Adobe Summit 2026: Liz Miller Calls Out the Market on AI Strategy – and She's Not Holding Back

 From agentic AI to brand intelligence and Firefly's trust-first model, Constellation Research's Liz Miller drops unfiltered insights from the Vegas floor.

In this on-the-ground dispatch from Adobe Summit 2026, CX Today Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is one of the sharpest voices in the CX and marketing technology space – and she's not here to sugarcoat anything. 

From the buzz around Shantanu Narayan's succession to Adobe's evolving agentic AI platform strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise and gets into what actually matters for enterprise marketers right now. 

Adobe Summit is buzzing... and not just about leadership transitions. Liz Miller joins Rhys Fisher to break down what's actually moving the needle for CX leaders on the ground in Vegas. 

🔴 Adobe CX Enterprise reframed: It's not a new product, it's a clarified story. Liz explains how Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) has always been the foundation, and why this rebranding is about helping enterprises understand how all the pieces connect in an agentic world. 

🔴 Brand Intelligence is the standout: Adobe's new solution lets marketers track how their brand appears across LLMs and AI search, not just the traditional web. As agent-to-agent engagement becomes real, knowing how your agents get found is mission-critical. 

🔴 Firefly's trust-first architecture: Adobe didn't bolt on safety after the fact. Liz walks through why Content Authenticity and invisible watermarking aren't lip service; they're structural, and they matter deeply for enterprise brand security. 

🔴 The radiologist moment: Jensen Huang's story from the keynote – AI can now read 100% of CT scans, yet demand for radiologists is rising – perfectly captures why Adobe's decade-long AI investment is a strategy, not a slogan.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello and welcome to CX Today. I'm Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Liz Miller, the VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research. How are you doing, Liz? I'm doing great. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Thanks for thanks for having me. Thanks for letting me talk.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

No, absolutely, absolutely. I'm good. I'm excited. You're uh you know you're out in you're at Adobe Summit, so we're trying to get some kind of on-the-ground insights from you today. Um so excited to see, yeah, excited to hear what you've seen, what you're what you're inferring from the conversations out there, I guess. First up, I suppose what what is the mood at the event? Obviously, you know, Chantan and Array had stepping down. Is there any noise about who we're replacing him? Just I'm wondering kind of yeah, what the atmosphere is like. That is the big that is the big question.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

That is that is the big question. And so it's kind of funny that that big question is being circulated here in Vegas. Because I feel like we could start a sports book, because the answer is no one really knows. And I think I've heard all sorts of rumor, I have heard every shape and size. Um, I'm surprised I haven't been told that I'm replacing him at this point, because the the questions are so big. And it was also kind of funny that literally, just as we're about to kick off with the keynote, which will have Chant New's, you know, last summit as the CEO, Tim Cook steps down. So it was almost like Tim Cook was doing him a favor by like, let's take the spotlight off of you for just a minute. No one's gonna talk about you not being CEO Shant Nu because everyone's talking about Tim Cook. I I think that that announcement coming out when it did did kind of provide a bit of a difference because that was such a clear succession plan that Apple had. And I think that it was a really smart move from Apple. They would not have been okay had there not been a succession plan. I think that it speaks a lot to Adobe and the Adobe culture and quite frankly, Chantanu's true leadership legacy here, which is he hires really, really smart people to be around him. You look at the leaders of the business units with Anil Chocavardi at the helm of the now newly named uh CX, Adobe CX Enterprise, um of that line of business, along with David Wanwani over at the um kind of what is traditionally called them the creative cloud and document cloud businesses, uh, but in that Adobe uh digital in digital media business, you have two leaders who are like they give strong a whole new name. Like the and and Chantanu listens to them. He understands how that business comes together. And I think he understood that this business could sustain those questions without really being impacted because the team here can keep innovating and moving forward. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing at Summit. We're seeing their capacity to really figure out where this world of agentic is not just taking marketing, but taking the task and the work of engagement so much farther than we could have imagined all those years ago when Adobe came in boxes.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Yeah, yeah. You obviously you touched on the kind of um the keynote. I was just wondering, was there anything from that keynote or just generally from any of the other talks that you've been to that's really stood out to you so far?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Oh, I've been loving the introduction of the brand intelligence solution. I mean, I think the reality here is, and the reality that Adobe has seen, especially in the last several months, having introduced uh the Adobe LLM optimizer that really starts to look at how all the different models crawl all of that content, how your brand appears in that, and then gives those um recommendations on kind of how to materially change what is being said and what is being brought back in those answers. I think because of that, they've really had a first, like front row seat into how these LLMs and how AI search is really changing the way that not only customers are finding us, but it's changing exactly the way that we are working in our SEO patterns and in our AEO or answer engine optimization strategies. So this new um solution around brand intelligence does exactly that. It lets us know where we are appearing, how we are showing up, not just in the traditional media world and the traditional web landscape, but it's also showing us how in an agent, you know, agent versus agent or whatever we want to call it. We can't call it A to A. We can't call it agent to agent, I'm afraid. But in this new world of engagement where our customers are going to be building their own agents as a means to engage with us, we need to know how those agents search, how they consume, how they engage, what are those patterns? So marketers need to be able to balance those, like what is the traditional world? You know, in the real world, how do we engage? What do we consume? In the digital world, what do humans engage and consume? And now we have to be looking about in the agentic world, in agentic AI, how do our customers' agents, how do they find us so that their agents are gonna speak with our agents? And I think it's a whole new world. Adobe is definitely staying in front of that.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, it's gonna be it's really, really gonna be interesting to see how all these different vendors try and cope with this new, this new almost new customer model. And you mentioned brand intelligence today. That was one of I think five uh and CX announcements that came out. It was a very, very busy afternoon for me yesterday when they all dropped.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Super busy. It's gonna be super busy today. Like like there are there are B2B announcements. There's like, ah, there's so much stuff.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Yeah. But one of the other ones, I guess probably maybe the what I thought was perhaps the standout, and you mentioned it earlier as well, is this new Adobe CX Enterprise. Um, I guess did you get any any more insights into it out of the event, or do you have just any early thoughts on that on that system?

