ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the idea of customer experience (CX) from a piecemeal, manually directed practice into a more streamlined and disciplined activity. The available technology has become so diverse and expansive that it is allowing enterprises to cope with a two-headed problem: providing more personalized and effective experiences is complex, and once you start to deliver those experiences, customers ratchet up their expectations and expect the new normal. So even though enterprises now have access to superior experience-building tools, the actual delivery of top-tier experiences has become more of a competitive necessity than a true differentiator. And enterprises can struggle to maintain consistency across customer journeys while optimizing each interaction for maximum engagement and conversion. That’s one reason ISG Research expects that by 2027, one-third of enterprises will be using AI applications to map and manage customer journeys that integrate sales, service and marketing processes. Adobe, which has built out an impressive portfolio of CX tools that stem from its marketing technology expertise, is focusing much of its development efforts directly on using AI to orchestrate (and measure) better customer journeys. Its approach gets at that dual problem by breaking down data silos and integrating disparate marketing and customer service technologies. Making journey management easier for line-of-business teams is the first step in turning CX from a disconnected, team-by-team approach into a true enterprise practice. And that, in turn, helps those enterprises keep pace with both the evolving tools and customer expectations. The fundamental piece of Adobe’s CX portfolio is the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), an extensible system consisting of a growing suite of AI-powered applications, notably Adobe Journey Optimizer. It provides a way for brands to create cross-channel customer journeys that are tailored to individual behaviors and preferences. Alongside that framework, the company has built a family of Experience Platform Agents: AI assistants that perform specific roles across the customer lifecycle, including Journey Agent, Audience Agent, Content Production Agent, and Data Insights Agent. Each agent takes on a specific, well-defined set of tasks and automates them using real-time data and domain expertise. Adobe will be rolling out different agents through 2025. These agents are part of a new product framework, announced at Adobe Summit 2025, that represents a strategic pivot towards what Adobe calls Customer Experience Orchestration, which is really a way of using AI to control large portions of the customer lifecycle. Adobe's approach centers on breaking down traditional silos between marketing, sales and customer service functions. Because it comes at the CX problem from its legacy in marketing technology (rather than the service environment), Adobe has a leg up on orchestration and journey design. Martech generally provides a better starting point for doing analysis on customer behavior, intent and sentiment than service-oriented applications. So, Adobe’s efforts in customer analytics, data unification and content management provide a strong base for building journeys that aim for desired (and optimized) outcomes. The company’s CX bias is towards building proactive engagement, rather than merely reacting to customer input. Focusing on goals and desired outcomes leads to a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences, which in turn delivers more effective marketing campaigns, optimized customer engagement, increased conversion rates and ultimately, stronger customer loyalty and value. There are two reasons why Adobe’s current efforts are relevant to enterprises. First, they center around an element of CX—journey design and management—that is transforming from a manual ad-hoc process into a standardized, software-enriched one. When you professionalize and automate a process, it becomes part of the basic methods of doing business; once that happens, other businesses must follow suit for competitive reasons. And when businesses are forced to address a process bottleneck such as journey design, they will discover that different teams and systems are all having an impact on customer experiences, even if that impact isn’t visible without study. Second, enterprises typically do more work to map or understand their journeys than to design them. The assumption is that journeys exist by default, based on what customers decide to do. When Adobe, or a competitor, focuses attention on the need to design journeys, users can start deciding which journeys are worthwhile and which are not. You can begin to prune away contact options that are unprofitable, for example, or amplify journeys that deliver certain results, and you start to identify the specific KPIs that tell you if you are properly matching journeys to outcomes. Adobe’s tools provide both sides of that coin: visibility into journeys that exist and power to influence them both in the moment and beforehand. The Journey Agent, for example, allows for automatic optimization of B2C and B2B journeys, while the Audience Agent handles segmentation and targeting with high precision. One of the most interesting elements in Adobe’s CX portfolio is its Agent Orchestrator, a coordination engine that lets multiple software agents collaborate intelligently across tasks. Use cases range from automated content creation (via the Content Production Agent) to intelligent site personalization (via the Site Optimization Agent). In effect, Adobe is breaking down the process of journey management into small enough elements that each step can be managed by at least one automated agent. Each step feeds automatically into the next: Journey Optimizer can use the customer profiles built within the CDP, drawing on behavioral data analyzed by Adobe Analytics, to create personalized journeys executed through Adobe Campaign, and continuously optimized using Adobe Target's A/B testing. At a high level, customer pathways are designed and monitored, measured and re-optimized. These capabilities are more than just incremental product updates. They signify Adobe’s strategy of creating agentic experience orchestration. Adobe’s architecture provides a stepping stone for enterprises to find a scalable path from automation to intelligent engagement. Adobe will likely continue to focus on enhancing its AI capabilities across the Experience Cloud. We could then see more sophisticated tools for automated personalization, predictive analytics and intelligent journey orchestration. Adobe should be on the radar of more businesses looking at expanding their CX capabilities. One of Adobe’s advantages is its martech-influenced focus on analysis and measurement of CX outcomes, rather than on the communication elements of the experience. This will help businesses build CX processes that are enterprise-wide in scope, rather than simply departmental and ad hoc. Regards, Keith Dawson

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