On the Ground at Adobe Summit 2026

24:16But this is a way to say, all right, I'm as a marketer. I now can orchestrate across my team members, across my agents. I can define goals. CX Coworker can execute on those goals. I think that is a great way for now marketers to be able to take a step back and say, hey, there's some signals I want to take in from our customers, from my industry, from my environment. and if those signals happen, no matter when they happen, as long as I have my coworker team made who can say, okay, great, that competitive signal came in from a channel or I'm selling beauty products and that beauty product has popped because of an influencer, coworker can say, hey, let's respond to that.

24:56Let's build a campaign. Let's get it out there. So coworker, is it like a marketing assistant that reads the results of all these campaigns that you put out there and then comes to you and says, hey, just so you know, your social campaigns are performing better. You should do X, Y, Z. Yeah, let's do some more social campaigns. And now the marketer is in this great position of like, hey, as I look across my team, how do I get my marketers who can build content, build experiences, but how do I amplify that team, have them move faster, have them be more agile? And I think coworker is that great example of how do you have your AI coworkers like, hey, here's how we're helping you build campaigns.

25:35Here's how we're going to make sure that if this thing happens, we can build the right campaign or the right experience around it. And then the marketer can look at it and say, yes, that looks great. Let's go. Or maybe that's not meeting the mark on the beauty product I did want to position. Let's see if we can redo it. So I think that's exciting for coworker. And then I think the other thing that's really exciting is Adobe brand intelligence. If you think about the rise of all of this content that marketers have to create, you absolutely have to make sure it's on brand, right? If you want to make sure it's governed, it's compliant, it's brand ready and that you can scale those brand guidelines across assets, across teams.

26:13Adobe brand intelligence helps you do that without having any sort of brand drift. Like I made 50 different assets or 5 ,000 different assets, but maybe the first one looked great. The last one didn't. Adobe brand intelligence. Exactly. It's consistent. There's no brand drift. It has all of your guidelines embedded in it. And all of your designers, all of your marketers can make content, make it faithfully, deliver that brand experience faithfully. So look, the idea of using an assistant or even an agent to help read what's effective on the marketer's end, I mean, that's one way that marketers could be using AI.

26:50The other way that I want to get your take on here is this idea that you are now not just marketing to people, but now we have a sea of agents crawling the internet. And so if I am a retailer and I've put these advertisements out there, look, people might see them. But really, now there's the agents that have to read the Internet. And so how do you advise chief marketing officers to think about that? I mean, how are you helping customers show up better to agents right now? I think about it as an audience. It's a conversation my team and I, we've been having a lot over the last several months. It's like if you think about the audiences a marketer has to go after, agents become an audience, right?

27:38So you have to think, I'll give you a good example. In brand discovery, you know, if you see the rise of people looking for information using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, you have to not only think about, all right, what are the humans doing? What are my customers doing? But what are the agents doing that are basically reading the information I have, making sure that agents are just as educated on what you're providing so that you do show up well in LLMs? But when you begin to sort of think about it as this is an audience. So like any audience, how do I need to think about educating them, engaging them, making sure I have the right content, making sure I've built the right experiences?

28:17It just, in this day and age, make sure your brand shows up better, right? your offerings show up better. And I think any marketer, you know, who's been dealing with audiences for the whole career, they're going to get that. They're going to say, great, if this is an audience, how do I think about educating, training that audience? So what's the answer to that question? How do you show up better to agents, to bots, essentially? Right, exactly. So if you go back a couple of years, I think people would have said, I have my website, my website's for people. I don't want to have bots scraping my website.

28:50that maybe it wouldn't be a good thing. But now it's like, no, no, you have to think about it as this is the website I want to make sure my customers are seen and this is the website and the content really that I want to make sure agents are seen. So how are you making that machine readable? How are you making that agent readable? So that content, that information that you want to show up is showing up, right? And I think if I look at products like Adobe LLM Optimizer, that's what we're helping you do is understand what is the experience that you want to build for humans, again, if you come to your website, or what is the experience you want to build for agents to make sure that you show up well as agents consume that information and then it gets ingested and trained for models.

