Adobe Summit 2026: Your Operating Model Is Not Ready For AI

Episode Description:
Adobe just renamed a $5B product line and quietly redefined the category. The harder question is who actually owns the operating model running underneath it.

In this episode, Raja Walia and Akande Davis break down what Adobe really signaled at Adobe Summit 2026, and why the rebrand from Experience Cloud to CX Enterprise is not a marketing exercise. They cover what the three announcements that actually mattered mean for buyers, why agents are a forcing function on the operating model rather than a substitute for one, and why the first leadership question is not “human in the loop versus human on the loop”, it is which decisions are human-led before an agent is ever involved.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• Adobe’s rebrand is a category reset, not a name change. When a company renames a $5B product line, it is telling the market the category itself has moved. Adobe is no longer selling platforms or products. It is selling a cohesive operating system, and the burden of running it lands directly on the customer.
• The three Summit announcements that actually mattered. The CX Enterprise CoWorker is a persistent AI agent that orchestrates Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, Marketo, Customer Journey Analytics, and Target in parallel. The Marketo MCP Server turns Marketo from a platform you log into into a node in an agent network. And analytics has been repositioned from an accountability layer to an agent-level decision input.
• Agents are a forcing function on the operating model, not a substitute for one. By Adobe’s own 2026 Digital Trends Report, 75% of customers cite data integration and quality as their top AI challenge. Deploying agents on top of a broken operating model does not fix the model. It scales bad decisions faster, autonomously, with no one catching them until the damage compounds. 
• “Human in the loop versus human on the loop” is the wrong first question. The first question is which decisions are human-led before an agent is ever involved; strategy, brand positioning, regulatory exposure, anything where being wrong is a credibility problem. If those decisions are not named, you are designing governance for something nobody has decided to own. 
• Once you are behind on the operating model, catch-up does not work the way it used to. Every new layer of technology will integrate with the data foundation underneath it. Companies that iterate on how they operate compound an advantage that static organizations cannot close, because you cannot adopt what you cannot operate.

Note: Signal & Stakes was previously published as Call It RevOps. The rebrand reflects a deliberate shift in the conversation, from tactical execution and operational how-tos to strategic decision making and the consequences that follow when senior leaders get it right or get it wrong. Same hosts, same honesty, different altitude.

Signal & Stakes is a podcast for people who sit inside the decisions that shape how companies grow, compete, and survive. Each episode surfaces a real decision, the signal that was there, what was at stake, and what happened next. Not advice. Consequence. 

Signal & Stakes is hosted by Raja Walia, CEO of GNW Consulting, and Akande Davis, VP of Operations at GNW Consulting. Signal & Stakes is produced by GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing technology and revenue operations agency helping enterprise organizations make sense of their existing MarTech investments. Through the GNW Orchestration Framework, GNW Consulting helps companies connect board-level priorities to day-to-day execution, identify where AI creates leverage across go-to-market operations, and determine where human judgment should lead. Learn more. 

Subscribe to Signal & Stakes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop monthly. Follow GNW Consulting on LinkedIn for episode releases, show updates, and content on marketing technology and go-to-market strategy

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Signal & Stakes is a podcast for people who sit inside the decisions that shape how companies grow, compete, and survive. Each episode surfaces a real decision, the signal that was there, what was at stake, and what happened next. Not advice. Consequence.

Signal & Stakes is hosted by Raja Walia, CEO of GNW Consulting, and Akande Davis, VP of Operations at GNW Consulting.

Signal & Stakes is produced by GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing technology and revenue operations agency helping enterprise organizations make sense of their existing MarTech investments. Through the GNW Orchestration Framework, GNW Consulting helps companies connect board-level priorities to day-to-day execution, identify where AI creates leverage across go-to-market operations, and determine where human judgment should lead. Learn more.

Subscribe to Signal & Stakes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop monthly. Follow GNW Consulting on LinkedIn for episode releases, show updates, and content on marketing technology and go-to-market strategy. Watch full episodes on YouTube.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Signals and Stakes. We're no longer calling it RebOps because the signal in the market, you know, was too was and the stakes were too high for us to ignore, which I think kind of resulted in this in this point.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

And I think I think we talked about that too, didn't we? I think we talked about, hey, like when we started this podcast up, we're like, you know what? We're gonna call it RevOps because we had no idea what to call it. And we even joked about it in our earlier episodes that we're gonna have to go back and change it because it's such a, you know, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Like in the market. Like it's it's just a hot take right now. It's a trending topic. Yeah, it's it's a trendy topic. And we couldn't figure out what to name it. And after X amount of episodes, we finally figured out like what we're really talking about is the signals of what is being placed out on the market with so much technology coming out and really what's at stake for companies, what's at stake for people, regardless of if you're in RevOps, if you're in sales ops, if you're in GoToMarketOps, if you're in, I guess, ops ops, whatever other version of ops comes out. Uh, but that's that's really what it is, right? It's it's what's the what's the market telling us and how do we react?

