Adobe Summit 2025 - everything we heard and learned as it happened

Good morning from Las Vegas! Ahead of Adobe Summit kicking off tomorrow, we're gearing up for a busy few days of news and announcements, so be sure to check back later for updates.

We've collected our badge ready for an action-packed day tomorrow, which kicks off with an Opening Keynote headed up by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, CMO Lara Balazs and other execs.

Good morning – we're up bright and early for today's action-packed itinerary. We'll be off to the keynote in a couple of hours before heading off into different breakouts and press briefings to hear what's new from Adobe.

Just as a reminder, the opening keynote will be hosted by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, CMO Lara Balazs and other execs.

We'll also doubtlessly hear from customers and fans alike - should be a good one!

We've been escorted to the press area ready for the opening keynote session where we'll hear from Adobe executives and customers about the future of customer experience with an emphasis on creativity, marketing and AI.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen welcomes attendees to the company's 23rd Summit. "Creativity is the new productivity," he said as he summarized the latest AI announcements.

"Creativity is a uniquely human trait," Narayen explained as he stressed how AI will enhance human output before he welcomed Anil Chakravarthy, President of Digital Experience and Worldwide Field Operations, to tell us where Adobe's heading.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey share a Coke Zero as Quincey explains how he modernized the beverage giant from within, beginning with favoring jeans over a suit and tackling the traditional hierarchical company structure.

Anil Chakravarthy has introduced Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator for Businesses, including 10 new purpose-built agents supercharge capacity and eliminate bottlenecks.

Chakravarthy promised more agents will be coming soon before showing us how one of the 10 launch agents, the site optimization agent, can help keep a website operating at peak performance by finding opportunities to enhance the site and then executing those autonomously.

Adobe CMO Lara Balazs explained how marketing is harder than ever, but personalization at scale holds the key to success. "If they don't get on board, they're going to be left behind," she added.

Digital Media Business President David Wadhwani echoed Balazs's comments: "The best way to stand out is through personalization."

He noted how speed to market is imperative, adding that the efficacy of social media campaigns typically drops off after just one week. GenAI can plug the gap where budget growth doesn't keep up with demand for more content.

Responding to customer demand, Adobe is adding new video editing tools to Firefly services, including aspect ratio changes and language translation – set to be one of the most impactful changes creatives and marketers can benefit from with mammoth time-saving benefits.

Adobe lifted the wraps off three new Firefly Services APIs in general availabliity: Translate and Lip Sync API for instant translation of spoken dialog into different languages, Reframe API to resize videos for different platforms and Custom Models API to ensure newly created assets are on-brand.

Additionally, the Substance 3D API will enable teams to bring together 3D objects with Firefly-generated backgrounds to accelerate content production, but this one's in beta.

Well that's a wrap on the opening keynote, which covered a lot of ground very quickly. To recap, we heard about updates to Firefly Services including new APIs and custom models for creating high-quality, on-brand assets and the newly launched Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator and Brand Concierge app for building and managing Adobe and third-party AI agents. Agentic AI is very much the theme of Adobe Summit 2025.

"The demand for content is insatiable," reads a slide presented by Adobe Express Director Pierre Tapia and SVP and GM Govind Balakrishnan to a small group of the press, citing research revealing that 90% of marketing leaders believe the demand for content will increase 2x in the next two years (50% by 3x).

The company's new AI tools can help companies repurpose existing assets leading to quicker time to market and a reduction in net new assets (and therefore cost).

Probed about the effects of artificial intelligence on designers, Balakrishnan noted that Adobe's tools help creatives become more productive, adding that the company doesn't view any of its products as replacements for humans.

AI also has the power to "dramatically lower the barrier to entry," he stated.

Tapia added that creatives would rather spend more time on ideation, creation and inspiration. GenAI tools can help increase the velocity of content while creating a "productivity dividend" that the creators can take to be more strategic.

Familiar challenges like cost and trust continue to slow down AI adoption, but IBM Consulting Global Chief Design Officer Billy Seabrook reckons change management is what's really stopping companies from realizing the benefits of AI. Preparing and re-training the workforce is the biggest thing companies can do right now not to get left behind.

After a short break, Amit Ahuja, SVP of Experience Cloud, Platform and Products, Digital Experience is joining us on stage to unpack everything AI from this morning.

"We're moving from experimentation to implementation," Ahuja said about agentic AI.

Two more leaders from Coca-Cola are here to talk about how they use generative AI to fuel content production for the group's 200 brands in over 200 countries. They haven't touched their Coke Zeros yet, maybe they're just there for product placement?

Coca-Cola VP Rapha Abreu stressed the importance of a clearly defined AI strategy. His colleague and fellow VP Shekhar Gowda added the companies who see the highest levels of success are the ones that define AI's role carefully.

"When you are defining your AI strategy... the key is to establish a human lead approach, where designers, creatives, humans, in general, lead and AI follows," Abreu said.

"What do enterprise software agents and sudoku solvers have in common?"

Adobe VP Shivakumar Vaithyanathan explains how agentic AI reasoning follows the same principles as human reasononing – planning, verification, and then backtracking. We just had to understand and define that in order to make AI more autonomous.

Well that's a wrap on today's keynote content. We're off for a chat with Joshua Young, Head of EMEA Sales GTM - Content & Collaboration, now.

We've got two more keynotes scheduled for tomorrow plus a sneak peak at some products in development, so come back for that all day tomorrow.

Good morning from day two of Adobe Summit 2025!

After yesterday's opening keynote, we're getting ready for the second major address later this morning, so stay tuned for all the latest news and updates as they happen...

It's breakfast time here at Adobe Summit 2025. We're still a couple of hours away from the main keynote session but we're hoping to hear plenty more thoughts and ideas in the meantime.

