Adobe defines its AI-powered customer experience platform

Evolution of Adobe's CX cloud

Previously, Adobe had released an agentic AI orchestrator for Adobe Experience Platform. It also included embedded agents within Adobe applications that performed tasks such as data analysis and content creation.

CX Enterprise builds on that by including a shared skills catalog that enables agents to access common capabilities, enhanced developer tools to support customization, and a specialized orchestration agent to manage workflows based on defined goals. A broad set of partnerships -- including native platform integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Nvidia -- extend these capabilities.

Adobe, like Salesforce and ServiceNow, must rush to marry deterministic, declarative business rules with the probabilistic power of large language models (LLMs). Adobe's IT stack starts with the data layer on the bottom, and small language models in Brand Intelligence and Engagement Intelligence running on top of that, governing the output to task-based agents, analytics, content generation tools and marketing tools.

Thus, AI will do some of the heavy lifting to embed business rules into LLM-based agentic workflow, said Sundeep Parsa, vice president of Products, Customer Data Platform, Experience Platform and Customer Journey Management Portfolio at Adobe.

"Business context is not always sitting in on some common SharePoint folder. Some of that is codified inside a whole bunch of applications. Some of that is tribal knowledge. How do you reduce the time it takes to bring all of the knowledge and run it through agents?" Parsa said.

"We've been serving [our users] for a very long time, and many of those policies and rules have been codified in our applications. That is how we are going to ground these LLMs."

Cicman sees CX Enterprise as Adobe planting its flag as the CX platform -- a big step toward what could eventually be an Adobe CRM. The vendor battle for the hearts and souls of the largest companies investing in customer experience seems to be brewing among CRM giant Salesforce, service giant ServiceNow and marketing giant Adobe as their technologies converge.

In the past, these companies -- for the most part -- stayed in their swim lanes. Now, however, each is encroaching on the other's turf. One example is Salesforce releasing an IT service management platform last fall, challenging the traditional ServiceNow stronghold. Many joint users deploy some combination of those three vendors -- or other competitors -- so interoperability among these frenemies also remains important.

Furthermore, Cicman said, Adobe has intensified its pursuit of B2B customers, having developed tools that accommodate buying teams after building its stronghold with consumer brands.

"Adobe is basically saying, 'Look, I want stewardship over customer engagement,' and they're putting a stake in the ground because ServiceNow is also building a CRM," Cicman said. "They're on a collision course."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.