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Yeah, and I think the insights are gonna be more relevant for folks that are are really kind of anticipating that. You know, with RevOps, you can get a little bit stuck in the weeds around the technical prowess. We want to pivot more into really what the market is telling us and and make decisions based on that. Um, and I mean I think that that goes nicely into what we're gonna be talking about today, which is around Adobe Uh Summit 2026. So it just wrapped in Las Vegas, right? On the surface, a lot of people say this is a product conference. We're talking about new agents, new AI, new demos. I think something else happened, which everyone in the room missed entirely. And I want to highlight that. And Raja, I know you want to talk about that explicitly.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

You know, yeah, you know, we take a lot of these like rebrands at like very face and superficial value. Like, you know, Adobe renamed their entire business, and we look at it as a name change at the core of it. You know, we don't have Experience Cloud anymore. Now they named it CX Enterprise, and you know, it's it's just a name change, the products are the same. And that's it's not just a marketing exercise, right? Like, and that's what the main thing is, right? When a company renames a billion-dollar product line, the they're telling you something. They're telling you what we now believe that this category is, is no longer and it's headed towards a different uh direction. Like that that's the signal that they're kind of laying out, right? So Adobe now is no longer selling new platforms, they're not selling you products. What they're selling you is a cohesive operating system. And that's the distinction that has to land directly if you're a CMO or CRO or a CIO who approved an Adobe investment. What does this mean for you? And I think that's kind of the bigger takeaway of it, not so much at face value. Oh, it's a name change.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Well, yeah, and and it's it's a good good terminology there because an operating system, you know, an operating system implies that someone needs to operate it, right? And you know that's not gonna be Adobe, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Adobe is not gonna manage your tech stack.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yeah, this is really a category redefinition. When you look at the Adobe digital experience business, they generated over $5 billion in revenue just in 2025. So a renaming is not something you do on a dime. It's not like a decision someone just says, hey, this sounds better. I think it's a re-pivoting. So when we look at kind of what actually landed at Summit, not necessarily the feature list or the structural changes, what were those things that that mattered the most or should matter the most to these these folks in the C-suite?

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Yeah, so for me, very specifically, and everyone's gonna have their own takeaway, right? It's a huge conference, huge announcements. To me, the three things that really matter is the CX Enterprise Cowork, that's a persistent AI agent that literally orchestrates across real-time CDP, journey optimizer, Marketo, customer journey analytics, target at pretty much at the exact same time, right? Like that, and that is like one of the biggest things that when we talk about a cohesive tech stack, it needs to do better. And that's exactly what that enterprise co-work agent is going to do. Uh the Marketo MCP server, right? You know, Marketo's back. I don't, I personally have never thought it went everywhere. I know there were naysayers, you know, lining up with picket, uh, you know, picket yeah pitches and forks uh outside Adobe. The investment has stopped. Yeah, the investment has stopped, and boom, you know, Marketo MCP server turns Marketo from a platform you log into to literally a node and an agent network that talks to systems pragmatically, right? Like, and that's like the other portion of it is like now we know where marketing automation is fitting into this, right? I and I know it's the entire tech stack. People like to kind of deliberate it and say, well, Marketo's separate because no, like this is exactly where it's kind of fitting in. And then, of course, analytics, right? The entire reporting tool is being repositioned from an accountability layer to agent-level involvement that will help decisions. And together, I think those three things really mean like what the stack is. It's a coordinated loop, you know, and and the loop needs an owner and it needs management. And I think that's the biggest the three key.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned that it needs an owner, and that that even kind of stands out as well because this is the CX Enterprise co-worker, right? It's not it, it's something that's meant to be in tandem with the person actually owning the plat, not even the platform, excuse me, the operating system.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Yeah, and you know, I think we're gonna get into that a little bit because we've been talking about it for a while. And when we say we've been talking about it for a while, I think everyone says that, but you can literally look at all of our conversations prior on this podcast, the various other, you know, uh marketing conversations that we've had is that humans are never going to be not involved in the decision making because someone has to own the decision. Uh, at the end of the day, you can't fire an agent, uh, you don't pay an agent, right? Uh, and and someone has to, and and I know that sounds fun, I know that's a funny thing to say, but someone has to take responsibility of it. And that's why what we've talked about before is like there's never going to be a point where a human is not going to be involved in some sort of aspects for agents, right? And I think that's the the framing I think you were kind of either talking about or you were referencing. And that's why, you know, with enterprise co-worker, it's a co-worker, it's not a worker. They didn't call it CX Enterprise Worker, they just called it co-worker for a reason.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Exactly. And I think, you know, with that that piece in mind and also the Marketo MCP server, it's identifying what the marketplace is saying. So there was already a demand for that MCP server. Um, a lot of other companies like Zappi or C Data were actually shipping MCP integrations before Adobe announced its own. So the ecosystem was built before the vendor. I think that's a signal about where enterprise pressure is really coming from. That the people that are are doing the work, identifying the need, and then uh pushing for it. So I kind of want to challenge that framing a little bit of, you know, you can't fire, you can't fire a uh an agent and they don't pay them, but they do consume resources, right? And and you can turn them off. So has it not always needed an owner? Have platforms like this always, whether it's an agent or not, is that a new take that they need an owner?

