Adobe's AI Ambitions are About Enterprise Efficiency, Not Just Art

In what’s soon going to be a post-Shantanu Narayen world, Adobe is preparing itself for an AI-first future, with a series of AI-focused initiatives announced at the Adobe Summit last month. They are aimed at positioning the company at the centre of what it calls the next phase of customer experience orchestration: enterprise systems powered by AI agents that can coordinate marketing, commerce, and customer engagement workflows with human oversight.

Prativa Mohapatra, Vice President and Managing Director at Adobe India, says the company’s strategy is being shaped by larger shifts in consumer internet behaviour. “The internet has been re-intermediated,” Mohapatra tells AIM, arguing that users are increasingly discovering brands through AI systems rather than traditional search engines.

She identifies three broader trends driving Adobe’s focus on customer experience orchestration: AI-led brand discovery, the emergence of “the world of humans and agents staying together,” and changes in digital advertising itself. 

CX Moves Into the ‘Agentic’ Era

The company announced Adobe CX Enterprise, an end-to-end agentic AI system designed to orchestrate customer journeys across content, data, and marketing operations. It also introduced Adobe Brand Intelligence and expanded GenStudio capabilities, and new “brand visibility” tools to help businesses improve their presence across AI-driven search and conversational interfaces.

But its largest announcement was CX Enterprise Coworker, which the company describes as an AI-powered system capable of executing multi-step workflows while operating within governed enterprise environments. 

According to Adobe, the system can monitor signals, recommend actions, and execute customer engagement workflows in real time across channels, while keeping humans involved in supervision and approvals. The offering integrates with Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimiser, and Customer Journey Analytics. 

Adobe also expanded Adobe Engagement Intelligence, Journey Optimiser Loyalty, and Adobe CX Analytics to support these workflows.

Mohapatra distinguishes Adobe’s “coworker” framing from the more common AI assistant narrative emerging across enterprise software. “An assistant helps you do it, but the coworker is completing the task,” she says. “As new ways of completing transactions happen, it gets into the intelligence zone.”

Partnerships Central to Adobe’s AI Push

Adobe also announced integrations with Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI.

Adobe Marketing Agent will now integrate across Amazon Q, Claude Enterprise, ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also partnered with consulting firms and agencies, including Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and WPP, to operationalise AI-led customer experience systems for enterprises.

Adobe’s emphasis on interoperability reflects enterprises’ growing concern about AI fragmentation across platforms and tools. At the same time, the company faces intense competition from vendors that already control broader workplace ecosystems, CRM systems, or cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, enterprise technology companies are racing to establish themselves in the emerging market for AI agents. Salesforce is building out its Agentforce platform, while Microsoft is embedding Copilot across its workplace and productivity ecosystem.

Mohapatra says partnerships will increasingly shape the AI market over the next several years. “A lot of it will be driven by big partnerships as well,” she says, pointing to the layered structure of the AI ecosystem, ranging from infrastructure and data to models and applications.

Governance and Brand Visibility

Another major theme at the summit was governance and brand visibility in AI-generated environments.

Adobe introduced Adobe Brand Intelligence as part of its GenStudio content supply chain platform. The system is designed to continuously learn from approvals, annotations, rejections, and feedback loops to help ensure AI-generated content remains aligned with a company’s brand identity.

The company also unveiled Workflow Optimisation Agent in Adobe Workfront, AI-powered campaign brief generation tools, Firefly Creative Production for Enterprise Workflow Builder, and a 3D digital twin solution developed with NVIDIA.

Additionally, Adobe launched GenStudio for Content Marketing, which can convert long-form documents and videos into campaign assets, customer case studies, and web articles. The company also announced support for ChatGPT Ads within GenStudio for Performance Marketing.

Meanwhile, it also expanded the Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe LLM Optimiser, enhancements to Adobe Commerce, and updates to Adobe Brand Concierge.

The company says AI traffic to US retail websites increased 269% year-on-year in March 2026, reflecting how quickly AI systems are reshaping online discovery and shopping behaviour.

Mohapatra says governance remains one of the biggest challenges enterprises face while scaling AI deployments internally. “Some projects start, but the moment you realise, ‘What data am I using in the AI test that I’m doing?’ suddenly, at the enterprise-wide level, you cannot use it,” she explains.

Key AI Growth Market

Adobe repeatedly highlighted India during the summit, describing it as one of the company’s fastest-growing regions for digital and AI adoption.

Mohapatra says India currently leads several Asia-Pacific markets in enterprise AI adoption, although companies are moving cautiously as they transition from pilots to implementation. Sectors including banking, airlines, hospitality, automotive, jewellery, and fashion are among the strongest adopters of AI-led customer engagement systems.

She also points to organisational readiness as a key challenge. “There is a sponsorship gap, there is a skill gap, there is a governance gap,” Mohapatra says.

At the same time, she acknowledges the realities of India’s price-sensitive enterprise market. “India is a scale market,” she says, adding that Adobe offers different pricing models depending on customer usage patterns and requirements.

Mohapatra also pushes back against fears that generative AI will eliminate creative and marketing jobs altogether. “Tools will enable all of that. It’s people who will take the creative world forward,” she says.

Whether enterprises ultimately adopt large orchestrated platforms such as Adobe CX Enterprise or continue relying on fragmented but cheaper AI tools may determine the next phase of enterprise software competition.