Lasting Takeaways from Adobe Summit and the Adobe Experience
After Adobe Summit wrapped up in Las Vegas, our team returned with a lot to digest, consider, and integrate into both strategic and tactical plans. As Adobe has continued to roll out new agents within their tools and accelerate agentic AI adoption, we’re taking a look back what the lasting takeaways have been in the Adobe ecosystem and looking ahead to impacts for 2027.
Looking Back at Adobe Summit and Analyzing Adobe’s AI Evolution
Since Adobe Experience Manager and the larger Cloud ecosystem (including Edge Delivery Services, Journey Optimizer, and Marketo Engage) are core tools for many of our enterprise clients, we keep a close eye on the latest Adobe news and always prioritize their annual Summit. As in recent years, the 2026 Summit focused on all things AI. Starting this year, the depth of AI conversations has shifted substantially.
Last year, people talked prompts and personalization, but 2026 focused on deeper evolutions and how AI is starting to sit more at the core of Adobe tools. Conversations flowed about orchestration, agentic systems, and the whole pathway from creative concepting through performance analysis. With the launch of CX Enterprise Coworker, a collection of discrete agents that complement one another to complete complex tasks, the integration of AI has become central in many of Adobe’s product lines. All signs indicate that both Adobe and users want to confront agentic AI at more sophisticated and core levels. But what does that look like in reality?
Nearly all the sessions at this year’s Summit focused on agentic functionality. And some Adobe agentic functionality is truly holistic, including deep integrations into the product feature set. But not all agentic integrations have successfully evolved yet; some agentic integrations Adobe has introduced are still quite minimal.
In many tools, Adobe has added a chat interface to complete the same tasks that a user would do in the software just using a different interface. As we’ve tested out some of these AI-chat top layers, we’re left questioning who Adobe is targeting with this functionality? Power users don’t need them—their work is more sophisticated already. But newer users won’t have enough context to use them. There are still bumps in Adobe’s agentic AI evolution.
Three Lasting Takeaways from Adobe Summit and the Current Adobe Experience
AI Impact on Human Staff
The industry has been talking about business efficiency with AI (and the human impact) since the early days of the AI bubble. Managers are pressured to make workflows more efficient with AI, and staff are worried about reductions and downsizing. Since Adobe Summit, we’ve been focusing on a specific and less represented aspect of the AI impact: the pressure AI places on human employees to shift their strategies and approaches.
With AI handling more rote, routine tasks, today’s business world needs employees to be more strategic in their approach, more holistic in their thought processes, and more decisive in their directions to teams of both humans and agents. An Adobe Summit presentation referenced Capgemini’s global research report that showed a 65% increase in engagement on high value tasks for human experts.
What will this shift look like for employees? What best practices will people need to use to help this shift? What concerns will this new shift have on individuals’ capacity for high-level engagement? This is proving to be a substantial shift for the digital marketing, IT, and development teams that we’ve been working with, and it proves true for our working relationship with workflows related to the Adobe experience.
Design to Dev Pipeline Remains Front and Center
The Adobe ecosystem continues to focus on the designer to developer pipeline—i.e., Adobe’s starting assumption is that web content is designed by a creative team and then turned over to developers to execute. The business role in content upkeep is assumed to be minimal, maybe occasionally an author needs to change a headline. The assumption is that authors need no other flexibility.
Yet, this approach does not align with the preferred business workflow of content management. Businesses don’t have the time or resources to rely on design prototypes and development teams every time they develop content. They need ready access to authoring teams who can create content in a system that is flexible enough to create net-new layouts for unique messaging. One of our ongoing focuses in 2026 is how to reduce the reliance on dev that is currently built into the Adobe workflow.
Semantic Markup for LLMs
The approach to optimize web content for LLM ingestion is reasonably mature, but the architecture to support semantic relationships is the next focus area. Presenting the connections between web content, clear articulation of content purpose, and relationships to other content will be the next frontier.
Deep Dive into the Evolution of AI-Related Work
In the next few weeks, we’ll be doing deep dive into each of these three topic areas and what our tactical and practical recommendations are moving forward. Follow along as we discuss how:
Human worker approach is shifting and its impact
The relationship between design, dev, and authoring really works
The new frontier of semantic markup architecture