How creativity, marketing, and AI are shaping the future of customer experience

Anil Chakravarthy, president of digital experience business at Adobe, discusses how the company is transforming customer experiences with personalized interactions and customer experience orchestration.

What sets your marketing apart from that of every other organization are the unique experiences you deliver to customers. Over the past decade, delivering those experiences has become more and more challenging as consumers and customer accounts engage with businesses across an expanding digital ecosystem in pursuit of a favorite product or memorable service—alongside a real sense of connection with the brand. While companies understand this desire, only 14% say they are actually capable of providing experiences that surprise and delight customers—a drop from 25% just one year ago in 2024. As we enter the era of AI, creating meaningful, personalized experiences has challenges, and the gap between reality and your customers’ expectations could be widening.

Innovating across eras

Adobe has been at the forefront of digital marketing since its origins, helping organizations build lasting customer relationships, define their brands, and, ultimately, support profitable growth. With technologies that have created and evolved business-critical categories, from digital marketing more than a decade ago to the current state of customer experience management across digital and physical channels, it is a journey navigated with a passionate community across industries and around the globe. Today, with generative and agentic AI, as well as human ingenuity, the state of the art is evolving from the management of experiences to their “orchestration”—an important distinction and one destined to separate digital business winners and losers going forward.

In 2025, consumers expect every encounter to be tailored to their unique needs. While businesses have made great strides, digital channels are proliferating, content demand is exploding, and data is more fragmented than ever. This has effectively held companies back from the holy grail of one-to-one personalization by preventing the scaling of content and customer journeys to the tens of millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of accounts waiting to engage with them. Indeed, our recent research shows that 78% of customers want personalized interactions across all channels, but only 45% of businesses can deliver. The good news? The next era of customer experience is on the way, with the ability to close this gap.

Conducting the next generation of digital engagement

The promise of customer experience orchestration presents the perfect opportunity for companies to achieve that goal of real-time personalization at scale, bridging the gap between the interactions customers want and those they are currently receiving. Leveraging generative and agentic AI to support creatives and content development at scale, as well as marketing intelligence to ensure hyper-relevance in delivery, businesses can achieve a more proactive, responsive engagement strategy and deliver on the foundational pillars of a well-connected content supply chain and customer experiences unified at every touchpoint. These elements, when powered by a real-time platform of connected data, services, and application programming interfaces, will help marketers truly orchestrate activities with their customers, as well as the work required to plan, compile, and deliver these remarkable experiences.

In the age of customer experience orchestration, an airline will push updates via a unique brand concierge to reflect dynamic pricing, precise weather conditions, and the traveler’s most recent search history on flights. A retailer will share tailored fashion tips through a secure, conversational interface based on a consumer’s specific lifestyle, past purchase history, location, and the time of year. From one seamless interaction to the next, data, generative and agentic AI, and bidirectional interactions will help marketers refine in-the-moment content and experiences at every step of its relationship with the consumer or account.

Bringing customer experience orchestration to life

As a global community gathers this week for the world’s largest digital experience conference—Adobe Summit—we are excited to unveil innovations that will help businesses navigate this path ahead. While questions remain amid a rapid transition to the age of AI, one thing is certain—your customers’ expectations will only continue to mount. The companies that prepare now across their people, processes, and technology are the ones best positioned to win in this brave new world.

Learn more about Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator and our other industry-defining announcements this week at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.

Note: This article was created by Adobe.