Adobe reaches for AI relevance

John Ebbert

Adobe

At Adobe Summit in Las Vegas yesterday, Adobe unleashed new AI-enabled products across its portfolio of marketing and advertising products.

Analyst Larry Dignan of Constellation Research unpacked the announcements:

“At a high level, Adobe launched a bevy of customer experience tools, agentic AI agents, orchestration efforts and content supply chain. The headliner launch was Adobe CX Enterprise, which is an agentic system designed for customer experience orchestration.

Adobe CX Enterprise includes:

  • Components that are governed and cover the entire customer lifecycle via Adobe Experience Manager (brand visibility), Customer Experience Platform (customer engagement) and Adobe GenStudio (content supply chain).
  • AI-first workflows with Adobe AI agents and coworkers via third-party agents and humans.
  • An open ecosystem that includes Model Context Protocol, Skills and native integration with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS and Microsoft…”

Dignan covers all of the announcements in detail as Adobe races to beat back critics who see AI as potentially destructive to the creative tech platform company. Adobe’s market cap stands at $100 billion today – down 30% in a year.

Read: “Adobe Summit 2026: Agentic orchestration for CX, creative workflows” (April 20) – Constellation Research

More:

  • Adobe Unveils CX Enterprise Coworker to Build Agentic-Enabled Workflows for Customer Experience Orchestration (April 20) – Adobe
  • Scaling AI impact: Rewiring marketing at Bristol Myers Squibb (April 20) – Adobe

Adobe Advertising and AI

Building on the momentum of Adobe Summit, Adobe Advertising Head of Product & Product Marketing, Greg Collison, announced his company’s lineup for “the next era of programmatic advertising.”

New AI-related products and updates to the ad product ‘menu’ include:

  • Adobe AI Assistant – “…a conversational interface where customers can ask questions or use prompts to support their campaign setup and management.”
  • Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing – “Launch high-performing creative variants in minutes.”
  • Adobe Performance Assist – “Through our Search, Social, and Commerce publisher assist capabilities, advertisers can use their own conversion data to enhance performance across Google, Meta, and Microsoft.”
  • Adobe Customer Journey Analytics – “a bidirectional integration, data flows in and out of both platforms. Data from Adobe Advertising can be automatically sent to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, enabling advertisers to visualize their paid media performance alongside the rest of their marketing data. On the other hand, data from Adobe Customer Journey Analytics can be piped into Adobe Advertising to support optimization efforts and further enhance bidding algorithms and user models.”

Read: How can Adobe Advertising help brands in the new era of advertising (April 20) – Adobe for Business

More: Adobe makes its biggest play yet for marketing’s AI future (April 20) – The Drum (subscription)

From tipsheet: With its long history in creative technology, Adobe aims to carve out a cross-walled-garden solution for marketers and content creators.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

  • Kimi K2.6: Advancing Open-Source Coding (April 20) – Kimi

  • Google Creates Strike Team to Improve Coding Models (April 20) – The Information (subscription)

  • Amazon to invest up to another $25 billion in Anthropic as part of AI infrastructure deal (April 20) – CNBC

LLMs & CHATBOTS

StackAdapt pitching ChatGPT ads

Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal uncovers yet another ChatGPT ads ad tech partner, StackAdapt, and its late-March pitch to potential advertisers.

She previewed her latest exclusive on LinkedIn:

StackAdapt is courting advertisers for ChatGPT ads via a limited pilot, per a leaked deck. CPMs range from $15–$60, driven by prompt relevance, with a $50K minimum spend. OpenAI said it has ‘adjusted’ its minimum ad spend; sources say it now sits around $100K–$150K.

Read: “Leaked Deck Reveals StackAdapt’s Playbook for ChatGPT Ads” (April 20) – Adweek (subscription)

From tipsheet: StackAdapt was part of the Forrester “Omnichannel Advertising Platforms” study published in March and was rated a “Strong Performer.”

StackAdapt joins Criteo and Smartly as ad tech companies who have publicly-announced their OpenAI ChatGPT ads partnerships.

BRANDS

Help wanted: big brand agentic commerce

After spotting a LinkedIn job listing from Mondelez, Digiday’s Kimeko McCoy observed an intriguing strategic direction in play for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketer.

See the actual listing: “Global Lead of Emerging Commerce Platforms” (April 6) – Mondelez International on LinkedIn

The job description for a product leader reveals “primary focus on Agentic Commerce” including:

  • “Own the global Emerging Commerce Platforms strategy, with a strong emphasis on Agentic Commerce (AI-driven shopping agents, LLM-powered discovery, and automated purchasing environments)“
  • “Define Mondelēz’s role, visibility, and conversion strategy within AI-mediated shopping journeys“
  • “Develop business cases, value models, and investment frameworks to quantify incremental growth and ROI“
  • “Lead pilot design and execution in priority markets, translating learnings into scalable global playbooks”

The listing says it is “no longer accepting applications.”

Read: “Why Mondelez is hiring a global lead to solve for AI-driven shopping bots” (April 20) – Digiday

MARKETING

Job opportunities and AI

  • Advertising salary guide: How to land a search marketing job with an AEO or GEO focus (April 20) – Ad Age (subscription)
  • “Work in Marketing? AI Just Rewrote Your Job Spec” (April 16) – Business of Fashion (subscription)
  • AI’s impact on early-career marketers is reaching a crisis point (April 16) – MarTech

BRANDS

Google expands video ads to local search

In another “sign of the AI times,” Google Search has been spotted showing video ads within its local search results “pack”.

To date, video ad creation may have been difficult for the small businesses trying to reach consumers in local markets. But today, AI is helping to bridge the creative workflow requirements for ad formats such as video.

