Highlights Of The Adobe Summit London 2026: AI Coworkers, Smarter Marketing And The Future Of Customer Experience

The next customer visiting your website may not be a person. It could be an AI agent researching a purchase, comparing options and deciding whether your brand deserves to make the shortlist.

That shift was one of the clearest messages from Adobe Summit London 2026, which brought more than 3,000 marketers, technologists and creatives together to explore how AI is reshaping customer experience. Having attended the event, I came away convinced that marketing is entering a far more consequential phase of AI adoption.

The focus has moved beyond generating copy and images. AI is starting to participate in discovery, decision-making, campaign execution and customer journey orchestration. It is becoming a coworker, capable of spotting opportunities, coordinating specialized agents and taking action within boundaries set by humans.

Adobe organized its vision around three interconnected priorities: brand visibility, customer engagement and the content supply chain. Together, they provide a useful framework for understanding how marketing will change as customers increasingly delegate decisions to AI.

Brand Visibility Is Being Rewritten

For the past two decades, digital visibility has largely revolved around search engines, social platforms and paid media. Generative AI is disrupting that model because people are increasingly asking AI assistants to research, compare and recommend products on their behalf.

“Brand visibility is being rewritten by LLMs,” said Luc Dammann , SVP and President of EMEA at Adobe. He explained that machines are becoming an increasingly important bridge between brands and consumers, changing the way companies earn a place in the customer’s consideration set.

This creates a new marketing discipline. Brands still need to reach human audiences, while also ensuring that their products, services and expertise can be found, interpreted and recommended by AI systems.

Adobe Brand Visibility is designed to help organizations understand how they appear across generative AI services, which prompts and topics are driving discovery and where competitors are gaining ground. Adobe announced that Semrush insights are now being integrated directly into the offering, combining AI visibility data with prompt research, market comparisons and competitive intelligence.

A Heathrow Airport demonstration illustrated where this could lead. A traveler used ChatGPT to plan a journey, discover relevant Heathrow services and identify the right airport lounge. An LLM application built with Adobe Experience Manager allowed the traveler to receive personalized guidance and reserve fast-track security without leaving the conversation. The important point was that Heathrow could remain involved in the experience even when the customer began their journey on somebody else’s interface.

This has significant implications for every business. A company may own its website, app and customer data, yet the first meaningful interaction could increasingly take place inside ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini or another AI service. Brand visibility will therefore depend on how clearly AI systems can understand an organization’s content, authority, products and relevance.

AI Moves From Assistant To Coworker

Adobe’s headline vision for connecting these capabilities was Adobe CX Enterprise, an agentic system designed to orchestrate customer experiences across data, content, audiences, channels and workflows.

At its center is CX Enterprise Coworker, a specialized AI agent that can interpret a business goal, develop an execution plan and coordinate other agents, tools and people.

Gina Casagrande , Adobe’s Director of Customer Experience Orchestration Evangelism, demonstrated how the coworker could detect an unexpected rise in traffic to a hotel destination page, identify why visitors were leaving without booking and recommend a response. It then helped optimize the page, create an acquisition campaign, identify audiences, generate content variations and prepare a personalized customer journey.

“The opportunities find me,” Casagrande said while demonstrating how the system surfaced a fast-growing audience from call-center conversations and other customer signals.

This phrase captured one of the most interesting changes on display. Traditional marketing software waits for people to open a dashboard and decide what to investigate. Agentic systems can continuously monitor signals and bring opportunities, risks and recommendations directly to the team.

The human remains responsible for defining goals, permissions and approval points. This is essential because a faster marketing machine can also produce mistakes at greater speed. Autonomy needs to be earned through transparent processes, reliable data and strong governance.

Eric Matisoff , Principal Evangelist for Customer Experience Orchestration at Adobe, put it succinctly: “Agents are only ever as good as the context and the governance behind them.”

I agree. The competitive advantage will rarely come from having access to an agent, since these capabilities will become widely available. It will come from giving that agent trusted business context, clear objectives and carefully designed authority.

Creativity At Scale Without Losing The Brand

The third major theme was the transformation of the content supply chain, the collection of people, workflows and technologies used to plan, create, approve, distribute and measure content.

