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Business Leaders CX Report: What’s Working and What’s Not in AI-Driven CX
The Gist
- Adobe bets on orchestration, not personalization. CX Enterprise Coworker signals a shift from campaign execution to continuous, agent-driven experience orchestration.
- Agentic AI exposes operating model gaps. Analysts say adoption isn’t blocked by tech — it’s stalled by outdated workflows that can’t support continuous engagement.
- Data maturity becomes the dividing line. Organizations without strong data foundations risk falling behind as AI-driven discovery reshapes how customers find and evaluate brands.
LAS VEGAS — In a city built on the idea that the house always wins, Adobe is making its biggest bet yet on agentic AI — and this time, it's wagering that the future of customer experience belongs to brands that can orchestrate, not just personalize.
At Adobe Summit 2026, the company announced Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker, an agentic AI layer designed to orchestrate customer experience workflows across Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and its ecosystem of applications, including Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics and Journey Optimizer. The announcement comes as Adobe reframes the entire business unit around a new name — and a new philosophy.
Oh, and "new" is very Adobe lately. You could start with an incoming new CEO, thought we don't know that is yet. They'll replace Shantanu Narayen — the architect behind the company's pivot from packaged software to a cloud-first digital experience empire — who informed the board of his decision to step down after 18 years in March.
Anil Chakravarthy is now president of Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration Business, notably rebranded from "Digital Experience" since the December earnings call, a deliberate repositioning that signals Adobe's intent to own the orchestration narrative.
Table of Contents
- Why This CX Name Change Actually Means Something
- What CX Enterprise Coworker Actually Does
- The Operating Model Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
- How to Tell If Your Vendor Is Building for This Future
- Adobe CEO Out as Company Beats Expectations
- Agentic AI Enables CX Orchestration Through Autonomous, Multi-Step Workflows
Why This CX Name Change Actually Means Something
So is the renaming, rebranding and pivot toward customer experience orchestration for real or like a good show out here in the desert? Does it all have substance?
Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, was quick to note that Adobe has cycled through names before — Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Digital Experience — and rebrands don't always signal substance. But this time, she argues, the language shift matters.
"They have lost the ridiculous language of 'managing' experiences and adopted the stance that experiences are orchestrated," Miller said. "The CUSTOMER is the only thing that can manage their experience. What teams are trying to do is orchestrate the experiences being delivered to meet at that magical intersection of the customer's and the business's context."
Miller called the reframe a standing ovation moment, noting that Adobe has finally articulated a definition for the business that aligns with how customer engagement actually works.
What CX Enterprise Coworker Actually Does
The product is designed to move marketing teams from episodic, campaign-based execution to continuous, intelligent engagement. Fully agentic by design, CX Enterprise Coworker is meant to monitor signals, recommend next-best actions and execute experiences across channels in real time — all based on defined business goals, with humans kept in the loop.
It is built on open standards including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) and is designed to interoperate across AI platforms from Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Microsoft and OpenAI. Adobe also announced a partnership with NVIDIA to integrate the NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime and NVIDIA Nemotron open models — a combination the company is positioning toward regulated industries that require governed agents.
"By synthesizing intelligence from across Adobe applications, enterprise systems, and leading AI platforms, we are closing the gap between insight and action, enabling brands to deliver one-to-one personalized experience at scale," said Anjul Bhambhri, SVP of Engineering, Customer Experience Orchestration, Adobe. "This is what it means to put the full power of agentic intelligence to work for marketing teams."
The solution draws intelligence from across Adobe's enterprise portfolio — Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, Customer Journey Analytics, Marketo Engage and Target — as well as CRM systems and external market signals. Adobe is bundling several new capabilities into the announcement: Adobe Engagement Intelligence, a decisioning engine optimized for customer lifetime value; Adobe Journey Optimizer Loyalty, which enables gamified loyalty experiences; Adobe CX Analytics, a unified intelligence layer that extends to LLM-powered interfaces; and an expanded Real-Time CDP profile capability that harmonizes unstructured and structured data. General availability is expected in the coming months.
Adobe says AEP now drives more than one trillion experiences per year across global businesses.
Miller said we will hear this week a lot about what Adobe is calling “AI Coworkers” that deploy across the enterprise with the context of the various customer, engagement, functional and corporate goals in context.
"People will nitpick over this naming," she said. "But in a time when all of the agents, copilots, bots and assistants are wreaking havoc, I’m OK with the idea of a coworker with defined and specific skills actually being assigned to and executing work in a smart, contextual and agentic manner."