29:33I want to ask you about AI adoption broadly speaking. Are you seeing any resistance at all to people adopting AI, You know, this idea that, I don't know, I kind of like my job. Why would I want a robot to do it for me? Is there any fear in the enterprises that you work with of adopting these tools? I think, you know, if you think about sort of ground zero for a lot of this disruption, Silicon Valley, and then you think about the West Coast. And then as you move sort of in concentric circles outwards, there's going to be varying levels of adoption, varying levels of people embracing it. There's no CMO I'm talking to that is like, okay, this isn't a thing.

30:17All of it, every CMO is like, yes, I understand this disruption across sort of the key marketing work streams in my world. So whether it's brand discoverability, whether it's content, whether it's customer experiences. So now help me figure out how to do it. And then I think when we're talking to teams, actually the hunger, the thing that we're getting a lot of requests for is, what do I need to know? Like, what's my primer on everything I need to know about thinking about marketing and the intersection of marketing and AI? So I think it has to do to me with there's a velocity of adoption depending on the industry, the brand, the company.

30:56But everybody realizes, hey, this is something I have to understand that's happening. but now understand, more importantly, how to navigate it, right? How do I make sure I'm not just bolting things on or not really thinking end-to-end about my brand experience and my customer experience? How am I really thinking about embedding AI into all of my work streams? So I think there is definitely that hunger to learn and to navigate it and to make sure that you're navigating successfully these shifts. But I think the adoption may vary depending on industry, like I said, industry brand, where you are, et cetera.

31:28So I think that's where we're helping customers is sort of figuring out, hey, how do we help educate you on where you are? And then how can we help you do, you know, how can we help you do more? I mentioned at the start of the conversation, we spoke six months ago at Adobe Max. And look, we're at a pace of innovation right now where a month feels like a year. And so a lot has changed in the last six months. What do you think has changed about the AI conversation in the last six months that you think is emblematic of the way you think people are going to be talking about it from here on in? It's not just the pace of change.

32:05I think it is understanding how this change and the paradigm shifts across things, how you have to think about them, how you have to implement them. I also think there's this, you know, and I've talked about this before. Or it gives you a chance, I think, to experiment more. And that experimentation becomes important. So you can really figure out what will work for you, for your brand, for your offerings, for your customer base. And so I think there'll be more agility than I think marketers have had in a while. I think the speed at which you can do things, create things, will give you the ability to experiment more.

32:43But I also think there is this concept of how do you think about agents as an audience? Not only an audience you're talking to, but even internally as there's lots of conversations, especially between, I think, CMOs and CIOs about who are the tech vendors we're working with, what's our agent strategy, how would we have agents internally, how do we orchestrate internal agents? I think there's a lot still to learn about how are you doing that training? How are you doing that skilling, if you want to say, you know, you want to think about that for agents? How do you want them to show up? I think that's an interesting conversation now.

33:22And how do you do that? I mean, this is a question that I've started to ask myself. How do I be on the forefront of these tools? It's a question I'm sure you're thinking about as well. How do we make our own people on the forefront of these tools? You hear companies sending their engineers back to coding boot camp, right? It's like relearning things. How do you think about upskilling your own people in this environment? Like I said, I definitely think the skilling, the training, just the education in general, right? Like I think of it as just how do I learn about what's going on in the industry?

33:57And this is what, you know, as a team, we're doing all the time. We love you guys as a source of information. But like, how am I learning? How am I keeping abreast of what's happening? But more importantly, how am I kind of changing the paradigm I've had for how things happen and how we now work in this world of people and agents? Like we've been on our team, we've been experimenting with, OK, great. We're not just having purpose built agents who maybe build us an audience. We're actually having teams say, hey, we needed to understand, for example, content operations. Well, we built an agent for that.

34:29We built a conversational UI for that. And I think that gives everyone a chance to get hands on with not only building, but using these tools and figuring out what's the right way to use them. We're actually doing a fun session here where we will have people come in, customize agents, Adobe agents, and then have them complete problems like, hey, create a campaign artifact. And it's interesting to see how that works, see how agents talk to each other, how agents work together to solve a task. So I think it's examples like that and, you know, experiences like that where marketers are really learning.

