LAS VEGAS -- Adobe revealed CX Enterprise, a product lineup it hopes will maintain its foothold in marketing tech and expand further into customer experience at a time AI is creating chaos in the market and upending the tech-buying calculus for CMOs and their CIO colleagues.
Among a bundle of releases planned for this year are more task-based agents in Adobe apps; the Brand Intelligence, which enforces brand rules and identity standards; the Engagement Intelligence System, which determines personalized next-best actions for a customer based on lifetime loyalty and defined goals; a catalog of agent skills that enable users to create custom workflows; and assorted developer tools to incorporate Adobe agents into the greater enterprise AI stack.
Enterprises are rethinking operations right now as they see the potential for AI to boost capacity, said Joe Cicman, analyst at Forrester. AI can speed products -- and variations of products -- quickly to market, faster than ever before. That begets the need for more marketing capacity, too. When thoughtfully deployed, agentic AI can help with that -- Adobe CX Enterprise is taking on the technology challenge it presents.
"They have to figure out how to take what the human was doing and codify that into a set of agents so that the work goes from episodic to continuous," Cicman said. "They're not firing anyone. A person is going from an artisan crafter to a person who is fine-tuning agents and checking their quality. So, everybody's getting a promotion -- [i.e.,] I was a content writer, now I'm an editor."
Evolution of Adobe's CX cloud
Previously, Adobe had released an agentic AI orchestrator for Adobe Experience Platform. It also included embedded agents within Adobe applications that performed tasks such as data analysis and content creation.
CX Enterprise builds on that by including a shared skills catalog that enables agents to access common capabilities, enhanced developer tools to support customization, and a specialized orchestration agent to manage workflows based on defined goals. A broad set of partnerships -- including native platform integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Nvidia -- extend these capabilities.
Adobe, like Salesforce and ServiceNow, must rush to marry deterministic, declarative business rules with the probabilistic power of large language models (LLMs). Adobe's IT stack starts with the data layer on the bottom, and small language models in Brand Intelligence and Engagement Intelligence running on top of that, governing the output to task-based agents, analytics, content generation tools and marketing tools.
Thus, AI will do some of the heavy lifting to embed business rules into LLM-based agentic workflow, said Sundeep Parsa, vice president of Products, Customer Data Platform, Experience Platform and Customer Journey Management Portfolio at Adobe.
"Business context is not always sitting in on some common SharePoint folder. Some of that is codified inside a whole bunch of applications. Some of that is tribal knowledge. How do you reduce the time it takes to bring all of the knowledge and run it through agents?" Parsa said.
"We've been serving [our users] for a very long time, and many of those policies and rules have been codified in our applications. That is how we are going to ground these LLMs."
Cicman sees CX Enterprise as Adobe planting its flag as the CX platform -- a big step toward what could eventually be an Adobe CRM. The vendor battle for the hearts and souls of the largest companies investing in customer experience seems to be brewing among CRM giant Salesforce, service giant ServiceNow and marketing giant Adobe as their technologies converge.
In the past, these companies -- for the most part -- stayed in their swim lanes. Now, however, each is encroaching on the other's turf. One example is Salesforce releasing an IT service management platform last fall, challenging the traditional ServiceNow stronghold. Many joint users deploy some combination of those three vendors -- or other competitors -- so interoperability among these frenemies also remains important.
Furthermore, Cicman said, Adobe has intensified its pursuit of B2B customers, having developed tools that accommodate buying teams after building its stronghold with consumer brands.
"Adobe is basically saying, 'Look, I want stewardship over customer engagement,' and they're putting a stake in the ground because ServiceNow is also building a CRM," Cicman said. "They're on a collision course."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
