A post-Summit reflection by Ross Robinson (Optima Partners) and Adrian Swinscoe (Advisor, Author & Host of Punk CX Podcast)
A couple of months ago, we attended Adobe Summit 2025 in Las Vegas.
Now, after taking some time to ruminate on the flurry of announcements that were made, one thing has become crystal clear: marketing technology isn’t just evolving – it’s, as Ross the Formula 1 fan says, ready to roar off the grid.
Adobe’s vision for the future of experience-led growth is bold, ambitious, and most importantly, already in motion. From the packed general sessions to the hands-on labs, Adobe made one thing abundantly clear: Generative AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s in the engine room. And it’s powering a fundamental rethinking of how content, decisioning, and personalisation work at scale.
(Picture – F1 Grid at Adobe Summit Grand Prix part)
Summit Highlights: The Tools Are Here!
Here are some of the standout product moments that got the crowd talking…
- Brand Concierge, a new Firefly-powered capability, aims to enforce brand consistency across AI-generated content, tackling one of the biggest barriers to adoption: governance and risk management.
- Agent Orchestrator, part of Adobe Experience Platform, promises to unify and deploy AI agents across systems – driving consistent, intelligent, and automated experiences.
- The continued evolution of Firefly, Adobe’s GenAI creative engine, brings scalable content creation and intelligent image/text generation deeper into everyday workflows.
- And perhaps most importantly, Adobe is integrating these capabilities seamlessly into real-time customer journeys through Journey Optimiser and Experience Cloud.
It’s exciting. It’s here. And it’s real.
But here’s the rub…for all the capability on display at Adobe Summit, there was also an underlying ‘hum’, like an idling engine, coming out of the conference, that pointed to a series of three challenges that companies need to overcome if they are to harness the power of the technology that is now available to them.
It’s Not The Tools Holding You Back. It’s Your Mindset.
The first of those challenges has got nothing to do with the technology but has everything to do with organisational mindset.
It’s a real barrier and is something that we see every day in our work: the resistance to change, the rut of legacy thinking, the comfort of old habits and the instinct to control rather than accelerate.
This new technology offers marketing and CX leaders endless opportunities and possibilities to achieve more and better customer, employee and business. But, unless they and their teams change how they think, operate, and make decisions, this extraordinary technology will sit idle, like a Formula 1 car in a suburban garage: expensive, impressive… but completely unused.
“Clients often have the stack, but they haven’t built the muscle. You can’t adopt F1 technology and still behave like you’re driving a Ford Transit.”
Ross Robinson, Director of Design & Transformation, Optima Partners
“We keep talking about transformation, but it’s still too often tech-led, not vision-led. To get there, though, we have to change our behaviours, the way we think about things, and how we approach things…..our mindset has to change. Mindset is the multiplier. Without it, you’re in danger of just automating mediocrity.”
Adrian Swinscoe, CX Advisor, Author & Host of Punk CX
Adobe has effectively given ambitious organisations a high-performance machine: intelligent content creation, agentic orchestration, and real-time decisioning, all underpinned by deep data connectivity.
And yet, many will be held back nothing other than themselves.
Their competitors, meanwhile, are not just adopting the tools. They’re re-engineering how they work – reimagining and rebuilding how they design experiences, manage content, and make decisions.
They’re bringing in a performance mindset: vision-led, fast, iterative, and built for the realities of a data-driven, AI-powered world… something we at Optima know inside out 😉
The Power Is There – But Where To Aim It?
Another big theme that surfaced repeatedly during the Summit was the widespread uncertainty about where to target these powerful new tools and capabilities…
While everyone might be talking about embracing AI, it’s not enough to just own AI – you need to apply it with purpose and precision and aim it at VALUE.
“So many organisations are chugging the Gen-AI kool-aid, but haven’t mapped out where the friction actually lives…..the campaign delays….the content version chaos…the bottlenecks in decision-making…”
Ross Robinson, Director of Design & Transformation, Optima Partners
“There’s still a belief that AI is a fix-all. It’s not. It’s a spotlight. It helps you see the inefficiencies – but if you don’t know where to look, it just adds noise.”
Adrian Swinscoe, CX Advisor, Author & Host of Punk CX
This isn’t about being “AI-ready.” It’s about being value-ready.
If you don’t deliver a return on investment (RoI), then all of your AI-readiness efforts will be for nought.
Thus, the winners won’t be those who adopt AI first – they’ll be the ones who aim the tech and its capability where it counts, where the value is, and will then move quickly from experimentation to impact.
From Potential to Performance – Putting The Power To Work
The demos at Adobe Summit were sharp, slick, and undeniably powerful. For many clients we spoke with, what they saw challenged many long-held assumptions and helped shift what they thought was possible with GenAI and personalised customer engagement.
But let’s be honest: demos are the highlight reel. The real work happens on the shopfloor – where processes, people, platforms, culture, and data collide in real-time complexity.
And, that’s where the third challenge emerged: How to take all of this potential and turn it into real performance.
Here’s what we’ve learned from years of experience about what that looks like in practice:
Mapping the content supply chain end-to-end, from idea to execution – Not just where content is produced, but how it flows – from brief to creation, approval to activation, across every channel and format. Most inefficiencies live in the grey zones between teams and tools. Shining a light on that journey is the first step toward scalable personalisation.
Embedding GenAI into real jobs-to-be-done, not just innovation labs – Innovation doesn’t scale when it’s siloed. GenAI needs to be part of day-to-day workflows – helping marketers write faster, designers create at scale, and decisioning teams test, learn, and optimise in real-time. It’s not about pilot projects; it’s about practical utility.
Rethinking how teams, governance, and decisioning systems interact -If your structure can’t support rapid experimentation, you’re not ready to realise the benefits of this tech. This is about breaking silos, simplifying approvals, aligning incentives, and building cross-functional operating models that unlock speed without losing control.
Measuring success by acceleration and relevance – not just volume or outputs
It’s not about how many assets you produce or how many journeys you map. It’s about how quickly you can respond to customer signals, adapt messaging, and deliver something genuinely useful, timely, and consistent. Speed to value is the new performance metric.
And most importantly…
Getting out of your own way
That means removing outdated processes, legacy mindsets, and organisational blockers. It means trusting the tech – but more importantly, trusting your people to use it. The bottlenecks aren’t always technical. Often, they’re cultural.
The Grid Is Packed. Are You Ready To Race?
So, the starting gun has been fired. The tech is here. The opportunity is clear. The possibilities are immense.
So here’s the question we’re asking our clients and networks:
Are you ready to race?
If so, let’s get you out of the garage…
Contact us here to discuss further.