35:05And I think leaning into that is going to be – that's what I think is going to be the thing that happens over the next, like, year or so is, like, really getting deep with if this is a new audience, if these are new, you know, supporting casts for the marketers, how do we get them educated and trained up and working, you know, with the marketers to achieve a task? Great. Well, Rachel, I want to thank you for having us here. That is Rachel Thornton from Adobe here on TI TV.

35:44I'm joined now by Amit Ahuja, SVP of Customer Experience Orchestration Platform and Products at Adobe. Amit, welcome to TI TV. It's great to have you here. Thanks for, yeah, it's awesome. And thanks for coming to the show and really appreciate it. So you've got a lot going on in your portfolio. Walk us through your role at the company very briefly. Yeah, so I've been with the company about 21 years. So I've been here for quite a few cycles of it, which has been amazing. I will not bore you with what I did during that most time, but for the last six years, I'm responsible for, think about as product management and product marketing for the customer experience orchestration part of the business.

36:21That's my role. So the thing that I want to dive deeper into specifically with you is we've got these partnerships that you guys are announcing with 30 plus different partners. These are big tech companies. These are not small startups in many cases. What are these partnerships? What do you hope to achieve with them? What is actually happening on the ground? Walk us through it. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. First of all, you and I were chatting a little bit. We've done some many, many years. the concept of these big ecosystems is not new. So let me start there. And I'll tell you why this year I think is a little bit different.

36:56But even if you're running back to many, many summits ago, I think one of the things I'm super proud about, we've always believed in this kind of open ecosystem approach. And it's just reality, right? I've always said this, that when I go to the majority of our enterprise customers, there is no such thing as only Adobe, right? So it's in the customer's best interest and our best interest to make sure that whatever technology we're providing, it works with the best of what I call the ecosystem. And traditionally, the way we thought about the ecosystem has largely been around a few big areas. One is what we call ISVs, which are other big tech players.

37:29And we've spent years and years developing integrations, reference architectures such that if a customer says, hey, I want to use Adobe over here, I want to use System X over here, we have that integration in those playbooks, right? So that's one. The second area we spent many, many years around the agency landscape, right? A lot of the agencies use our technology to help power their offering, right? And we partner with them as it relates to going to these customers and now giving them an offering. And the third area has been the system integrators, right? So whether it's the Accenture, Deloitte, I mean, there's many, many of these that we work very closely with, and we have amazing partnerships as it relates to look, once our technology is there, how do you go actually make it successful on behalf of the client?

38:06So that's been true, I would say, pretty much every summit. And, you know, I know the number 30 is coming up because it refers to some of the newer ones, but we have thousands of companies in this ecosystem, right? But what are the ones you're announcing this week? You've got big names. So I'll get to that. Exactly. So the new part a little bit and where the attention is this year more than ever is a lot around the AI part, right? And understandably, I think everybody's walking into the summit saying, hey, AI is top of mind. What does it mean? What does it mean for me? And so the ecosystem, you're exactly right.

38:33So some of the ones we're really excited about from that domain is number one, we're starting to see more and more customers saying, hey, Adobe, I use you to standardize all my customer experience, but now I've got a bunch of people, whether it's the IT organization or even practitioners who are standardizing on Claude, who are standardizing on ChatGPT Enterprise, are standardizing on Copilot Cowork, are standardizing on whichever main AI platform. One of the biggest things we're sending the message of today and we've built out is you can access our technology through any of these environments.

39:02And that's really important right now because I think a lot of these customers are trying to figure this out and say, okay, you are my system of record for everything CX. You have all my workflows, you have my system of truth, you have all my context. how do I now bring this into people who are using these other AI tools such that the investment is paid off that way too? So that's kind of the new category that's emerged. Although it's really a build on, like, we've been working with Microsoft for years, we've been working with Google for years, but now we're starting to see a lot more interest around how do we expand this into these new AI services.

