The DXP Catalyst Update - Mar 26, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

It was a busy week across the digital experience vendor ecosystem. I tuned into portions of Adobe Summit remotely and also attended the Optimizely Roadshow event in NYC. These events, particularly Adobe’s annual summit, typically spotlight current industry trends and product innovations, and this year was no exception.

Last month I wrote about the rise of AI Agents in DXPs, with vendors like Adobe, Optimizely, and Salesforce leading the charge. Not only was AI agents a major theme, but it went beyond that into the emergence of multi-agent orchestration. Leading DXPs are moving beyond simply embedding AI features - they’re building foundational layers to operationalize AI across content, data, and customer journeys.

In this week’s DXP Catalyst Update, I’ll focus on highlights from the Adobe Summit.

EVENTS
Adobe Summit 2025

Several key segments are worth reviewing:

• Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, reflected on Adobe’s journey and outlined the company’s long-term vision for powering next-generation customer experiences.

• Anil Chakravarthy, President of Digital Experience, introduced Adobe’s new AI Platform as the foundation for this new era of Customer Experience Orchestration. A key highlight was the launch of AEP Agent Orchestrator, a new capability within Adobe Experience Platform that enables businesses to deploy and coordinate AI agents across workflows and customer touchpoints.

• David Wadhwani, President of Digital Media, showcased how Adobe is scaling content production through GenStudio, with updates on Firefly Services, content operations infrastructure, and how brands can streamline the content supply chain to deliver personalization at scale.

Product announcements and strategic takeaways are covered in the sections that follow.

From CX Management to CX Orchestration

Adobe’s CEO, opened with a reflection on Adobe’s journey - from the launch of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to now powering some of the world’s most complex customer experiences. When Adobe entered the digital marketing space in 2009, its focus was on enabling businesses to establish a strong digital presence through content and analytics, primarily via Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Adobe Analytics.

As digital matured, Adobe expanded into Customer Experience Management (CXM) -connecting content, data, and journeys. Tools like Audience Manager, Campaign, and Target (alongside AEM and Analytics) became key components of this evolution. This strategic shift culminated in the 2019 launch of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), designed to unify these capabilities within a centralized data and activation layer.

Today, Adobe is advancing a vision that brings together creativity, marketing, and generative AI to power personalized, real-time customer experiences at global scale - something that has become a baseline expectation. It starts with the Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RTCDP), part of AEP, which enables brands to build and manage audiences. These audiences are then activated with dynamic, personalized content through GenStudio. Adobe refers to this approach as intelligent orchestration - delivering the right content, to the right customer, at the right time.

Adobe’s AI strategy is rooted in trust and enterprise-grade governance. Its Firefly models are trained on licensed, high-quality data to ensure commercial safety, and brands can build custom models using their proprietary assets. The Adobe AI stack is enhanced by creative, document, and customer experience agents that don’t just generate content - they reason, recommend, and optimize to drive business outcomes. This end-to-end approach is what underpins the Adobe AI Platform (built on AEP) - spanning ideation, content creation, omni-channel orchestration, and performance measurement.

In case you’re not up to speed with all things Adobe, last year at Adobe Summit, Adobe introduced GenStudio and Firefly Services, doubling down on the promise of delivering personalization at scale. The focus was on integrating the content supply chain and unifying customer data and journeys to create seamless, connected experiences.

Narayen emphasized that we’re still in the early innings of a new era driven by GenAI and agent-based technologies. Customers now expect real-time, personalized, two-way conversations across every touchpoint - delivered with respect for privacy and individual preferences.

This shift signals the rise of Customer Experience Orchestration - where content, customer data, and journeys operate in harmony with AI. Adobe believes this orchestration is essential to fuel customer acquisition, retention, and growth for both B2C and B2B businesses. It’s a future where creativity, marketing, and AI converge to meet the demands of the modern customer.

The Era of CX Orchestration - Introducing AEP Agent Orchestrator

Anil Chakravarthy, President of Adobe’s Digital Experience Business, transitioned the keynote into a deeper discussion on how the company is delivering on that vision.

He emphasized that we are now entering a new era: Customer Experience Orchestration. This isn't just campaign coordination - it's real-time, intelligent experience delivery that spans marketing, service, and commerce. At the center of this is AEP, and now, the new AEP Agent Orchestrator.

Agent Orchestrator is Adobe’s big move into agentic AI - an architecture that enables coordination between purpose-built agents, third-party agents, and those built in-house by customers. It’s designed to help organizations overcome operational bottlenecks and reduce the burden on overextended CX and marketing teams.

It introduces four key components:

1. Purpose-Built Agents - Ten agents were announced, each targeting specific areas where marketing and CX teams often struggle, like web optimization, audience management, workflow efficiency, and experimentation. For example, the Site Optimization Agent can analyze site performance across page speed, engagement, and code-level implementation, and then recommend (and help deploy) enhancements. This sounded incredible! The Audience Agent helps refine segmentation, detect anomalies, and scale lookalike modeling. He didn’t go into all the others, but some of them included agents for Content Production, Workflow Optimization, Data Engineering, Data Insights, Journey, Experimentation, Product Advisor, and Account Qualification.