Generative AI makes producing an image or paragraph remarkably easy. Enterprise content is harder. Every asset may need to comply with brand standards, legal requirements, channel specifications, audience needs and local market conditions.

Adobe demonstrated an agentic workflow connecting GenStudio, Workfront, Firefly Creative Production and Adobe Brand Intelligence. Starting from a campaign brief, the system could create a detailed production plan, assemble assets, generate channel variations, validate them against brand guidelines and predict which creative options were most likely to engage a chosen audience.

Adobe Brand Intelligence introduced three particularly useful skills. One assembles content variations according to brand and channel rules, another validates outputs for compliance and consistency and a third predicts performance before content is published. Adobe also showcased Firefly Creative Production’s digital twin capability, which can create thousands of on-brand variations of physical products without specialist photography hardware.

For me, the real opportunity here is extra creative capacity. When teams spend less time resizing assets, chasing approvals and transferring information between systems, they can invest more energy in the original idea.

Siobhan McMullan-Finnegan-Dehn , who leads growth and customer performance across digital, retail, voice and partner channels at Sky, expressed this well. “AI raises the bar for creativity, it doesn’t lower it,” she said.

Sky is examining how AI can streamline workflows, accelerate campaign variations and connect creativity with customer data. McMullan-Finnegan-Dehn explained that the valuable outcome is the time returned to people so they can focus on ideas, storytelling and customer needs.

She also offered an important warning: “Trust is built over years and lost in seconds.” For established brands, responsible AI cannot be treated as a compliance exercise added at the end. It has to shape the tools, training, workflows and operating model from the beginning.

Customer Experience Becomes An Operating Model

Several customer stories reinforced the idea that successful AI transformation extends far beyond technology.

Adobe highlighted its partnership with Tesco, which combines Adobe CX Enterprise capabilities and Firefly Foundry with Tesco’s customer intelligence. The aim is to provide relevant recipes, savings and personalized experiences responsibly across Tesco’s 24 million Clubcard households. The companies have also created an innovation lab where Adobe engineers work alongside Tesco’s personalization and AI teams.

ABB offered a valuable B2B perspective. Its challenge involves presenting one coherent global brand across complex divisions, markets, products and lengthy buying journeys. Its digital transformation is already increasing engagement and lead generation, while the next ambition is for relevant content to find the customer instead of forcing the customer to search through a large corporate site.

Sport provided another useful lens. Speakers from the Premier League and NFL discussed how fandom now stretches across countries, platforms, games, fantasy leagues and social communities. The NFL’s experience of turning a surge of interest from young female fans into sustained engagement showed why brands need to recognize cultural moments quickly and follow them with relevant content, products and experiences. The Premier League described a similar need to extend the emotion of match day across the entire week and reach international fans who may never attend a game in person.

Across retail, travel, entertainment, industrial technology and sport, the underlying challenge is remarkably similar. Organizations need to connect data, content, decisions and journeys around the customer, even when their internal structures remain fragmented.

The Shift From AI Pilots To AI Execution

My strongest takeaway from Adobe Summit London was that we are leaving the era of isolated AI experiments. The next phase is about redesigning how marketing and customer experience work.

Nathan Hancock , Vice President and Managing Director for Adobe UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa, described the early wave of corporate AI experiments as “boardroom magic tricks,” impressive demonstrations and long lists of pilots that rarely transform the core business.

Businesses now need to decide where AI can create measurable customer value, then redesign workflows, roles and governance around those outcomes. Sky, for example, is investing around 150,000 hours in AI upskilling because technology alone cannot deliver the transformation.

McMullan-Finnegan-Dehn offered perhaps the best reflection of the day: “This next era is not going to be for lack of tech, it’s going to be for lack of imagination and leadership.”

Adobe Summit London showed that many of the technical building blocks are arriving. Brands can monitor how AI systems perceive them, generate and validate content at scale, personalize experiences in real time and deploy agents that coordinate complex work.

The harder task begins now. Leaders must decide what kind of customer experience they want to create, how much autonomy they are prepared to grant AI and where human judgment adds the greatest value. The companies that answer those questions well will shape the next era of marketing.

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