SPEAKER_01 6:33

I so so let's be very clear about what that is. It's it's really a new nomenclature for a vast portfolio of enterprise ready, built for the agentic world and ready for it platform solution that comes from Adobe. It's not necessarily the tools of the technology are not necessarily new. There's a lot of new chalked up in there. But what it's really doing is encouraging customers and encouraging Adobe itself to understand how all of these tools and how all of these components come together. For years, Adobe has been building this foundation that's been referred to as the Adobe Experience Platform, lovingly known in Alphabet Soupland as AEP. So when we look at AEP, a lot of people have been like, why do you need a platform? We've got all these tools, you don't need all of that stuff. But what Adobe very rightly figured out from the very beginning is that marketing and anyone involved in this world of CX and customer engagement has so much different data, has so many different workflows, has so much that needs to come together. You need to have that really strong foundation, that experience platform on which all of these applications, all of these points of interaction and engagement can be developed and can be built. You need something rock solid at the bottom, but now you also need something rock solid on which AI can perform. So that's where you start to see that strata and that kind of markitecture, as we lovingly call them, uh, the layer cake for some people. Some people are it's the layer cake you see it in like the sunrise. You see, like you see it in all different things. But what we're seeing here in this architecture is we have AEP. That is where all those foundational schemas, that single data experience data comes in and can really sit and be in one place. So that when you're building out these agents, when you're building out these workflows, all of the data that is powering that can be pulled into one place and harnessed for the purpose of intentionally becoming an agentic enterprise. And you're starting to see that same motion in a lot of other vendors. You can't just have a random smattering of tools that then connects to a very like loosely connected bunch of things that you call data. It simply does not work if we really want the work of engagement to become part of that total workflow of the enterprise. So I think what we're seeing in that Adobe CX business is really a resetting of the story so that from this moment on, you understand that this platform is there. This is where all of AI comes together very intentionally, with a lot of trust, with a lot of governance. And I think that was the word of the day that if you if you weren't ready for it, you would think it sounded like controls. But when when Adobe talks about governance, they are really talking about what can your people do, right? How do we open up AI so that your people can access all of these skills? And you also have to remember, Adobe has put its foot very firmly in that conversational AI bucket. So, as you and I well know when it comes to conversational AI, if you are just letting it run amok, if you don't have that platform, you are not going to get the business outputs that you expect. So I think that that when we talk about CX, when we talk about kind of CX Enterprise and Adobe CX Enterprise, know that it isn't something new. This isn't all of a sudden them waking up one day being like, oh my gosh, we need to be a platform. This is really articulating where the platform sits and how the total look of the platform, that AI platform with that with that experience platform, how that all comes together to really power a very different set of applications moving into this marketing's goal to become a genetic.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you say the emphasis on refinance. I think sometimes from the outside looking in at some of these vendors, we maybe think that they treat it as an afterthought sometimes, but it's really good to hear that that isn't the case, certainly uh Dovey.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