39:33So I just want to get a little tactical here, because we've got people who maybe may not be as familiar with Adobe's suite of products. And so these partnerships with these big tech companies, with Microsoft, with the AI Labs, for example, are these just product level integrations where it's that this Adobe product works and can communicate with a Microsoft tool? Is that what a partnership means here? Or is there actually money changing hands? Are you paying any of these partners? Are they paying you? First of all, I appreciate that everything sounds very high level until you ask questions like that.

40:12So, genuinely, I appreciate you asking that. Let me give you an example, right? If I break down our stack, right? And the way I always think about technology and the way I think about the products we build is across the stack. These partnerships, although they come across as, hey, it's one logo, another logo, are actually very multifaceted. So if I break it down, I say, okay, let's define the software stack. Let's start at the top. People log into applications and we call the front door, right? The user experience. What we are saying today is that if you are using Cloud, if you are using ChatGPT, if you're using Google Enterprise, and you'll actually, I don't know if you'll be able to attend the keynote, you will see a demo of that with Copilot.

40:48You can now access our technology directly through that UI. So in other words, again, the follow-up tactical question would be like, well, great. So what? Let me give you an example. Today, a bunch of marketers log into Microsoft Word, right? Where do you create a campaign brief? Well, they're like, hey, I want to go write a bunch of stuff. So they go to Microsoft Word. Historically, they would say, okay, I want to create this campaign brief. Now, where do I start? And wait, what campaign did I already run? What worked? What didn't work? What concepts should I be using? Guess where all that information is?

41:14It's in Adobe. So why wouldn't I surface it through Copilot directly in Word, right? So that all that information is now showing up there and marketers are thrilled, right? They're like, hey, I don't have to switch 15 different systems. and you're actually using the technology to populate what I need at that time, right? So think about one layer of the stack as this front door, okay? So these partnerships are around, hey, if you want to standardize and access us through that, you can. If you want to come in through another, what I call front door, you can do that too. Keep going down the stack.

41:39You have a whole level of intelligence and models. We work with a lot of these people around their model layer. We have our own models, they build models, and we can incorporate all these different models depending on what people are doing, right? Take another level down the stack. Our software runs on different hyperscaler environments. We partner with them around the hyperscaler environment. So my point is, like, it's sometimes easy to see one logo. What we've done is truly think about at every layer of the stack, what is the right thing for the customer? How do we partner with these people?

42:08And these relationships are absolutely multifaceted, to answer your question, as it relates to technology, as it relates to go-to-market. All of that is part of this. And multifaceted also in terms of are the companies paying each other here? or is it just a handshake saying, we'll work with your products? Yeah, I mean, we have years of history of using different parts of platforms, whether it's hyperscalers, et cetera. They have years of history of standardizing on our technology, right, as it relates to some of their use cases. So there's like, again, it's hard to capsule it, but every part of stack has this kind of multifaceted relationship.

42:40I want to ask you about this, the fate of SEO, you know? Yeah, yeah. What is the fate of SEO in your opinion? Because we're talking about it this week. There's now how you show up in chatbots. There's how the agents are reading your content on the internet. Are we going to care about SEO five years from now? Yeah. So let's take a, I appreciate what you said earlier about for the listeners that aren't super deep on this. Let's take just a micro step back. The notion of what brands have had to do to be discovered is always evolving. Okay. So, I mean, if you really want to rewind the clock, I'm guessing, and again, I'm going to date myself, but way back in the day, you put ads in a newspaper, right?

43:25That person clipped out the newspaper or whatever, read the newspaper and went to their local store and they got greeted by a local store. That's when you started. That's when I started at Atobi, right, right. Before there were even computers. Thank you. So then - You said it, not me, okay? Then there's digital, right? And digital came around and said, hey, like this whole world is changing, right? You need a website, you need a mobile app. And this notion of search engine marketing came out, right? with Google and all these other tools came out. It's like, oh my God, people are expressing intent in these places.

43:50I need to be seen in these environments, right? Now, in the last couple of years, you're seeing this whole evolution of new platforms, right? And you're a consumer, I'm a consumer. I tend to use Perplexity a lot. I use ChatGPT a lot. And I'm now going to these environments to learn and discover or automate. I'm actually doing a lot of things in these environments. A brand fundamentally has to now understand, hey, as this evolves, how do I reach these folks as well? I don't think it's a notion of, oh, all that other stuff is gone. It is truly incremental to now, how do I address? And there's incredible synergy between, hey, what I do from an SEO point of view, right?

