Matthew McQueeny is VP, Growth at iMedia, the “Bracketologist” of the DXP/CMS March Madness, and a CMS Critic contributor.

There are certain moments at industry events where you can feel the narrative shift in real time.

Day 1 at the 2026 Adobe Summit was one of those moments.

And it's not because AI was mentioned. Every event over the last two years has been saturated with it. It was because Adobe – with a not-so-subtle assist from NVIDIA – reframed the conversation entirely.

The reality? We're no longer talking about generative AI. That's so 2025. All the energy right now is concentrated on Agentic AI and its ability to help us get actual work done.

I've been drinking from a gilded firehose at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center here in Las Vegas. Adobe Summit continues for the next few days, but it's already lighting the world on fire. Here's what's resonating for me as things kicked off.

Moving from “Generate” to “Execute”

Early in the day, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen took the stage with an inspirational vibe, surrounded by a cacophony of visual bliss and a clear mission of “Empowering with AI.” This was a bittersweet delivery, as Narayen announced back in March that he would be transitioning from the captain's chair after a successor is appointed, and would remain as Chair of the Board.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on stage at Adobe Summit 2026. Source: Adobe

In his keynote, he set the tone with a familiar but still grounding principle, one that has clearly influenced his vision since taking the helm in December of 2007 – an epic 18-year run at one of the most storied tech companies in history.

“Tools don’t create, people do,” he said. "It’s our privilege to empower all of you to create the experiences that matter.”

What struck me is how that line could have been said five years ago. What couldn’t have been said is what came next, when NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage. The conversation quickly moved from creativity to capability—and from potential to production.

“AI is no longer just generating answers," he said, "it’s now doing work.” He was smirking like a troublemaker when he added the stinger that AI is “finally valuable.”

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Source: Adobe

Wow. That distinction might matter more than anything else – because we’ve spent two years watching AI write copy, generate images, and summarize meetings. But what Adobe and NVIDIA are pointing toward is a world where AI can build campaigns, orchestrate journeys, optimize performance, and execute against strategic business goals.

In this sense, it's not just acting as a feature, but as a system of authority. And that's transformational.

The Agentic Enterprise: The New ‘North Star’

If there was one phrase that defined Day 1, it was the “Agentic Enterprise.” It's certainly something we've heard before, but not with this much gusto. And when it comes to a picture of what that looks like, Adobe’s vision is clear: AI agents become co-workers. Systems become orchestrators. Workflows become autonomous.

“The front end of software is now agentic," as Huang said. "It understands your intent and executes it.”

That’s a profound shift for anyone in the DXP/CMS space. We’ve spent decades optimizing interfaces, workflows, and content models. Now we’re entering a world where the interface is conversational, and the output is action.

Is Customer Experience Orchestration Finally Real?

It sure seems like it. And Anil Chakravarthy, the President of Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration Business, introduced Adobe CX Enterprise as the system designed to bring this vision to life.

On paper, it might sound like another platform launch. But in reality, it’s Adobe making a strong claim that Customer Experience Orchestration is no longer aspirational – it’s truly executable.

Chakravarthy outlined three pressure points every enterprise is facing. The first is brand visibility in AI-driven discovery, which we've been talking about a lot on The Matt & Matt Show. The second is an explosion of channels, which has been gaining traction for some time.

Finally, there's an insatiable, exponential demand for content that's applying pressure to everything. And on that, he added a stat that really stuck with me: “Marketers expect content demand to increase 5x over the next two years.”

If that’s true (and it probably is), then the current operating model for most marketing teams simply doesn’t hold.

The Content Supply Chain Becomes the Battleground

This is where David Wadhwani, Adobe's President of Creativity & Productivity Business, really leaned in.

“Winning isn’t about producing the most content," he said. "It’s about producing the right content—on brand, at scale, and personalized.”

That’s easy to say. Much harder to operationalize. Adobe’s answer to this is its trifecta of GenStudio, Creative Agent, and Brand Intelligence, which round out a toolbox of professional-grade resources for building and scaling brands at unprecedented levels. And it's all in the same ecosystem.

But the real story isn’t the product names—it’s the model behind them, which is, as Adobe framed it, human-led but agent-accelerated. That phrase came up repeatedly, and it’s worth sitting with. Why? Because it’s Adobe acknowledging one of its core values: AI doesn’t replace the creative process. It compresses everything around it.