I I think the best example of that, Reese, is how they created and built the Firefly models. So Firefly from the outside can be a little bit hard to try to figure out what it is. People want to think it's just an application that leverages other people's models. But at the core of Firefly, the application, is the Firefly apps and the Firefly suite of apps. And this is a series of foundation models that really specialize in text to image, text to video, like prompt to video. It's these are the core of generation, but the hallmark of them is this intense trust and safety issue. It is not lip service of we created something that can generate all this stuff, and then we went back in and put in guardrails, and then we went back in and thought about the ethics. We didn't figure out, you know, how to go and build the monster and then put it to life and then go, uh-oh, did we have a lock on the door? That's not what Adobe did. Adobe from moment one was like, we have multiple stakeholders that have to be not only represented, but protected in this world of generation. And it's artists who are out there every single day creating original art. It's the content owners, it's the copyright owners, it's the rights owners. We have to protect them and we have to protect our customers who are in the enterprise. Because you know what? No one wants you to be able to go into a model, type in, I want to see a family at the beach surrounded by a picnic and soda, and see a very iconic font that's spelled a different way. It it that doesn't count. That's not safety. If you have taken someone's iconic font, you have allowed for that type of breach, and that is brand insecurity in a world where we have to have brand security as everything can be generated. So Adobe has been very intentional about that. Um, you start to see scenarios where uh things like the content authentic authenticity initiative, that is a mouthful without a whole lot of coffee, Reese. I'm not gonna lie. The cut the content authenticity initiative, where you are actually, instead of in those generations, um, you know, Google is pushing the idea of synth ID, where you have this identification, you have this all this information, the persistent data that goes along with it, uh, and a watermark that people can just, quite frankly, crop out of the image. Like you can remove a lot of these things. You save it as something different, and all of a sudden all of your guardrails are gone. That is not what content authentic authenticity does. It's actually an invisible watermark that stays with that, um, with that, with that credential the entire time. So these are the types of things, like these are the types of guardrails that, quite frankly, because Adobe thinks about it before it started building, you could have it right there from the very beginning. So, as an enterprise marketer, as someone who cares about their brand, you have a marketer, or quite frankly, maybe you have a seller, or maybe you have a contact center agent that just wants to send uh, hey, I'm following up with the workaround that we talked about because you have something that's broken and I just want, I just want you to remember what it was. And that contact center agent maybe wants to put something that makes that email look nice. They want to put a brand image on it. You do you really, as that brand owner, want that really thoughtful person that's really looking to heighten experience to like just pull down something off of the web? No, you want them to be able to use a tool that can pull from all those enterprise safe, on-brand, allowed assets. And that's really what Adobe's thinking through. And so I think that's what you kind of see at every step of every engagement and every announcement here.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yeah, so it's a really good point, obviously, because Adobe is so unique in the CX space because of how wide its portfolio is. Like you said, because it has all these other areas it has to consider. For Godrails, it's only it's a natural step for them to bring that same kind of uh attitude in towards AI guardrails. So yeah, it's a really, a really good point. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