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Yeah, I mean, I think that need is not new. Do you remember like the easy button, like the target commercials? Like, if it was just that easy, and when people first bought a marketing technology back, I don't know, like 10 years ago, uh, you people expected to have it just turn on and work. And they were very surprised to realize that you needed an admin. Like that the concept of having an admin for your CRM was like, well, I bought this thing and it should just do it. Uh, what changed, I think, is really the cost of not having one. Before agents, you know, a bad operating model gave you messy instance data or data, and you know, poorly performing campaigns at a very micro level. Uh, but the same bad operating model with agents running on top of it gives you uh bad decisions. And I think that's the crucial part about it. First, it was just problems and maybe campaigns, some sort of marketing material, some sort of you know, uh goof up in typos, uh, an operating model that is a bad that is making decisions, that is making business level decisions and is continuously scaling with nobody catching them. Like that damage is already done at some point, right? Like there's there the amount of un undamaging you'll have to do is even more, even greater because you're thinking about the idea of making a mistake and fixing it, whereas now it's the idea of making a mistake leading to another mistake autonomously. That's the bigger, that's the bigger piece of it.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Well, and and it's really rooted in data quality, right? Even Adobe's own 2026 digital trend report shows that 75% of their customers cite data integration and quality as their top AI challenge. If there's not good data, not good quality, how are you gonna get AI to do what it really is going to do? Um, on a foundation by their own numbers, it's not ready. Like Adobe's own numbers are saying it's not ready for it.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah, and and here's the part that nobody really asking very loud at Summit, right? Like obviously, like at conferences, everyone's gonna project big, but everyone's kind of left talking about which agents should you be activating? Like, where first of all, like let's just talk about let's look at agents, um, not like people, and let's look at them like a product. Which agent are you going to invest in, right? And nobody's asking who's gonna own the logic behind it. No one's asking who's going to act on the decisions they're making. No one is asking what happens once that decision moves upstream to any automation. And if you don't have those questions answered before the agent go live, guess what? You're just not running an operating model. They're gonna be free to do whatever they want. You're running a fast version of whatever you had before, including the problems. And those problems are going to be more like it's going, they're going to escalate faster, they're going to bubble up faster, everything is going to be faster.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Yeah, a forester representation actually at Summit framed that exactly. So agents are forcing function on the operating model. So you actually need to consider where they're going to be placed overall. And deploying agents without redesigning how the team operates doesn't really move the needle. Um, in our own internal uh orchestration framework at GNW Consulting, that's why data is the foundation, that's why life cycle is the second step, and that's why placement comes after we've identified those things. Um, now this kind of ties back to the earlier point around the CX enterprise coworker. So Adobe drew a line between human in the loop and kind of like human on the loop. So approving versus monitoring during. You have been saying that that is the wrong first question. So why is that?

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah, so it it's the second question. The first one is what is human led before an agent is involved? It's kind of like you know, Tinder. You swipe right, someone's got to do the swiping, right? Like, or everything else is just gonna, you know, not fall into place. Like, so which decisions belong to humans? Which decisions are going to make the company generally more progressive? Strategy, brand, how do you want your company to be positioned? What is the strategy? What's your go-to-market strategy, right? Anything with regulatory exposure and anything where being wrong is a credibility problem, those are the ones that like that is the first question. If you haven't named those, you're designing governance for something nobody has decided to own. And that's, I think, the bigger part of it. Like, it's not a technology gap anymore. Tech is there. I had a vending machine that was powered by AI. I don't know how that works. You know what I mean? But they are uh technology is not really the problem anymore. It's the decisions who owns the decisions, and those decisions and the outcome of those are going to show up 18 months later when a board is asking you, Well, who made the call? Are you gonna say Mr. Roboto made the call? Like, you know, nobody has a clean answer for it. Mr.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

Roboto. It's a great agent name, I guess. But yeah, you're right. It's it's not a technology gap. It's less about like, oh, can AI do this? It's well, what's the process in place and who's actually owning the outcomes of it? Because if nobody is and we're distrusting this infrastructure that has poor data quality, I think that's that's kind of what it comes in. So, you know, if we think about the the entire intent behind this name and why we've adopted signals and stakes, it's really about what is the signal, what's at stake. So the signal, what is this actually telling us? Not about Adobe or Adobe Summit or the products, but really in general about where the market, what's the signal that's coming from the market?