44:23And now how do I reach these new environments? And to our strategy, right, which I'm very excited, it's called Brand Visibility is the portfolio that we do in this domain. We've announced a whole bunch of new products there. One is called LM Optimizer. It's getting a lot of traction around helping brands answer this. But the thing I always tell people, I think where Adobe is uniquely positioned and hopefully this comes across as you listen to Summit. Yes, we want to provide you with the analytics and the data to understand, oh, okay, I'm seeing that for my brand, brand A or B, and again, most of our customers have multiple brands.

44:58I'm seeing that we are not getting cited or not getting referenced on ChatGPT. And to go fix this, you need to go update your content on Reddit, whatever it might be, right? There's a whole thing. Just showing the analytics is interesting, but actually providing this closed loop automation cycle is where the world is going. And to do that, right, you have to have this analytic capabilities. You have to have the content generation capabilities. You have to have the CMS and telemetry capabilities. That's what we're bringing together, right? The notion of that is what we call brand visibility. Some people call it this experience flywheel concept, which basically means what's the signal?

45:32Like, what am I hearing? And where am I, what's the discovery looking like? What do I need to go generate, whether it's onsite or offsite? and then fundamentally how do I continue to optimize that loop? The reality is that even back to your point about SEO, what the bots were, like doing kind of what they, I call them basically notification bots back in the day for search, these agents are completely different, right? Now you have personal agents being built on OpenClaw. They're coming to your website. These personal agents are going to start making decisions. So now every brand is saying, yes, I need to provide information, but oh God, I got these personal agents showing up.

46:03They're making decisions in subseconds. so your content better be agent optimized and better be ready in subseconds for that agent to say, oh, I'm going to go automate this. I'm going to go buy this. That whole world is completely evolving and we're very fortunate that we've been building what we call Adobe Experience Manager, which is our foundation for content, into this world of brand visibility and really excited about that. Let me ask you one last question here. We cover a lot of startups here on the show. We also cover all the big tech companies that are all sort of circling around a similar area of products in terms of agents.

46:41How do you stand out? How do you differentiate yourself? I mean, first of all, I told you earlier, I'm responsible for product, and I have a lot of respect for the startups. I have a lot of respect for the big tech companies. I think everybody's coming at it from their point of view, which I think is absolutely great, and I think it's great for the industry. I think it's great for the customers, et cetera. So I think that's kind of part number one. Part number two is this is not a new phenomenon, right? If we were sitting here having this conversation 15 years ago, we kind of around the time we started building this category called digital marketing, we would have the same conversation.

47:16I would have told you at that point, hey, venture funding is there's 50 companies in every little space that we could be. Actually, it's probably way more than 50. And if anybody ever wants to see that, whoever's listening, go to these tools like LumaScape, or there's all these different Chief Martech. This has been covered for years, how many startups and all that. Where we differentiate truly from the ground up is, A, I think we have truly led the charge around what are these categories and what are the tools required to fully execute on it. So if you rewind back to the beginning, we really defined what is digital marketing.

47:44Then about six or seven years later, we defined what is customer experience management, a broadening of that as it relates to tools and capability. Last year at Summit, we came out and we said, hey, now we're defining a new category. We call it customer experience orchestration. We've always taken the lead on that. But more importantly, I think we've been ahead on thinking about what are these tools that need to be connected to actually drive this value. And I never take away from the startup who's focusing on one area. There's a lot of great tech there. I think there's other big companies doing amazing things.

48:13But I think our unique thing is, A, we're trusted by a lot of customers for this. B, they've used us for years and have built it up. And C, the reality of where we sit today is that all these companies are hearing about AI, AI, AI. If you're a CIO, you're a CMO, you are saying they're getting inundated with every company in the world coming and saying, AI, AI, and you walk out of a meeting, you're like, I don't know what is going on. Adobe comes in as strategic partner. And most importantly, we know how to make AI work in the enterprise context. So now everything you're trying to do from a CX point of view, you can do that with Adobe, which I think is truly differentiated.