The Marriott Bonvoy Demo: From Signal to Action

I expected demos, but I was all in when they announced that Marriott Bonvoy was taking center stage. Given that I'm a customer, I was curious to see how Adobe’s agentic AI vision actually clicked with a real-world use case.

In the example, everything started with a simple signal: A spike in engagement from the South of France, followed by increased traffic coming from LLMs. Then, strong interest, but weak conversion. This would have created a black box in the realm of traditional marketing tools.

But here's where the agent magic kicked in. Instead of just surfacing data, the system interpreted it – understanding the business goals, team priorities, and the urgency of the task. It immediately quantified the opportunity and assessed available budget and resources – and determined how the team could take action.

Marriott Bonvoy presentation. Source: Adobe

Then it went a layer deeper, identifying why conversion was lagging. As it was revealed, traffic was being driven by a trending TV series filmed in the region. It was a classic cultural demand spike – the kind of moment where a destination suddenly becomes “hot” (think The White Lotus effect).

From there, everything accelerated. The system optimized the landing page with more relevant imagery, generated updated messaging, validated brand, SEO, and accessibility, and published instantly.

Then it expanded the opportunity by:

building new audience segments (including call center signals)
generating creative variations
orchestrating a multi-channel campaign
simulating performance
launching

All from a single signal. Impressive.

So the takeaway isn’t that AI can generate content – it’s that it can detect a moment and act on it immediately – compressing what used to take weeks into an immediate and continuous loop.

NBCUniversal: Creativity at Scale Without Compromise

One of the more grounded moments came from Ashish Desai, EVP of AI and Enterprise Innovation at NBCUniversal. Because if any company has a reason to be cautious with AI, it’s NBCU – which is constantly wrestling with IP complexity, talent rights, and brand equity challenges.

And yet, all of those problems are good in the sense that consumers crave entertainment. And this is in NBCU's sweet spot.

“Creativity is not going away," Desai said. "It’s being accelerated.”

To keep up with that level of market appetite, NBCU now has over 2,000 of its creatives using Adobe's astounding Firefly, a tool for creating and editing images, audio, and video with access to top models from Google, OpenAI, and more. With AI embedded in real workflows and custom models trained on their own assets, NBCU's team is realizing faster and more prolific output.

This alignment with creativity is key, because it reinforces a theme we’re seeing across the industry: the future isn’t generic AI. It’s specialized AI that's trained on your brand, your data – and your truth.

The CMO Reality Check

There's persistent talk about the challenges facing CMOs. It's an uphill battle, but the role is more strategic than ever – and chief marketers need to have a deep understanding of how AI impacts both the stack and the customer experience.

The closing conversation between Lara Balazs, Adobe's CMO, and Jon Gieselman – Chief Growth Officer Comcast/Xfinity – might have been the most practical part of the day.

Gieselman cut through the noise. “Most marketing is beige," he remarked. "People play it safe.”

That’s not an AI problem, Gieselman said. That’s a creativity problem – and his point was clear: AI will scale whatever you give it. The classic “garbage in, garbage out” paradigm.

The takeway? If your ideas are average or even “meh,” you might just be accelerating boredom.

My Take: Why This Changes the CMS Conversation

Through a CMS Critic lens – and from the conversations we’ve been having on The Matt & Matt Show – the first day at Adobe Summit really codified something we’ve been circling: the CMS is no longer the center of gravity.

To be clear, content management systems are evolving to provide a vital system of record and authority. But this new polarity isn't exactly a shocker. We've been seeing this transformation over the last few years, and it's been accelerating as composable architectures have taken root and orchestration has elevated in prominence.

Here's how the stack is shaping up in simple terms:

AI layer (agents, orchestration)
Data layer (CDP, signals)
Content layer (CMS, DAM, assets)

And increasingly, that AI layer is driving the whole experience. That has massive implications for vendors, system integrators, and enterprise buyers because the question is no longer “Which CMS should we choose?” It’s more like “Which system can actually execute our strategy?”

Final Thought…

There was a line from Huang that I keep coming back to:

“You don’t pay for AI because it knows things… you pay for AI because it does work.”

That’s the shift. And if Adobe is right, the winners in this next phase won’t be the companies with the best tools. They’ll be the ones who figure out how to operationalize AI as a key part of its workforce.

If you're at the Venetian and looking to navigate the rivers of the agentic enterprise, I'll be on a gondola around 3 AM.

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Adobe Summit Day 1: The Rise of the Agentic Enterprise