2. Multi-Agent Collaboration - These agents don’t work in silos. The orchestrator supports collaboration across agents - Adobe’s and yours - allowing coordination of tasks, balancing execution time, and optimizing for outcomes.

3. Reasoning Engine - This powers adaptive decision-making. It ingests context-specific data, builds predictive models, and continuously adjusts orchestration strategies to align with user intent and business goals.

4. Customer Experience (CX) Models - Adobe is fine-tuning small language models that are grounded in your customer data. This helps ensure precision, explainability, and safeguards - a key requirement for enterprise-grade AI.

The Agent Orchestrator is natively built on AEP, which brings trust, governance, and extensibility. Adobe also announced a new agentic application, Adobe Brand Concierge, built on top of this stack. It enables personalized, multimodal experiences (text, voice, video, image) from exploration to loyalty - all driven by first-party data and brand-compliant content from AEM.

Adobe is building an agentic ecosystem with major partners like Microsoft, SAP, and ServiceNow. For instance, Adobe is integrating into Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling marketing practitioners to query AEP data and activate content directly from within Teams or Word. With SAP, Adobe aims to tie experience orchestration with operational data (like campaign ROI from SAP cost data). These partnerships show that Adobe’s orchestration strategy isn’t closed - it’s meant to extend across enterprise systems.

Personalization at Scale

Another keynote section was presented by David Wadhwani, President of Digital Media, showcasing how Adobe is operationalizing content production at scale with GenStudio. For leaders in digital marketing, the message was clear: the pressure to deliver more personalized content - faster and with fewer resources - isn’t going away. In fact, it’s intensifying.

Content has become the fuel for growth - but with shrinking shelf lives and increasing channel fragmentation, organizations need better infrastructure to keep pace. Adobe cited that creatives are spending an average of 21 hours per week on repetitive tasks that could be automated. GenStudio addresses this by unifying the content supply chain: planning, production, activation, and performance tracking.

A live demo illustrated more than just GenStudio - it showcased how Adobe’s full creative and marketing stack works together to deliver content at scale:

• Workfront initiated workflows and campaign planning, ensuring structure and accountability.

• Creative Cloud and Photoshop were used to design core hero assets.

• Firefly Services transformed those assets into countless content variations quickly and safely.

• Adobe Express empowered teams to localize and personalize assets on the fly.

• GenStudio for Performance Marketing structured delivery across paid media channels.

• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) anchored the entire system with centralized asset management.

Adobe also introduced GenStudio Foundation, now in beta - a cockpit for managing end-to-end content operations across Adobe’s tools. Built on the Adobe AI Platform and integrated with Firefly, PDF, and customer experience models, it offers extensibility for organizations aiming to standardize and scale content operations.

Also worth mentioning is Adobe’s growing focus on Content Analytics - not just measuring the performance of campaigns, but understanding what content within the campaign drives outcomes. Adobe now enables tracking of specific attributes, such as the colors, composition, or even semantic themes of assets (i.e. whether dog images outperform cat images), helping marketers optimize content creation based on real insights. This capability, available this month, pushes performance tracking beyond engagement to content intelligence.

Perhaps most notably, Firefly Services - Adobe’s family of GenAI models - are now trainable on enterprise-specific data, enabling companies to generate on-brand, IP-safe variations in bulk using their own proprietary design systems and messaging. Together, GenStudio and Firefly represent Adobe’s answer to the creative bottleneck at enterprise scale - delivering content that is not only faster and smarter, but now fully measurable.

Final Thoughts

The Adobe Summit keynote made one thing clear: Adobe is building the connective tissue between creative tools, marketing operations, and real-time personalization through an agentic AI framework. This isn’t just about making existing tools smarter - it’s about redefining how experiences are planned, executed, and optimized.

Given Optimizely’s recent move into AI agents, I anticipated Adobe would follow suit - but I was genuinely impressed by the two agents they showcased, especially the Site Optimization Agent, which has the potential to save teams a tremendous amount of time.

What stood out even more, though, was the unveiling of the Agent Orchestrator. Rather than focusing solely on individual agents, Adobe is investing in the coordination layer - enabling multiple agents to collaborate across journeys, workflows, and experiences. It’s a powerful concept, and I’m curious to see how Adobe continues to evolve its multi-agent orchestration capabilities.

Adobe also expanded AI functionality across the GenStudio platform to better empower both marketing and creative teams. And while the spotlight was on content velocity and personalization, I found the brief mention of Content Analytics particularly exciting - the ability to track not just campaign performance but the impact of specific content attributes could be a game-changer.

With AEP as the data backbone, Agent Orchestrator as the decision layer, and GenStudio as the content engine, Adobe is laying out a roadmap for powering customer experience in the AI era. For IT and mar-tech leaders, these developments signal a pivotal moment to re-evaluate how orchestration, content operations, and personalization strategies are architected.

The era of Customer Experience Orchestration isn’t coming - it’s already here. And Adobe clearly wants to be the operating system for it. The competition with Optimizely heats up!

Next week, I’ll be sharing takeaways from the Optimizely Roadshow - where some of the same orchestration and personalization challenges are being addressed, but through a different lens. Stay tuned.

WHAT’S NEXT
Upcoming Topics

• Next Week: Recap & Thoughts from the Optimizely Roadshow NYC Event