48:47And that's respecting your brand, that's respecting your controls, that's respecting compliance, a lot of the stuff that people don't talk about. To make this work in enterprise, that is what you need. Great. I want to thank you for coming on. That is Amit Ahuja from Adobe here on TI TV.

49:17I'm joined now by Jason Cherok, VP of Product Design and Analytics at Dick's Sporting Goods, which is a client of Adobe. Jason, welcome to TI TV. It's great to have you here. Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about your role at Dick's Sporting Goods. Yeah, so I, as you mentioned, lead product design and analytics. It's across the enterprise, so we have really three big areas. Our athlete, which is really what we call our consumer, so all things, you know, marketing, e-com, et cetera. On our teammate side, which is really merchandising, supply chain, those types of things. And our foundation, which is our data and AI platform, infrastructure, all those things.

49:50So I get to play across the space and I have a lot of fun doing it. Now, I have to ask you because I was looking forward to this conversation a couple months ago on X. I saw that the top four apps on the App Store, you had the three big AI chatbot apps. And then Dick's Sporting Goods was right there at number four. And look, you see a lot of stuff on the Internet. So I just want to make sure. I mean, that was true, right? Dick's Sporting Goods was the number four app on the App Store. It is indeed true. Yes, we take a we got a lot of buzz from that for sure. We take a lot of pride in our app. It really comes down to how we think about our overall athlete experience.

50:24So we always think app first and everything from, you know, how you're engaging in our loyalty program, things you can do inside of the store with your app, and then just generally how we try to keep you engaged and make sure we meet your goals. So take a lot of pride, and we're very excited about that performance. So, look, I think, you know, we can talk a little later about why the app was so popular then. But what I am interested in asking you about is how AI is embedded not just into the app, but into the company at large. Tell me a little bit about some of the ways in which you're using the technology.

50:55Yeah, for sure. I mean, AI is not a new thing, right? It's been around for a long time. So we spent a long time already really investing and putting time into our data and AI platform to begin with. So a lot of that is understanding in our entire ecosystem, the athlete, right? So we have everything from, you know, Game Changer, which helps us understand your journey throughout youth sports. We have everything in our stores and how you're engaging. And so it comes down to really having an integrated, holistic view of the athlete. So that's one. Two is then the ability to actually engage them. So in order to personalize at scale and be part of your end-to-end journey, you really can only do that with AI.

51:31not only in the experiences you're creating, but even operationally, how we can serve that experience. So we use AI in pretty much all things, and we're doubling down on it now as it continues to evolve and with the use of agents. So let's get a little tactical here. I mean, so I'm an athlete, a customer, I guess, of Dixon's Sporting Goods. I mean, you know, when I log onto the website or if I'm using the app, I mean, one way that I know that I can interact with AI is using chatbots. Now we have this era of agents. Help me understand the line between what is a chatbot to you, what is an agent to you.

52:09Are the agents actually deciding for me what I'm going to purchase? Just walk me through it on the ground. Yeah, I mean, agents, if you think about agente commerce holistically, right, really the difference is, one, agents can reason. And so they can actually help, to your point, make recommendations, understand more, and really research more and more quickly than a human could, right? So that's one thing. But I think the other is, as it continues to evolve in the industry, there's going to be new channels and new access points to where athletes are. And so, one, we have to make sure we always meet the athlete where they are and get them what they need and help them meet their goals.

52:42But the other is ultimately how we create a differentiated experience within Dick's Sporting Goods. So, as you come to our platform, the ability to use agents and engage conversationally is really something we can do in a differentiated way because of a few reasons. One, we do have the breadth and depth of our product catalog, firstly. Second is our expertise in the culture of sport and how to play sports. And so that's really uniquely Dix. And then our athlete profile, everything we know from not just purchase behavior, but really how you're engaging with us, but also how you're engaging in sport.

53:16And so when we provide all that, we can create a truly differentiated experience through the use of agents. And so, you know, once again, so, you know, for people who might not be as familiar with the Dick's Sporting Goods platform, the website, I mean, so when you say customers are using an agent, is this like an assistant that I see on my account? You know, how does it actually work? Yeah, that really is our goal. So if you think about today, like many others, there is a chatbot capability. Usually that has to do with things like customer service and those types of things. And those have been around for a long time.