And you know what? And it's um it wasn't it's here's the funny thing. It wasn't necessarily something that a lot of folks in the market recognized as a differentiator. Um, and and I think that the market outside of customer experience, like the financial markets, if I'm being honest, I think they struggle to understand why this is so important. And I think it's why you start to see like wild financial fluctuations every time Adobe like releases their quarterly earnings. They're like, we shall punish you with damaging your stock. And you're like, you're they're like, they don't have an AI strategy. And I don't think there is anything that could be farther from the truth. Like when I see those statements, like there are two statements these days. If I'm just if I'm really spilling the tea with you, Reese, this is like, ooh, this we're getting into dicey territory here, but Liz is about to lose, lose her mind. Okay. When financial markets look at Adobe and say they don't have an AI strategy, my answer is usually then you haven't been paying attention. Because an AI strategy is more than just going out into the market and shouting that your AI can do things. It's also much more than pretending that AI is a full sentence. Like you don't just walk into a room and be like, AI, period. That's that's not that's that's not what AI is, everyone. And I and I think that unfortunately, a lot of the markets want it to be that. It want they it wants AI to be a complete and fully formed thing. That when you just walk into a room, you can say that you're doing the thing. Like I had turned on the AI machine and now I'm saving all this money. Let's fire all the people. Like there, that's not that's not the reality. Um, and so yesterday in the keynote, Shantanu and Ryan interviewed Jensen Wong, which was the ultimate look into what really happens in Silicon Valley when two innovators, two, you know, two guys who are just working their way up the, you know, the engineering track, who have been like meeting at the Denny's out on Scott, are now all of a sudden CEOs of these massive companies, right? They're seen as these innovators, but they've been longtime friends, right? Jensen was even joking that he had um creative the creative suite like version three, the box of it, and that Shantonou had autographed it for him. Like super funny stuff like that, right? Um, and but Jensen's told this really funny story where he's like, listen, 10 years ago, even five years ago, everyone said, you know what, in 10 years, we're not gonna need radiologists because AI is going to analyze and execute every CT scan. So if you're a radiologist, in 10 years you're gonna be out of a job, right? And that's what everyone predicted. And he was like, look, because AI is gonna look at every single CT scan. And he's like, you know what? They were right. Today, AI can look at and analyze 100% of CT scans. So then why are radiologists on the rise? Why is the demand for radiologists on the rise? Because you have to right-size the purpose and the task and the process, right? And it was such like it was just one of those like profound, like mic droppy moments, right? Where you just kind of sat there and thought to yourself, oh my God, he's right, because AI can analyze the scan and come back with all the details, but the radiologist has to figure out because of their expertise, why and how to move forward. Right. And and I thought it was such a big statement, and it was such a big statement to be made on that stage. And so I think that people forget that Adobe has that expertise. They've been they've been working AI since, you know, with back in the ML days, and we called it sensei, right? Like it was that was their AI for for years, for well over a decade. So they have the AI strategy, I think that's there. I I also think the thing that everyone seems to mistake around these parts is that everyone's terrified of AI. And I gotta tell you, from being on the ground here, this is not this is not a conference full of scared people. In fact, I've seen more people diving into and sharing that this is their third, fourth, fifth experiment on the different use cases that they could apply. This is a group. If you want to look at marketing and call us something, we are people who are not afraid of experimentation. We have been doing A-B tests for decades now, and we know on any given day, 80% of our A B tests fail. And because that's what they're supposed to do. Because we're looking for the 20% that succeed, because that becomes what we're executing today. So it's, you know, on the ground here, there is it's not excitement. And I don't know if this is gonna make sense. It's not excitement that you feel. People aren't here for the party, people are here for work. Like they are talking to each other about substantive change, how they manifest it, how they move it forward, how do I continue to evolve what I know about being in an agentic world? But how do I encourage younger employees to look beyond what they think searching in, you know, a chat GPT is? How do I share all of that institutional knowledge? So it's just really cool to be around that next phase because I think once we get done through the excitement of the what we can do, Adobe really starts to focus in on the what we should do. I'll get off my soapbox now.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

No, thanks, Liz. It's been it's been really, really great. I always, you know, when we can't be at advanced, it's always great speaking to people like yourselves who are obviously so passionate, who are in amongst it all who are having these conversations and they can, you know, dig into the insights and share them with the rest of us. So yeah, I really, really enjoyed the chat.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

And they have a Premier League trophy downstairs. Oh no, I haven't seen. It yet. But yeah, oh yeah, they're trying to get everybody into football here. The other kind. They've got the NFL and the Premier League as their as like two of the conversations they're having. So I'm like, it's an all-football corner, people.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Oh, that does make me a little jealous, but also a little nervous. I'm a big Arsenal fan, and we're we're right on the right on the edge of the Premier League a little bit. So we'll see. Gooner's gotta go. I think that's uh the perfect place to leave things. Um yeah, thanks again, Liz. Like I said, really, really great chat. I'm really really excited to see what the rest of obviously we're not even we're not even finished yet, really excited to see what the rest of the event has in store. Um I'd also like to just quickly thank our audience for tuning in. If you enjoyed this, please do like and subscribe to the channel. And remember you can head on over to cxtoday.com for more stories like these. Until next time, thanks for watching.