As we wait for today's keynote to start, let's remind ourselves of some of the announcements we've already heard:

• Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator – a new platform for building, managing and orchestrating AI agents
• It will also integrate with partners like AWS, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and more
• 10 new purpose-built AI agents – including site optimization and content production agents
• Adobe Experience Manager Sites Optimizer – a new application to automate issue diagnosis and solution recommendations to capture more web traffic
• Adobe GenStudio Foundation – a new interface to bring together campaign plans, projects, assets and insights from across Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud apps

The audience is flowing in as we gear up for the second keynote of Adobe Summit 2025.

Rachel Thornton, CMO, Enterprise has welcomed the audience or around 12,000 to the second day of Adobe Summit 2025, setting the scene for us to hear about some success stories.

"Treat your own employees like the customers," JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon says as he envisions a world where companies makes their workers' lives easier by deploying the right tech solutions.

Chatting on stage with JPMorganChase Jamie Dimon, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen asked the leader how the banking giant approaches AI.

Dimon explained that the company has always been about "big math," so AI was just the next logitcal step. JPMorganChase first used AI in 2012, and the company now has 2,000 employees working on its own AI.

An estimated 700 use cases for AI are now observed within the company, with the most popular being fraud detection, risk analysis, prospecting and document summarization.

Echoing endless studies published in recent years, Dimon added that getting the data in an accessible form is the hard part.

The audience applauded as Dimon declared that consumer data should be their own data – it shouldn't belong to banks, healthcare institutions, etc.

Anjul Bhambhri, SVP, Adobe Experience Cloud is here to tell us how Adobe is supercharging the company's AI Assistant with agents, which she describes as "intelligent and autonomous."

Users will continue to engage with them through conversations, but they'll go beyond answering questions by "doing things for you."

You have to tell them what you want want, highlight goals and costraints, and AI agents will proactively make suggestions and fill in gaps, Bhambhri adds.

How AI agents get to work is really simple, Bhambhri explains. The process starts by analyzing user input, then the agent reasons with your intentions before generating an orchestration plan.

Speaking about agentic AI, "You are always in the driver's seat, and you have an autopilot that you can switch on," Bhambhri added.

In a live demo, Rachel Hanessian, Senior Manager of Product Management, Generative AI just extended her imaginary three-day hotel stay with Marriott after seeing a targeted email to offer her discounts on local attractions. This was powered by Adobe's new AI Assistant tools, she explains, as she shows us the behind-the-scenes.

"When my daughter goes online shopping for tops, the Brand Concierge can recommend the colors and styles that match the pants she bought in store a few weeks back," Bhambhri explained.

Hilary Cook, VP, Global Marketing Operations at Marriott, asked the audience if they're "excited to implement what we're seeing" at Summit.

AI is "not a silver bullet for fixing decades of debt" but it's an "incredible amplifier if you're willing to do the right work," Cook explained as she addressed the disparate processes that plague every company.

"We're now in the tens of millions of variations," Cook said after the company adopted Adobe's product suite. Marriott has also seen a 70% reduction in time to market for campaign content generation.

That's it for today's keynotes. We're off to chat with more people from Adobe before we take our seat again to hear what's cooking in the labs at Adobe HQ.

We've just had a chat with Anjul Bhambhri, SVP, Experience Cloud Engineering, Digital Experience, who is a firm believer that companies must try AI to understand its pros and cons, and how it might be able to help them. Much like saying you don't like broccoli when you haven't even tried it, experimentation with emerging technologies is key.

Adobe Digital Trends Report shows that two in three (64%) are seeing increased productivity and efficiency. The same number are seeing greater volume and speed of content ideation and production.

Every year, the report reveals ROI is increasing.

You can now buy sheets, mattresses and scents you experience at Marriott hotels so you don't have to steal them, company SVP, Marketing, Data Activation and Personalization, Chris Norton jokes on stage as he sets up to tell us how the hotel chain is using artificial intelligence to understand how customers engage the its 30 brands.

Siloed marketing teams, goals and content plagued Marriott until it went all-in on Adobe Experience Platform, Norton declares.

Its Adobe investments are just the tip of the iceberg, though. He says that talent investments, content acceleration, a solid data foundation and rethinking the ways of working are all just as vital for an effective digital transformation.

"Sell the vision but set the expectations," Norton advises for companies looking to get the C-suite on board. "This is a journey that's never truly done," he adds.

The countdown is on for Summit Sneaks in two hours, where we're promised demos of new features that may or may not end up in our Experience Cloud products in the future. Actor, comedian and producer Ken Jeong will also be bringing the laughs.

We're here at a very lively Sneaks to hear what Adobe's got planned for us next, and the party is in full swing.

Sneak #1: designers can turn sketches into images powered by Firefly, with changes updating on the fly

Sketch-to-image struggling to interpret your substandard sketches? You can also feed it text prompts just to make your intentions that little clearer.

Sneak #2: Patent-pending Project Panorama goes one step further to help developers map their apps and customized in-app experiences to help understand where user interactions drop off.

Sneak #3: For the 'data storytellers', Project Slide Wow makes presenting data much more succinct by automatically generating slides from datasets.

Sneak #4: Been put off moving content management systems because of the sheer amount of work and time involved? This next sneak uses an AI agent to handle that for you in a much more efficient manner.

That's us over and out for this evening. Just a reminder that the projects demonstrated this evening in Sneaks are in development in the labs, so may or may not make it to general availability.

Adobe Summit 2025 is over, but we're still reminiscing about the powerful tools launched to make marketers' workflows slicker.

Whether that's the launch of 10 new AI agents or the ability to quickly create marketing asset variations with the enhanced Firefly, we've gone from experimentation to implementation and we're now starting to see first hand how companies can leverage AI to enhance productivity.