Related Article: Agentic Customer Experience Ambition Is Rising — Enterprise Readiness Isn't
The Operating Model Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
The enthusiasm on the Summit floor runs up against a harder reality that analysts are not letting go unexamined.
Adobe earned the top current-offering score in Forrester's most recent Digital Experience Platform evaluation — along with a Customer Favorite designation — its innovation score came in only on par with peers, despite a $3.9 billion R&D investment in fiscal year 2024.
Joe Cicman, principal analyst at Forrester, has a take on why agentic adoption remains slow is blunt: it isn't a technology problem.
"Agents are a forcing function on the operating model," Cicman said. "They force work to transform from episodic to continuous. Simply deploying an agent capability into an operating model does not move the needle. The operating model must be redesigned. That work takes time and attention."
For organizations that haven't yet built strong data practices — a prerequisite for getting full value from a platform like Adobe's — Cicman said: "Organizations that don't yet have strong data practices should immediately build strong data practices. Adobe built its platform to make great use of data assets."
Cicman also flagged a broader market force reshaping why operating model adaptation has become urgent. ChatGPT and similar tools have become the preferred discovery channel for buyers in the research, evaluation and purchase stages. Brands that haven't adapted risk losing visibility entirely in AI-mediated search and recommendation environments — and scaling the content production required to maintain that visibility demands a redesigned operating model, not just new software.
Related Article: AEO, GEO, SEO: What's the Best Search Playbook?
How to Tell If Your Vendor Is Building for This Future
For CX and marketing technology leaders who are mid-contract or mid-implementation, Cicman offered a concrete litmus test for evaluating whether a vendor like Adobe's agentic ambitions are real or performative. He called it the Customer Zero question.
"Have the vendor take you through their Customer Zero program," Cicman said. "That's like asking a running coach to run in front of you — to show you their daily training — and to help you plan the transformation of your own unique operating model into an operating model that scales via agents."
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Adobe, Cicman noted, has undergone its own internal transformation through its Customer Zero program — using its own platforms to retool workflows before bringing those lessons to customers. In a Summit environment heavy with product announcement noise, that distinction may be what separates a real bet from a long shot.
General availability for Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker is expected in the coming months.
Adobe CEO Out as Company Beats Expectations
Adobe entered 2026 navigating a major leadership transition alongside strong financial results. In March 2026, the company announced that CEO Shantanu Narayen will step down once a successor is named, closing an 18-year tenure that transformed Adobe from a $1 billion creative software company into a $25 billion digital experience platform.
Adobe's Q1 FY26 results beat expectations, with revenue reaching $6.40 billion (up 12% YoY). AEP ARR grew over 30%, and Firefly exceeded $250 million ARR.
Adobe's most significant strategic push prior to this week centers on the "agentic web" — brand discovery through LLMs and AI agents rather than traditional search. Adobe's 2025 holiday data showed LLM-driven traffic growing nearly sevenfold year-over-year, converting 31% higher and generating 254% more revenue per visit.
On the M&A front, Adobe announced plans to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion in an all-cash deal expected to close in Q2 2026.
Agentic AI Enables CX Orchestration Through Autonomous, Multi-Step Workflows
Agentic AI transforms customer experience by enabling autonomous systems that plan, reason and execute multi-step workflows across fragmented platforms with minimal human intervention.
Unified Data & Automated Workflow Orchestration
Unlike traditional chatbots or copilots, agentic systems can reason, adapt and act independently, coordinating across support, sales, marketing and product touchpoints. The technology reshapes traditional workflows by eliminating linear handoffs. Autonomous agents simultaneously verify inventory, check warranties and execute multi-step responses, escalating only when necessary.
Quantifiable ROI & Productivity Gains
Organizations implementing autonomous AI systems reported 28% improvement in issue resolution time and 19% increases in first-contact resolution rates. AI agents resolve up to 40% of inquiries across chat, email, voice and WhatsApp channels.
Gartner predicted that by 2029, agentic AI will independently handle 80% of routine customer service inquiries, cutting operational costs by 30%.
Real-Time Personalization & Governance
Early ROI shows up behind the scenes in routing accuracy, workflow coordination and reduced handle time rather than customer-facing automation. As AI agents become integrated into CX workflows, chief customer officers must shift focus from task management to strategy, governance and human-AI collaboration frameworks.
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