AI in marketing is a game-changer for B2B and B2C brands. CIOs have a glorious opportunity to partner with their CMOs to simplify, personalize, and scale marketing initiatives.

That is, for CIOs who look beyond AI’s productivity and efficiency drivers. The top Digital Trailblazer CIOs focus on force-multiplier opportunities in customer experience, lead generation, branding, and other growth drivers.

At Adobe Summit, I reviewed several AI innovations that will transform marketing for the AI era. CMOs can boost creativity, maximize the utility of existing marketing assets, and both scale and personalize marketing campaigns.

Here are three key marketing innovations in the AI era that CIOs need to know.

1.    Scaling marketing with brand guardrails

Adobe has reimagined its marketing stack by integrating new AI capabilities with its existing marketing platforms and tools.

Adobe CX Enterprise bundles three capabilities: brand visibility (Adobe Experience Manager), customer engagement (Adobe Experience Platform Native Apps), and content supply chain (Adobe GenStudio). It leverages data in Adobe CX Analytics while providing native AI integrations with top AI platforms (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, and Nvidia) into what they call the Adobe Composable AI Fabric. 

Using the word fabric expands on what data fabrics do and customer data platforms (CDPs) offer, including AI model openness, MCP integrations, and automations.

The heart of Adobe CX Enterprise is CX Enterprise Coworker, a conversational UI that lets marketers trigger AI agents and skills. The highlighted agents included compliance/risk, social media, paid ads, and pricing strategy.

A second component is AI Brand Intelligence – think guardrails and governance applied to the brand –  ensuring assets adhere to identity, style, accessibility, and other compliance factors. This component enables marketers to create a brand ontology, leverage computer vision models to scan assets, and apply a reasoning engine whenever people and AI agents create marketing materials.

Why this matters: How scaling marketing impacts CIOs

CIOs rarely have the opportunity to observe how marketers do their work, the complexity of integrating multiple tools, or the effort required to scale campaigns across dozens of channels. Adobe demoed how marketers can use AI agents to scale and personalize campaigns while following branding guidelines. The added intelligence and automation are less about marketing productivity. They are entirely about optimizing formats for different channels while increasing the value delivered from campaigns. There are also opportunities for CIOs to address technical and data debt using Adobe CX Enterprise – ask me about it!

2.    The creative design becomes collaborative with AI agents

Many CIOs are wrapping their heads around AI’s coding competencies. There’s a mixed response, with some that awe developers, while others spark dread.

Now those same emotions are reaching the design community, but herein lies a lesson CIOs can learn from. While tech companies boast high percentages of code being completed by AI and the resulting productivity improvements, you see a completely different business value when designers collaborate with AI agents. 

In Adobe GenStudio, designers can go from mockups to completed designs using vibe-design practices, much like how developers can vibe code applications. But designs are much like POCs, and they only become production-ready through AI agent-led automations using a tool like Adobe Firefly Creative Production.

Why this matters: CIOs must partner with CMOs on AI’s impact on creativity

Innovation is driven by creativity, craftsmanship, and the leveraging of technology to improve experiences. AI is disrupting craftsmanship, and both designers and developers are questioning their futures in the workplace. Enterprises will still need designers and developers to drive innovation. Therein lies an opportunity for CIOs and CMOs to partner and guide their organizations toward AI’s transformative potential. 

3.    Conversational AI interfaces are coming to every CX

I predicted that AI would have an Uber/Airbnb moment in 50+ AI predictions for 2026. While many businesses have improved customer support with AI, we haven’t yet seen many examples of genAI capabilities embedded in ecommerce, media, and other B2C and B2B customer experiences.

DICK’s Sporting Goods’ partnership with Adobe may be a leading candidate for showcasing conversational AI interfaces in its customer experiences.

They showed two form factors, starting with a ChatGPT plugin to interface a learn-to-buy shopping experience. But the more interesting demo was Adobe Brand Concierge, a conversational UI that can be deployed to the website and a mobile application.

These conversational experiences will be game changers compared to the old rule-based decision-tree shopping wizards.

Why this matters: CIOs must have a plan for conversational UX

The demo on the expo floor had some kinks, so there will be good reasons for marketers to partner with IT on integration, configuration, and testing. But there’s no doubt in my mind that every customer experience will go through several transformations:

1. Conversational UX is bolted onto existing websites
2. New conversational UX mobile apps are launched
3. Convergence and simplification, as browsing and clicking UX declines, and conversations take over as the primary UX
4. Conversation UX and voice UX converge

CIOs should budget for this transformation and plan to roll out incremental changes to ease customer adoption.

Why review Adobe CX Enterprise

Last year, I asked and answered: Who is the pioneering AI leader CIOs should watch in CX?

Adobe rolled out new AI agents at last year’s summit. This year, they demonstrated their vision for agentic AI in marketing and design. CIOs should aim to deliver IT’s business value beyond productivity and efficiencies by partnering with their CMOs on growth opportunities. Review Adobe CX Enterprise for the possibilities.