Adobe has joined the agentic AI fray, using this week’s Adobe Summit to debut 10 embedded AI agents across its Adobe Experience Platform along with supporting brand concierge app for further agent customisation and management. The agents are among a host of AI-powered product innovations across the vendor’s various platforms and products aimed at delivering better end-to-end customer experience management and personalisation at scale.

Freshly embedded AI and agent capabilities are being supported by a raft of new vendor and systems integration alliances, including an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will see more Adobe Experience Platform capabilities directly accessible in Microsoft’s business tools and for use in Powerpoint, Word and Excel documents. There are also a slew of new AI-powered capabilities in Adobe GenStudio, Firefly Services and Custom Models, aimed at optimising the content supply chain for businesses, removing bottlenecks across content management, content production and improving workflows and collaboration while retaining brand safety and compliance.

Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, powered by Adobe’s AI Platform, is designed to enable businesses to build, manage and orchestrate AI agents from Adobe and third-party ecosystems. The inaugural suite of 10 purpose-built agents, built on Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, are all about augmenting the capabilities of marketing and creative teams through common tasks and jobs.

These 10 starting AI agents are: Data insights, Audiences, Site optimisation, Content production, Journey management, Data engineering, Product advisor, Account qualification, Workflow optimisation and Experimentation. Highlighting Audience Agent as an example, Adobe claimed users could cut back the process of creating custom audiences from 4-5 days to just 1-2 hours by using natural language prompting in the agent to build out audiences.

Product Advisor Agent, meanwhile, will be able to personalise experiences based on user context and brand preferences, anchored in first-party data and brand content for reliability and compliance. Meanwhile, the Account Qualification Agent supports enterprise B2B objectives by evaluating and advancing new opportunities to build sales pipeline and engage key members of a buying group. Audience Agent analyses cross-channel engagement data to create and optimize goal-based, high-value audience segments, which can then be activated for widescale personalisation campaigns.

“Adobe has a long history of working closely with CMOs, CIOs and their organisations to drive impactful customer experiences that are anchored in reliable and real-time experience insights,” said Anjul Bhambhri, senior vice-president of engineering, Adobe Experience Cloud. “Agentic AI is a major leap forward that will accelerate workplace transformation. Adobe’s latest innovations will drive productivity gains for practitioners to free up time for creative ideation, while unlocking capacity for marketers to scale personalisation through purpose-built AI agents.”

The agents are multimodal and support interactions across text, voice or images by leveraging AEP insights, Adobe Experience Manager brand experiences and third-party sources. They will directly connect to Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP), Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

Complementing the new out-of-the-box agents is Adobe Brand Concierge, an AI-powered solution built on AEP Agent Orchestrator that allows businesses to configure and manage AI agents that guide consumers through the funnel using immersive and conversational experiences. Adobe Brand Concierge will be built to support use cases across both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to- business (B2B) teams.

As an example in B2B, Adobe said the Brand Concierge will go beyond providing general product information on a brand’s website to deliver tailored content based on the existing account relationship, while handling tasks such as booking follow-up meetings. These capabilities aim to optimise the sales cycle by generating more leads and boosting conversion through more precise personalisation.

Adobe said it wasn’t stopping at its own front gate on agentic AI. In recognition of the need for customised capabilities that address specific needs and verticals, the vendor has struck new and deeper strategic partnerships with Acxiom, Amazon Web Services, Genesys, IBM, Microsoft, RainFocus, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday to enable seamless execution of use cases across agents for customer service, enterprise resource planning, human resources, collaboration and productivity, and data management. Adobe also announced expanded agency and system integrator partnerships with Accenture, Deloitte Digital, EY and IBM to drive customisation across industries and use cases.

Under the private preview of Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot, marketers can leverage the conversational interface of Microsoft’s Copilot to access data and insights from Adobe Experience Platform, with audience analysis process improved thanks to insights surfaced directly in Microsoft 365 apps through Copilot. Marketers can also prompt Adobe Marketing Agent to instantly uncover and pull insights from Adobe Customer Journey Analytics directly within Copilot, plus connect through to Adobe’s collaboration tools, Workfront, so as to summarise projects, tasks and issues, locating essential details and project information from content in Microsoft 365 applications, such as PowerPoint, Word, or Teams, and proactively monitoring the health of team projects.

In addition, Adobe is expanding its generative AI platform, integrating foundational models, including commercially safe AI through Adobe Firefly, across applications to scale content production that powers customer experience management. Adobe Firefly is a collection of creative and generative APIs and services for enterprises.