53:53What we are hoping to do ultimately is create a very seamless conversational experience that really is across our entire ecosystem. So imagine, to your point, yes, you have a personal assistant but can be, you know, all things dicks. And so we're not there yet, but that is the ultimate goal, and to make it deeply personalized to you. So that's what will make it different from many other places you might be using an agent. So agents are one thing that you're working towards. The other area that we've been exploring in our coverage here at The Information is how brands get their name out there in this new ecosystem of chatbots, agents, etc.

54:32I mean, search was the way that people learned how to do it. You certainly had social media advertising. Now you have questions about how do I get my name to show up better in the chatbot results? How do I even think about advertising in the chatbots? But walk me through the considerations that you're making there in terms of this new era of discovery. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing that explode, right? So there's the SEO, GEO, AEO. It's kind of, at the end of the day, what it comes down to is with Agenda Commerce and agents, it really is using a large language model. And how that manifests inside of an experience requires a whole different set of data.

55:13And so a lot of that comes down to, you know, how are you enriching the breadth and depth of your product information? What else are you providing inside of there to give enough context to the LLM to serve you up? And so I think there's not only how you— What's the answer? What else do you provide then to make sure that it shows up better in the LLM? As much as you can, right? So large language models are just that, right? They're looking for patterns. They're trying to understand. And so it's a very different experience from just some of the romance copy you might put on a website that might help you get exposed for what an athlete is searching for.

55:48Traditionally, you actually have to do both now. So how do you make sure you have that enriched experience for, call it the human, but then also when an agent is coming in, providing more depth inside of that knowledge so that it can actually create a recommendation? So it's just more content at the end of the day? It's basically more content at the end of the day. So how much are you using AI to produce that content then? Yeah, I think there's, I mean, and again, that's been around for a while too, if you think about it, right? So when you think about like anything from creative assets to anything else, there's even product information.

56:20Like there are ways that you can auto tag or help enrich those data sets that is rather than someone manually doing that, which unfortunately still is true on some levels, right? Somebody has to do that work, but AI can help enrich that. And so that's been around for a while. But I do think that what we're trying to do is actually streamline that end-to-end. So when we think about AI, even in our content supply chain, if you will, we're using that throughout our operations. And so there's just more and more capabilities evolving that we always jump in head first and really try to use it to the best we can.

56:53Where are you seeing return on investment as you make these investments in AI in your business? A big part of it really is speed to market. And so, you know, we think about, even before we talk about athletes, which to us is, you know, everything from a weekend warrior to someone with, you know, kids and everything else. It really is, that's a lot of people with a lot of touch points at scale. And so, when you have millions and millions of athletes and you have millions and millions, if not billions of touch points over the course of their journey, the only way to do that is through AI. And so, we use that in a lot of our operations, really, to be able to meet them where they are.

57:30Hmm, great. Well, Jason, I want to thank you for joining us on TI TV. It's great to have you here. Thank you very much.

57:48I'm here with Taylor Schreiner, Senior Director and Head of Adobe Digital Insights. Taylor, welcome to TI TV. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. Appreciate your time. So the way that I understand your role at Adobe is you are in charge of a lot of the data that comes out of the company. Is that right? Yeah, I have a really exciting role running a team called Adobe Digital Insights. And we provide industry-leading insights and perspective on everything from the digital economy to how AI is transforming customer experiences to creativity and generative AI all across the board of what Adobe touches.

58:19And so because you're the data guy, I want to ask you some questions about, you know, the macro state of play in AI. And, you know, the first topic I want to ask you about is whether or not people are using agents. Because I know they're out there. I know companies are selling them. But here at The Information, I mean, this is a question we've tried to get to the heart at is, are people actually using these things? Our data absolutely demonstrates yes. So we're seeing consumers use AI in general about five times as much as they did even a year ago. But what's really interesting about that is not just the adoption rate, but the trust that they're showing in AI.