Search Engine Land’s Anu Adegbola said, “Google is bringing video into one of its most intent-driven surfaces — local search — as it looks to make ads more immersive and engaging.”

Read: Google tests video ads in local search results (April 20) – Search Engine Land

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Tracking the ‘Share of Model’

Brandtech Group’s Jellyfish is finding new ways with AI to streamline media planning for the integrated marketing agency. And it’s affecting how automated advertising platforms like Google’s Performance Max are engaged on behalf of clients.

Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal reported:

“Its ‘Share of Model’ product measures how often AI models mention a brand compared to competitors—analyzing themes, sentiment, and cultural context—and translates those insights into targeting signals for Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns.

For (client) Project Management Institute (PMI), a professional organization for project, program, and portfolio management, this approach translated into a 20% lift in sales volume, a 45% increase in conversions, and a 156% improvement in return on ad spend over a 90-day campaign that concluded in early January, according to Jellyfish.”

Read:

  • “Jellyfish Wants You to Use Large Language Models to Plan Your Ad Buys” (April 20) – Adweek (subscription)
  • Marketing website: ShareOfModel[dot]ai

From tipsheet: “Share Of Model” seems like a logical framework for understanding a brand’s visibility — and great marketing for the agency. It’s reminiscent of eMarketer’s recent reporting-by-vertical of brand mentions for finance and personal care.

Every AI visibility-related company wants to be the ‘Nielsen’ for GEO.

COMMERCE MEDIA

Marketing the agentic commerce platform

Startup Envive (formerly Spiffy) CEO Aniket Deosthali is pitching generative engine optimization to eCommerce clients courtesy of his company’s agentic commerce platform.

AdExchanger’s Joanna Gerber reported:

“Envive is a commerce-focused AI company that helps brands improve how they show up within AI search and develops brand-specific agents that marketers can deploy on their websites.

By studying a combination of past campaign results, CRM data and third-party data, Envive develops a clear understanding of a brand’s customer profiles. This understanding allows marketers to shift their messaging and content strategies accordingly and improves their odds of ranking better on answer engines, Deosthali explained.”

Mr. Deosthali, a former Walmart eCommerce executive, added that an Envive AI shopping assistant is also helping close the loop by crawling the client’s website and informing the conversation with the consumer.

Read more on AdExchanger. (April 20)

More: “‘Commerce is entering the agentic era’: Envive raises $15M to build AI agents for online retailers” (September 2025) – GeekWire

From tipsheet: The retail media purchase funnel is being addressed by commerce and advertising/marketing platform players simultaneously.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

WPP, Google Cloud unite for marketing

Giuliana Coli, WPP’s VP, Global Strategic Partnerships, touted the fruits of her agency holding company’s AI and marketing partnership with Google Cloud.

On LinkedIn yesterday, she highlighted:

  • “Co-developed 3 products with teams at Google Research, addressing a rapidly changing consumer journey, from GenerativeUI from AKQA targeting the intention economy, to an agentic automotive assistant that transforms the purchase journey from VML MAP.”
  • “Partnered on the launch of Nano Banana Pro, 2 and Veo 3.1 and kicked off a research project with DeepMind to upend the way we produce content. Teams from across WPP have launched hundreds of AI-led campaigns, delivering assets in days, not weeks.”
  • “Launched AgentHub on WPP Open and with that democratised Gemini-powered agent building capabilities to our entire organization. In tandem, we are developing a shared data and intelligence platform for agentic in partnership with Google Cloud teams.”
  • “Partnered on frontier innovation and robotics projects, testing world-building models like Genie.”

Read more on LinkedIn. (April 20)

WPP is co-hosting an event with Google titled, “Google Next,” beginning today. See agenda.

Related: Trainline signs major data deal to boost WPP AI platform (April 20) – Decision Marketing

‘The Networked Experience of Discovery’

Commenting on Google’s integration of AI Mode into Chrome last week, Digitas Search SVP Corey Kahn shared his big picture view on the future of search.

Mr. Kahn said on LinkedIn:

“This is about the Networked Experience of discovery, research, and decision-making getting simpler and more practical for the consumer.

– Relevant, AI-powered answers sourced across the entire content ecosystem
– Clear ability to dive deeper in a website experience, if the consumer chooses
– Seamless interactivity with the most important information in one screen
– Space for ads that is native and controlled

We are seeing how Google plans to bring together the power of Chrome, Gemini, AI Mode, and the traditional search page to one search experience that your customer actually wants.”

Read more on LinkedIn. (April 20)

More: “We’re changing that today with a set of updates for AI Mode and Chrome!” (April 18) – Google VP of Search Liz Reid on LinkedIn

AGENCIES

Research: Agencies’ top concerns

“Overall, agencies’ top concerns this year are client spending and the effects of AI.

Thirty-eight percent of agency professionals anticipated that the biggest challenge the agency industry will face in 2026 is reduced client budgets, while 38% said the same about the effects of AI. That’s according to a Digiday+ Research survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2025 among 62 agency professionals.”

Read: Digiday+ Research: Agencies punt budget growth expectations to 2027 — while AI worries intensify (April 20) – Digiday (subscription)

PEOPLE MOVES

MORE

  • Apple names John Ternus as CEO to replace Tim Cook, who will become chairman (April 20) – CNBC
  • Opinion: “Why CTV Is Becoming The First Real Test Of Agentic Advertising” (April 13) – Frans Vermeulen, CEO, Swivel on AdExchanger
  • What is Generative AI in Marketing? (undated) – Databricks
  • “Yahoo and the Guardian forge direct path for advertisers via Yahoo DSP” (April 17) – Mi3
  • Hightouch reaches $100M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI (April 15) – TechCrunch