Adobe GenStudio Foundation is Adobe’s end-to-end content supply chain solution. With the latest enhancements, marketers and creatives get a unified interface to bring together data from Adobe’s full suite of content supply chain solutions and single pane of glass to view campaign plans, projects, assets and insights.

Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing was another noted innovation announced this week, further enabling businesses to scale content production by automating tasks. Asset creation for display ads is now available for advertisements served through Microsoft Advertising Platform and Google Campaign Manager 360. Adobe also confirmed it has expanded its collaboration with LinkedIn Ads, for teams to create campaign assets for B2B use cases. Additionally, Adobe’s extensibility framework enables businesses to connect with third-party solution providers, including IntelligenceBank, Acxiom, Lithero, PwC, Saifr and Stensul— extending functionality to regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.

There are also new Adobe Firefly Services APIs supporting video and 3D workflows, while translate and Lip Sync API and Reframe API will drive use cases from translating spoken dialogue into different languages, to resizing videos and combining visual elements (such as logos) into single images. The Substance 3D API enables teams to quickly create asset variations for existing product images – for use across channels such as e-commerce and digital marketing.

Finally on the Firefly front, there’s Creative Production, powered by Firefly Services, a no-code interface that can handle a variety of repetitive and time-consuming production tasks, such as intelligently cropping assets for different marketing channels including social media and ecommerce.

The latest capabilities in Adobe GenStudio, Firefly Services and Custom Models are all about optimising the content supply chain, removing bottlenecks across content management and helping to deliver the scaled-up content production necessary for personalisation at scale.

“Adobe is uniquely positioned to guide companies to a dynamic era of Customer Experience Orchestration, where creativity and marketing come together with AI to deliver true one-to-one personalisation at scale,” said Anil Chakravarthy, president, Digital Experience Business at Adobe. “We are delivering numerous innovations built on Adobe’s AI platform to boost the capacity of teams and help them drive the most impactful customer experiences, empowering businesses across industries to capture this massive opportunity.”

Elsewhere across the platform suite, Adobe Content Analytics, generally available this month, will enable businesses to measure the performance of content (down to the attribute level) and make real-time adjustments to websites and applications.

More broadly, Adobe made it clear innovation and improvements aren’t just coming from the direct source. The vendor has struck a new partnership with Amazon Web Services and Amazon Ads. The strategic collaboration with AWS is set to combine Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration with AWS's cloud services and builds on the availability of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) on AWS. New integrations with AWS's generative AI services, Amazon Connect and Amazon Ads are now coming to market. For one, the companies will integrate AEP with Amazon Connect to provide end-to-end visibility into the customer journey while protecting customer privacy by combining AEP's customer profiles with Amazon Connect's customer care insights.

Adobe also plans to leverage Amazon Q in Connect and Adobe's AEP AI Assistant alongside AI Agents, so businesses can deploy tailored experiences based on unified customer data. Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) Collaboration, built on AEP, is an offering that delivers a secure environment for advertisers and publishers to jointly discover, activate and measure high-value audiences through consent-driven first-party data. Business can deliver personalised ad experiences, without relying on third-party signals. Through an integration with Amazon Marketing Cloud, marketers will be able to combine customer data in Real-Time CDP Collaboration with performance insights from Amazon Ads in Amazon Marketing Cloud to measure segment performance and drive better return on ad spend.

Direct integration between Amazon Ads and Adobe Creative Cloud applications also means businesses can efficiently create and publish high-quality ads. Creative teams can access professional templates designed for Amazon Ads within Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Express, with automatic compliance checks and seamless access to Amazon Creative Assets.

Holdcos were part of Adobe’s latest partnerships mix. Under a new partnership with Publicis, Adobe will build solutions that combine Publicis Groupe’s deep delivery capabilities across its intelligent content operations with Adobe Firefly Services directly into Publicis Groupe’s Core AI platform. This will enable businesses to scale the production of personalised content, and through Publicis Groupe’s identity solutions, tailor experiences to specific audiences. Publicis Groupe’s agencies and production studios will go a step further with commercially safe Firefly generative AI models for image, vector and video creation.

Adobe said AEP and the applications it powers – Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Mix Modeler – chalked up 50% year-over- year revenue growth in FY2024, with 30% YoY growth in new customers. The vendor’s customers include The Coca-Cola Company, Coles, Delta Air Lines, Eli Lily & Company, General Motors, HDFC Bank, Henkel, The Home Depot, Major League Baseball, Marriott International, NVIDIA, PGA TOUR, Sony PlayStation, TSB Bank, Ulta Beauty, U.S. Bank and Qualcomm.