broader shift in how we talk about commerce and commerce tech. “Five years ago, the focus at Adobe Summit was all about commerce,” he says. “Now, it’s again all about data and content. Content is king and data is queen. But let’s not forget—these content conversations are still commerce conversations. They’re all about how we market and sell things.”
Summary
The fact that we are already talking about Generative AI being the ‘old generation’ of artificial intelligence emphasises the accelerated pace of technological change we’re living through. That pace is a big challenge for organizsations and brands. We’re barely getting to grips with what’s gone before, and something else is already upon us.
It’s in this fast-forward environment that brands really need a partner they can trust to help them see the wood for the trees. When it comes to getting the most out of Adobe software, our credentials are exemplary. Not only are we a long-standing Adobe partner with a deep understanding of the company, its products and their capabilities. We are also uniquely positioned in the world-class level of expertise we offer across creative & media, marketing, commerce and tech. We cover all Adobe audiences in one place.
We also count AI as a specialist area and offer our own suite of AI-powered solutions. These include WPP Open, WPP’s intelligent marketing operating system, which leverages AI to connect clients to the right agency services across the WPP family. Used in conjunction with Adobe systems, it provides a complementary set of AI capabilities to help marketing and creative teams transform their processes, enhance efficiency, and accelerate business growth.
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