58:57So when they show up from AI, they're spending about 25 % more in commerce than they had been if they were coming from another source. and because of that trust, they're starting to now transact in chatbots in the brand interactions on the webpage and see that as the way that they want to interact with the brands that they want to transact with. So that's really interesting. So people actually, they are shopping with these chatbots. I mean, this is happening. Absolutely. In increasing numbers, obviously, like anything in AI, yesterday it was your neighbor and tomorrow it's everybody on your block.

59:33It's happening at an incredibly rapidly increasing rate. But I think it's fundamentally based on the trust that consumers are seeing in AI. And because of that trust, they're willing to make these transactions. Now, tell me a little bit about, you know, in terms of the usage, there's also the investment that companies have to make in these tools. I'm curious where you see customers getting the most ROI from these tools. Is this cost savings? Is it higher revenue? Where is this all coming from? Well, one of the clear sources in the data is just making your web page visible through optimization for LLMs and AI.

1:00:13So, for instance, we see the companies that are leaning into AI are the top 10 % of fastest-growing companies in our dataset. So if you're a top 10 % fast-growing company in our dataset, you're getting fully a third more of your traffic from AI than anybody else in the dataset, And that's because you're leaning into optimization for Gen.AI exposure. You're leaning into LLM visibility, and you're using the agents that get those things done. So walk us through some of the data here. I mean, you know, do you guys, you collect so much data. I mean, are there any stats that really jump out to you about the ways in which these agents are being used, the cost savings, the traffic?

1:00:58I mean, what numbers should we be paying attention to here on our end? Well, I think one of the things that comes out today at Summit from Oxford Economics that I can't take credit for, but they did an amazing job, is that, you know, maybe an eighth or a sixth of companies have really deployed agentic AI across the board, but within the next 12 to 18 months, everybody expects that number to be massively higher, to accelerate rapidly, and not only that, to transform the way that companies do business. So not just accelerate, but change the way that work is done because the AI is now living on top of the governance, data, and operations of the business and able to affect a bigger impact on the operation.

1:01:42Now, one of the other questions we've been asking here on our show is, okay, so people are using agents. They might be playing with them. They might be piloting them, experimenting with them. Is it durable, right? Will it last? You just mentioned, you said the proportion of people that use this technology is set to increase. But I'm wondering about the people who are using the tools. Will they continue using it? I wonder if your data tells you anything about that. Absolutely. I mean, if you think from across the board, the most interesting thing about the agentic transformation right now is how human it really is.

1:02:17So if you are an individual contributor who used to be fingers on keyboard, you're now going to be running a swarm of agents that get more done for you. If you were the CMO who didn't, you know, talk to the CTO on a regular basis, you guys are now joined at the hip. And if you're a customer or a consumer whose interaction with the brand had been through, say, search or navigation, you're now operating through your own AI agents and the brand's AI agents to get work done. And it's when the human interactions change, when the organizations change, when the consumers change their behaviors, that's what I think creates durability across the board.

1:02:53And how are those human interactions changing? What is changing about it that you're seeing? Well, on the consumer side, we're seeing, as I said, increasing trust in AI. So one thing that really stuck out to me is that if you buy something with an AI agent, you're actually 68 % less likely to return it, which is sort of an odd stat. But that's because you have built trust into the interaction with the AI in the selection process of the item that you've purchased, and you believe that it's the right one and the one that best fits your needs. Or similarly, in finance, we're seeing 80-plus percent of people wanting to get financial advice from AI agents and act on that advice.

1:03:34And so it's that level of trust that transforms your life. You're no longer going store to store. You're trusting the agent. You're no longer talking to your brother-in-law about where you should put your money. You're trusting the agent, And I think that's what is going to be the durable transition in our economy. Great. Well, Taylor, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Taylor Schreiner from Adobe here on TIT. That does it for today's show. A reminder, you can catch us back in our New York City studio tomorrow. We are on this stream Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.

1:04:07And if you can't make it then, episodes are available on theinformation.com, on our YouTube channel, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to follow us on X, on social media, on Instagram, on TikTok. I am already excited for our next show. Have a great rest of your Tuesday.

1:04:22Cory Weinberg:Bye-bye for now.