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Yeah, I mean, so the signal is pretty clear, right? Like enterprise technology is no longer being sold as some sort of collection of tools you kind of buy and just figure out. You know, it's it's a shifting category of like operating systems and managers and you know, tech first kind of focus. Adobe's kind of moved to front first and the loudest um the the most. Now, every platform is gonna have some sort of stack. Every platform, I think Salesforce, uh, while we're recording this, just announced that they're moving to Headless 360, which is just agent first, right? Once again, but who's gonna manage those agents? There's still gonna be people that are putting those data sources together. Now, the implicit message in this is that we built the system, what you do with it is on you. And that gap between buying a platform and operationalizing it has existed for a decade, but it's going to even be more competitive, and that gap is going to be even more is even going to be even longer if you haven't figured out a way to answer that first question.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah. And and based on even our own conversations with folks at Adobe Summit, technology has been and is always very easy to buy, but the accountability of owning it, it's it's gonna be much harder. And that's that's generally what the signal is. Okay. Now, with that in mind, if that's what the signal is and it's real, what do you what's at stake if you don't do anything with it, if you don't act on this signal in the marketplace? Your ability to scale and grow.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Like that is what the signal is, right? The operating model and the data foundation, why are people talking about it now more than ever is because how fast a company scales and how fast that they can grow is going to be based around it. A company that is adjusting and continuously modifying their operating model is going to have less challenges compared to the per compared to a company that just has one operating model with absolutely no iteration process. Because the gap between what successful companies do and what a company that is so invested in how things have been and what they want to do is going to so be so far in the upcoming years with the kind of involvement of technology and autonomous agents working that you're never going to be able to catch up to it. You're always going to be behind. So the company that is iterating and learning and adjusting, they're the ones who are going to succeed. And if you're not doing that, you can't like you're not going to be able to catch up. Like that's what the big signal is. You're not going to be able to catch up because technology is about to V-line up this chart, and you're always going to be playing catch up.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yeah. And the scary part, or maybe the sobering thought too, is you might not realize until months and months later, and the whole time you thought you had you had been scaling effectively. You thought that that gap was closed. You thought you were on pace with your competitors. It's hard to recover from that, especially when you think about customer experience, acquiring new talent, margin across revenue. Um, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

I mean, and none of that really moves quickly in the right direction once you're behind. And I think that's, I think, the biggest signal is that in the market, the way technology, and let's, you know, obviously not even Adobe, just in general, but even the way the market and technology is advancing is that once you're behind, you're behind. Catch up is not going to be like how it used to be. Catch up is going to be even more difficult because there's going to be something new that comes out that's going to integrate with the data foundation layer of something that you already had. So if you're behind on that, guess what? You're going to be now behind on adopting the new piece of technology that might make your life easier, might make you scale better. We don't know what that is, but we know it's cut.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

And the process is going to be uh where that lives. I mean, if if uh there's a question I had to sit with, you know, if uh if an agent in my stack or maybe an agent, uh one of my co-workers at CX Enterprise made a decision, and I was asked by a customer or someone on the regulation side to explain why they made that decision. Could I explain that? Could I explain that decision? Right? Could I could I do that?

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Yeah. Mine is a little bit more simpler. Um, who owns an operating model at your organization? Not about Adobe, not about like who owns your operating model as a business that is going to feed any tech investment that you are going to make. And then when did you last talk to them? And if the answer is not very recently, you should be talking to them on a day-by-day basis or a week-by-week basis, as we kind of see what the new face of uh autonomous, autonomous agent activity, whatever we want to call it, is going to be.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Yeah, yeah. And the the fact is if you don't have a clean answer to either one of those, you know, that's uh that's a signal and and what you have to do with the same thing. That is that's another signal, yeah. Yeah, it's another signal, and obviously more, even more is at stake. Um, but yeah, thank you guys so much for tuning in to this episode of Signals and Stakes. Again, we'll be back with another episode diving further into these topics uh with this improved, I think, much better format. I think this is a a better way to look at things beyond RevOps because of what it impacts, and we're excited on this new uh journey. Thank you guys for joining.