Adobe marketing chief on AI and the future of B2B creativity

We’re definitely thinking more holistically. Whether you’re a creative director or a performance marketer, time is always a constraint. Campaign briefs land late, deadlines are tight and people don’t get to do their best work. That’s a universal truth in marketing.

What we’re doing now is removing some of that friction by automating the tedious stuff and giving marketers the tools to execute faster while freeing up creatives to focus on big, emotionally resonant ideas. We want every role in the marketing ecosystem to play to its strengths. For creatives, that means doubling down on craft and storytelling. For marketers, it’s about speed, agility and data-led iteration. That mindset shift is unlocking better work across the board.

We’ve learned a lot from our own rollout. Early on, adoption worked best when the user was already a hybrid – someone who dabbled in photography or design alongside their main job. They understood aesthetics, so they could get the most out of the tools quickly.

But as we scaled beyond that group, we saw results dip. That was our wake-up call. We realised this couldn’t just be a plug-and-play rollout. We needed training and ongoing enablement so people could use the tools confidently and creatively.

And crucially, we framed AI not as a way to do more with fewer people, but to do better with the same team. It’s not about squeezing people harder – it’s about giving them more power. That distinction changes the conversation entirely.

Honestly, it’s been transformative. Performance marketing projects used to be at the back of the queue for studio resources – always needing small edits, tweaks and variations. Those briefs were low priority because the creative team was focused on bigger campaigns.

Now, with tools like Adobe Express and GenStudio, they can create what they need on the spot. They know their channels best, they have great instincts for what will work and they now have the tools to act on that. Meanwhile, our studio teams can put all their energy into high-impact creative. Everyone’s doing more of what they’re good at.

It’s also opened up a new level of testing and learning. Before, you might have had three ad variations. Now we run 10 or 15, testing copy, imagery and even cultural nuance. The platforms reward that. You give them more data, they give you better results.

It has elevated marketing to a truly strategic function. A few years ago, we rolled out a unified, data-driven operating model that spans B2B and B2C. Everyone from product to sales to marketing uses the same KPIs. We all see the same dashboards and the same customer journey – from discover to try to buy to renew.

It’s made our impact totally transparent. And now, with tools like Adobe Express, we’re empowering marketers to act faster, smarter and more independently. There’s less friction, more experimentation and more ownership.

Marketing teams are no longer waiting on others to execute – they’re publishing directly to platforms like Meta, LinkedIn and Amazon. We’ve also built in brand guardrails like template systems and locked assets, so we protect consistency without slowing people down. That combination of speed and control has been a game-changer.

Social media is a great example. The pace of cultural trends is breakneck – memes, news moments even tone shifts. In the past, a marketer would spot something and say, “we should jump on this.” But then you’d wait on creative, approvals, reviews – and by the time it was out, the moment was gone.

Now, they can jump on trends in real time. They can build in Adobe Express, publish straight to platform and move forward. That kind of agility is essential now.

But it goes beyond social. The rise of LLMs means people are discovering brands differently. Instead of searching on Google, they’re asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. Those answers are being trained on places like Reddit, YouTube and forum content – stuff that’s often overlooked by traditional SEO strategies.

So B2B brands need to rethink where they show up. You can’t just focus on owned media anymore. You have to be part of the right conversations, in the right communities and creating content that gets picked up by the models feeding those LLMs.

There’s a good level of awareness but I think many brands underestimate how fast it’s all moving. Generative search is already diverting traffic from traditional sites. We’re not talking about what might happen – we’re already seeing it.

That’s why we launched the LLM Optimiser. We needed a tool to help us understand how our brand appears in LLM outputs – what’s surfacing, what’s missing and how to improve it. Now we’re offering that to clients too.

It’s not just about SEO anymore. Brands need to show up in the places that matter to LLMs: forums, social channels, creator content. And for B2B, that includes more niche spaces – Reddit threads, technical blogs, expert communities. These are the new discovery layers.

Brands that get this right will maintain visibility. The rest risk quietly fading into irrelevance – not because their product isn’t great, but because they’re invisible in the places people now go for answers.

That’s the danger – when it’s so easy to make content, the temptation is to just make more. But we push hard against that. We’re not saying “do more for the sake of it”, we’re saying “do smarter, more effective work.”

What we automate is the repetitive stuff – formats, sizes, versions. That frees up time and mental space to focus on the big idea. And that’s where the magic happens. All the winning work you see – whether in B2B or consumer – has emotional resonance. That comes from humans, not machines.

We’re also testing constantly. Ten versions of an asset go out and the feedback loop tells us what tone, visuals or calls to action perform best. That’s insight we feed back into the next creative iteration. But the strategy, the narrative, the brand idea – that’s still human work.

You can’t outsource your soul to a machine. But you can use the machine to clear the path so your best creative work comes through.

I think the old walls between functions – creative, marketing, data – are going to dissolve. These teams will start operating as one. It’ll be less about roles and more about shared outcomes.

We’re already seeing it internally. Teams are aligned around the customer journey, not the org chart. They’re working cross-functionally to orchestrate experiences using the same data, the same insights, the same AI tools to build something cohesive and relevant.

We call it customer experience orchestration. It’s the idea that every part of the journey – from first touch to renewal – is shaped with intention. AI will be a huge accelerator of that, but only if companies bring together the right workflows, the right tools and the right mindset.

So my bold prediction? In the next few years, the best marketing organisations won’t look like traditional teams anymore. They’ll look like creative intelligence units, blending art and science, tech and narrative, powered by AI but deeply human at the core.