Adobe’s AI takes over marketing, promising smarter ads and bigger sales for less work

Adobe is unleashing powerful new AI agents to autonomously build campaigns, create personalised content, promising to change the way you view ads forever. Here’s what’s coming.

Adobe head of solution GTM strategy, APAC & Japan Jeremy Wood says AI agents are transforming marketing.

Artificial intelligence agents can now create targeted marketing strategies based on your company data, and use those strategies to devise and build personalised ad campaigns, including videos with your company branding.

It’s an example of new capabilities being offered by Adobe. The software giant is promoting 10 new AI-enhanced “agents” to its marketing platform customers at its Australian summit this week.

Workday, Oracle, Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia and SAP are ­others going along this track.

AI agents are not only capable of complex reasoning and communication; they can act autonomously, devise goals and strategies, and perform a series of tasks on your behalf.

In the near future, AI agents used by event organisers, hotels and transport services might collaborate to organise a conference, including the necessary accommodation and transport.

Adobe’s new agents cover a large range of marketing tasks, such as data insights and analysis, audience analysis, content production, data management, building sales pipelines, hypothesising and simulating ideas, customer journey optimisation, and workflow optimisation.

They were announced in March but the rollout is yet to begin in earnest in Australia.

Head of Solution GTM Strategy, APAC & Japan Jeremy Wood said Adobe was collaborating locally with Marriott to demonstrate how its agents worked.

Mr Wood said with traditional data insights, marketers tried to figure out the performance of their output.

“A lot of the time pulling that data is quite a complex process. We have marketers saying I have to queue that up with the data analyst team, the data analyst team might come back to me within days, might come back to me in weeks. Now with agents, that agent can automatically pull that data, bring it back and visualise it for anybody.”

An agent might also make recommendations about optimisation or nominate campaign strategies that work better. “This really makes it (analytics) accessible to many, many more users.”

Mr Wood said you might ask Adobe’s production agent to create content and imagery for an audience of a certain age group that likes ocean activities and being by the sea.

The agent would use both your branded content and film clips from Adobe Stock to build targeted marketing videos in more than 30 languages. “We have a great case study with Coca-Cola, which has done all of this exactly.”

He said customers were free to train their agents on their data.

An AI-powered design system co-developed by Coca-Cola and Adobe lets designers train AI models to achieve accurate content creation and quality.

Adobe’s agents are built using a platform called Adobe Agent ­Orchestrator and can work with third-party ecosystems. Adobe and Microsoft have jointly worked to enable Adobe Marketing to collaborate with Microsoft Copilot.

Adobe had also developed a tool called Brand Concierge to enhance a company’s communication with its own customers.

There is the elephant in the room; the fear of massive job losses from AI, and specifically agents. For data analytics, that could be the jobs of data scientists.

Like many in this field, Mr Wood is optimistic that AI and agents will free up time for higher-level strategic thinking.

“We’re seeing … on the enterprise marketing side … that this will free up some very valuable and skilled time. Those employees (will) be able to focus on more strategically valuable exercises.”

The author travelled to Adobe Summit as a guest of Adobe