How Generative and Agentic AIs Work Together for Content and CX Orchestration

Ever since Adobe started talking about the content supply chain a couple of years ag  at its annual Adobe Summit event, I have been really interested in treating the act of making digital content like making physical goods.  And seeing how important digital content is to creating relevant experiences along every touchpoint in the customer life cycle, it seems like more enterprises should be treating the content creation process in this manner.

So as we held our CRM Playaz watch party for this year's Summit opening keynote, I was really interested in seeing how things were progressing with the content supply chain and how Adobe is focusing on the evolution from customer experience management to customer experience orchestration. This shift emphasizes integrating generative and agentic AI to automate, adapt, and execute personalized customer experiences at scale.

Significant product announcements included:

• Introduction of the Agent Orchestrator, which coordinates purpose-built AI agents across workflows. This system leverages reasoning engines and customer experience language models for deeper integration.
• New integrations with Adobe Workfront and Frame.io for streamlined workflows.
• Introduction of Firefly-powered video generation capabilities.
• Broader analytics capabilities, including content performance analytics integrated with audience data for actionable insights.

Adobe's approach is to use its combination of tools from its Creative Cloud (e.g., Firefly, Frame.io) with Experience Cloud solutions to streamline content creation, delivery, and analytics at scale to span the content supply chain stages:

• Workflow and planning
• Creation and production
• Asset management
• Delivery and activation
• Analytics and measurement

We spoke to Daniel Sheinberg, senior director of product management at Adobe, for a post-Summit conversation to learn more about how these announcements will shape the future of the content supply chain, help with the transition away from customer experience management toward customer experience orchestration, the role agentic AI will play in all of this, and how agentic is coupled with generative AI to make "creativity the new productivity", as stated by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during the keynote.

Edited transcript

Brent Leary: I don't know why this stuck inside my head as long as it has, but creativity is the new productivity. And when I started thinking about it, and then in the context of what you guys are doing with the content supply chain and the whole move to customer experience orchestration, it just all seems to kind of fit.

Daniel Sheinberg: The content supply chain is really all about the explosion in interactions between consumers and brands and the need for relevant personalized content in every one of those touchpoints. And nobody can keep up on a human scale. It's just it's not possible.

In the content supply chain section of the keynote on Tuesday, the host was David Wadhwani. David heads up our digital media business. He owns the Creative Cloud. And when you think about the content supply chain, it's that combination of everything we do for creatives as well as the experience cloud, which David doesn't own.

But all the Experience Cloud solutions that come together to take you through that flow of the supply chain, it starts out with workflow and planning. It goes into creation and production. There's asset management. Then there's delivery and activation, and then and then there's analytics and measurement. That whole lifecycle of content. it really takes many of the things Adobe's doing across the business, many of the different solutions that we have to deliver that at scale.

It's really exciting to have David up there representing the whole story and see people coming in from different parts, different teams, different product organizations to represent the work they're doing to bring it all together.

Everybody knows about Adobe and creative production. These are the tools creatives are using every day. What I think people are learning about in that content supply chain context is, well, there's this whole strategy and planning that goes into it, and ideation. You may have seen there was the kind of vision demo of a new ideation product that will be genAI-powered to be able to get teams collaborating and thinking about the content that they're going to need for a campaign.

But also, what are the audiences they're going to need, and what are the channels they're going to reach, and how are they going to be successful with this campaign. That's kind of the creative creativity and marketing coming together. You've got solutions like WorkFront and Frame.io that are key to that, those workflow pieces around the content supply chain.

Then you've got the creative tools and lots of really cool stuff happening there. Obviously with Firefly, you're starting to see how, you know, things like the text-to-video obviously continues to have, you know, additional models releasing. You may have seen the translate in lip sync, which is really cool functionality, but it's not just about, you know, one creative person kind of doing that in isolation.

It's also leaning into what we call Firefly services, which allow you to hook into those APIs, the creative APIs, and do this at scale. So you've got teams that can now crank out hundreds, thousands of versions of this, recognizing that you've got a video to start with, but now you need it in 50 different languages, and you needed it in five different formats. It's gotta show up well on a mobile device. It's got to show up well in an Instagram video. It's got to show up well on a desktop. So being able to do that, through technology rather than people having to do all that mundane work, is just critically important.

Paul Greenberg: So on the Creative Cloud side, you've always had the Behance, you know, the community. It's basically a community of creators. How do you take that creator community? How do you integrate into the experience? Cloud's kind of the overall, well, I guess the overall ecosystem itself. How do you do that?

Daniel Sheinberg:  We announced the release of Content Analytics at Summit. And what it does is it allows you to look at the performance of content. Certainly you can look at the performance of an individual piece of content in all the different places that it showed up. But even kind of more compelling is you can understand, what's the performance by the characteristics of content. So you can go look at the example up on stage was something like, you know, I can look at students in the U.K., the campaigns that they responded best to the content that was in there.

What was the attributes of the content? What colors appealed to them? Were they better off with people in the content or better off the landscapes in the content. All these kinds of questions. And I think that'll become something that's really powerful for for creators going forward.

We've moved into a world where, especially for creatives who are working professionally and working in producing for marketing context, understanding what performs is really important. 

When you are an independent influencer, you're kind of doing everything. You're thinking about what do we need to create? How do we distribute it? You're thinking about how to perform all that stuff, and you can react in real time to that. But if you're in a large organization and there are hundreds of people involved in this process, it's the same end-to-end process, but you've got the folks who are thinking about "what should we do"? Or what we need can be really pretty far away from the people who are actually creating it. And then the people who are actually measuring it. And so starting to have that understanding when you're in the creation phase of what's worked well before, how can I incorporate that?

I think that would be really valuable to creators and folks in the community like Behance.

Brent Leary: When you think about that community, they're creative incarnate, basically. That's what they do. That's what they are. That's how they identify. And when you think about the agentic stuff, you don't necessarily think about people that are that creative. You think a little bit more on the developer or business process expert. How does agentic crossover and help the pure creatives personally and how they fit better into the overall?

Daniel Sheinberg: If you think about why people went into being creative, it's that spark of inspiration and creativity that they're really passionate about. And then I think a lot of people are focused on the craft as well and making that come to life. But then there's a lot they get sucked into that I don't think they really enjoy that much, you know? Creative teams having to be the brand governance folks and creative teams having to create in this format, but "then give it to me in that format."  Agents can take on a lot of that work for them, the mundane tasks, to free them up to do the truly creative things.

My take on where we are with generative AI is it's still derivative content that you're creating, right? It's not actually like that true spark of creativity… the truly innovative stuff. I don't think generative AI can do that because it's effectively just trained on what's out there. I think there's still that opportunity that persists.

What I do think is pretty cool, and you were starting to see creatives doing more and more, is that ideation phase where it's like, "hey, I just have a concept. I want to throw it out there, just like see what it looks like, you know, really quickly give me some treatments." That kind of thing. 

it's not going to do the work for you, but it's a way do it quickly and see what something might look like before you invest a lot of time, energy, and really getting it to that pixel-perfect place.