Forget the brickie’s laptop, Phil Koolen, director of account service at Anchora is spending his spare time in Vegas keeping the B&T readers in the know about the Adobe Summit.
If day one was about vision, day two was about pressure testing it. The energy on the floor shifted from “look what’s possible” to “okay, but how does this actually work in our organisation?”
That tension between what Adobe is showing on stage and what enterprise teams are actually wrestling with made for a more interesting day than the headline announcements might suggest.
Day two kicked off with a keynote pairing that felt genuinely different: Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen in conversation with Procter & Gamble CEO Shailesh Jejurikar. P&G’s perspective cut through the usual Summit polish.
When you’re running 65 brands across every continent, the AI conversation isn’t theoretical, it’s operational survival.
Jejurikar’s framing was memorable: a brand manager in his early career would produce one or two ads a year that ran for three years.
Today, the content demand is so vast that he said flatly, “you cannot do it physically without AI.”
The “agentic web” got its own keynote moment and it’s worth paying attention to. Adobe’s pitch is that most brands are still optimising their digital presence for humans, while AI agents are increasingly the ones making decisions about what to surface and recommend.
Their data: AI driven traffic to US websites grew 269 per cent year on year in March.
The product response is Adobe LLM Optimizer, already deployed by over 600 enterprise customers, with some reporting citation increases north of 140 per cent. The demo, set in a Dick’s Sporting Goods scenario, showed a landing page being built, regionalised, and published in minutes in response to a live trending moment.
The most grounding session of the day had nothing to do with product. Code and Theory CEO Mike Treff delivered a talk on transformation leadership that was notable precisely because it avoided the demo format entirely.
His thesis: 70 per cent of transformations fail and the number one reason isn’t technology… it’s culture.
The line that landed hardest: “reactive organisations are built for the last disruption, not the next one.” Qualcomm’s Jeremy Krall offered a candid counterpoint from the inside. Small team, growing remit, budgets flat, and an explicit shift to measuring velocity of content output alongside brand metrics.
What kept coming up in side conversations was this. The pilot to production gap is real. One attendee dropped the line that their organisation had “more pilots than Delta” and the knowing laughter suggested they weren’t alone.
The takeaway from day two: Adobe is making a serious architectural argument. That AI shouldn’t sit on top of your marketing stack, it should be woven through it.
The CX Enterprise co-worker demo, built around an Ulta Beauty scenario where agents responded to a viral beauty moment overnight while the marketer slept, was the most compelling execution of that idea yet.
But the day’s honest subplot was this: the technology is moving faster than most organisations’ ability to operationalise it.
The winners won’t necessarily be the fastest adopters. They’ll be the ones who figure out how to operationalise and adapt first.
