Phil Koolen, director of account service at Anchora, has touched down in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit and is moonlighting as B&T’s on-the-ground spy, feeding back intel from the heart of the action.
The AI pivot everyone saw coming has officially arrived. Human led and AI Accelerated.
Las Vegas does spectacle better than anywhere and Adobe Summit leans into that fully.
Day one opened with the kind of keynote that fills a convention hall and makes you feel like you’re watching a product launch, a TED talk, and a Hollywood production simultaneously. The screens are enormous. The demos are polished. And this year, everything has an AI layer on top of it.
That said, something felt genuinely different about the 2026 conversation compared to last year’s generative AI frenzy. The buzzword of the day wasn’t “generate”, it was “agentic.”
As Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang explained it on stage together, the shift is from AI that creates things to AI that does things. Drafting a campaign brief, orchestrating approvals, localising assets across 12 markets, the pitch is that AI can now run the entire workflow.
Jensen’s analogy was characteristically quotable: radiologists weren’t replaced when AI learned to read scans, they got busier because they could process more patients. The implication for marketers is that you won’t be doing less work, you’ll be doing more campaigns, faster, across more channels. Whether that sounds liberating or exhausting probably depends on your headcount.
The product that got the most floor buzz: Adobe CX Enterprise. The announced end to end system connects data, content, journeys and now AI agents into one orchestrated layer. The live demo, done through a fictional Marriott Bonvoy scenario, showed a marketer going from a trending social signal to a fully built, localised campaign without touching a single spreadsheet. Impressive on stage. The conversations in the hallways were more measured: “great demo, but we’ve got three legacy systems and 40 business units. Our solutions are custom and everyone uses the tool differently”
Speaking of which, one of the more grounding sessions of the day came from a banking customer who has deployed Workfront purely for compliance governance, not marketing. No brand campaigns, no creative workflows just loads of regulatory procedures tracked, attested and audited. They reportedly eliminated thousands of hours of manual email chasing.
Corridor conversations with enterprise marketing teams surfaced a consistent theme: the biggest blocker to AI-powered personalisation isn’t the technology, it’s that different teams can’t agree on what “audience” even means.
Before the agents can run, someone still has to align on the basics.
The takeaway from day one: Adobe is making a serious, coordinated bet that agentic AI is the next platform shift and they’re moving fast to own the infrastructure layer beneath it.
For marketers, the honest question isn’t whether AI will change how campaigns get made. It’s whether your organisation is structured to let it.
