Creative License: How Adobe Helps Brands Stay Creative within the Age of AI

The promise of personalization has been in advertising conversations for years. What modifications now’s the infrastructure to really ship on it. Adobe helps enterprise manufacturers transfer from fragmented buyer information to related experiences that really feel particular person. 

In this episode of The Speed of Culture podcast, Matt Britton sits down with Rachel Thornton, CMO of Adobe Enterprise, dwell from CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Rachel unpacks how Adobe helps manufacturers transfer from uncooked buyer information to real personalization at scale, why she believes everyone seems to be a creator, and the way agentic AI is utilized in a advertising group. 

The dialog additionally covers Adobe’s push into sports activities and fan engagement, the Semrush acquisition, and the way to construct model integrity in a world the place AI can generate content material sooner than any group can overview it.

About our visitor: With greater than 20 years of expertise in advertising management at a number of the most recognizable names in tech, together with AWS, Salesforce, and Cisco, Rachel is now pushing the frontier of AI, creativity, and buyer expertise. 

At Adobe, she oversees how the corporate helps enterprise clients construct customized, data-driven experiences at scale, and he or she is intently concerned in Adobe’s increasing work in sports activities, fan engagement, and agentic AI.

Key Takeaways:

[02:26] Adobe’s Core Strategy: Customer Needs Drive Every Innovation — Rachel frames Adobe’s evolution as a relentless effort to remain in line with clients somewhat than forward of them. From the pivot to cloud and cellular to the present deal with AI, every main shift has been anchored in what clients really need subsequent. The thread working by way of all of it helps manufacturers transfer from understanding information to constructing significant buyer profiles, and from these profiles, delivering the type of customized journey that makes a buyer really feel recognized. This is the inspiration of what Adobe brings to enterprise entrepreneurs in 2026.

[05:55] Everyone Is a Creator — Rachel makes the case that creativity is not the area of skilled designers or devoted inventive groups. Whether somebody is constructing a marketing campaign, crafting a gross sales outreach, or launching a product, the act of creation sits on the middle of the work. Adobe’s increasing suite, from Creative Cloud to Express to Firefly, is constructed round the concept that instruments ought to take away limitations somewhat than create them. The result’s that groups who as soon as needed to wait on others can now transfer independently, inside model tips, on the pace the second requires.

[11:01] What AI Agents Actually Do for Marketers — Rachel pulls again the curtain on how agentic AI works inside Adobe’s personal advertising group. Audience brokers that advocate who to focus on based mostly on marketing campaign efficiency. Insights brokers that floor findings with out requiring a separate group to file a request. The image she attracts is much less about dramatic automation and extra about eradicating the friction that slows down good advertising choices. Agents deal with the repetitive, time-consuming work in order that entrepreneurs can deal with the concepts and experiments that truly transfer the model ahead.