Here’s What Adobe Execs Say About the Future of AI
The leaders of one of the world’s largest creative companies did an AI deep dive with The AI Report. Here’s what they said.
Last week, Liam Lawson of The AI Report was on the ground at Adobe Summit 2026 — sitting down with four Adobe executives to talk about AI and what’s next. When leaders of one of the world’s largest creative companies are doing AI deep dives, I think it’s worth paying attention.
The catch? Most AI news feels like it is written by enterprise leaders for enterprise leaders. Big solutions for big budgets. The results can leave small and mid-size businesses scratching their heads and wondering just what “agentic content supply chain” means for them.
I don’t usually paraphrase another writer’s work — but this piece is worth reading. So I’m taking the liberty but uring you to readh the original. Full credit to Liam Lawson for the reporting. This is my take on what it means for the rest of us.
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Unlimited AI Means Judgment Matters More than Ever
Once upon a time, business leaders would hand a creative director a brief, and the first question they’d ask is: how many design versions should we produce? With AI, how much is no longer the question. When machines can output multiple designs with the push of one button, “how much” gets replaced with “OMG, please stop iterating.”
Unlimited choice comes with its own challenges. Too many choices can be paralyzing.
Knowing what you want — and more importantly, what your customers want, and which option will stop the scroll — has become more critical than ever. This is probably good news for anyone who worries AI will replace all jobs. Too many choices means we sitll need humans in the loop.
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What’s Your Sizzle?
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Google Probably isn’t Going Anywhere
But it is losing its stronghold on search
You surely haven’t missed the conversation about how people are abandoning Google in favor of AI. Google Search used to be the authority for finding whatever you wanted. Now ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are doing to Google what Google did to the Yellow Pages. Not killed exactly. But forced to adapt.
Google trained us to narrow our searches: Mexican food near me. AI lets us ask in full sentences: Where should I eat Mexican food from Mazatlán with a four-star rating that isn’t too busy on a Saturday night? The result is richer, more contextual — and Ai is pulling from everything ever written to give you better, more targeted responses.
Adobe’s own data shows that AI-driven traffic to retail sites grew 393% year over year in just the first three months of 2026. And that traffic is now converting 42% better than traffic from traditional search. People aren’t just browsing through AI. They’re buying.
Which means if AI doesn’t know about your business, you need to do something about it. Like right now.
➤ Start Your Sizzle Statement: Your Sizzle Statement is your defining document. The reason why people choose you. It is also an essential tool to help AI understand who you are and why you’re the premium choice.
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All the World’s an Assembly Line
Agentic AI is today’s hot topic. The Association of National Advertisers picked it as its “word of the year” for 2025, but it will very likely get much more mainstrem attention this year. Don”t be surprised if your New Year’s Resolution for 2027 includes some version of “I resolve to figure out this agentic AI thing.”
Agentic AI sounds like a woo-woo 2070 version of The Matrix, or possibly a bad remake of Lucy and Ethel stuffing their faces with chocolate. But the future is here.
Here’s how content used to work. The CEO said let’s do this. The marketing VP wrote a brief, handed it to the creative director, who handed it to a designer, who handed it to a copyeditor — and then, finally, it got posted. Six or seven humans for one article.
What is Agentic AI?
When we talk about agentic AI, what that means is almost every step in that chain can now be automated. The marketing director turns to AI to build a brief. That brief lands in a drive, waiting for the next agent to produce content that looks and sounds like your brand. That content then waits for the next agent to proofread it. And so on.
AI isn’t quite ready to run full content chain without human oversight — but we are pretty close to having small and mid-size businesses adopt most their own agentic routines (if they haven’t already).
It sounds high-tech and distant, but here’s how anyone could automate their content production right now. Take this article (or any article on content automation), copy it into Claude or ChatGPT, say “Explain what this means” followed by “Can you build me a string of automated content agents?” You’d have a working assembly line built by the end of the day.
The good news. You can automate, but automatic doesn’t mean high quality. As as one Adobe exec put it: taste is everything. AI can do it — that doesn’t mean it should do it. We’ll still need humans for the quality control decisions.
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Unlimited choice comes with its own challenges. Too many choices can be paralyzing.
– Monica Poling
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Your Partners Matter
Adobe is leaning hard into its strategic partners — NVIDIA, IBM, Google Cloud, Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Accenture. In this section, the orignal article took a bit of a turn into product placement. But the meta point is this: When AI partners with AI, anything is possible. Anything.
For small and mid-size businesses, that can feel like a little bit like watching the Road Runner zip by when you’re Wile E. Coyote falling off the cliff with your “Yikes!” sign.
But here’s the real deal. You can choose those same tools to expand your own possibilities. The biggest barrier isn’t what the big teams are building. It’s deciding not to play at all.
➤ Read More: Search the Enchanted Artists: New Mexico’s finest book artists directory to see the results of my recent Gmail search.
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The Bottom Line
Reporting on the Adobe Summit 2026 veered into impact on enterprise audiences. But the signals are universal.
Key Takeaways
- Judgment is the new bottleneck: Unlimited AI output has shifted the scarce resource in business from production to knowing what to keep and what to kill.
- AI search is changing buying behavior: AI-driven traffic to retail sites grew 393% year over year in early 2026 and converts 42% better than traditional search.
- Agentic AI is already here: Content pipelines are being automated end-to-end — and small and mid-size businesses don’t need a big team to start.
- AI has democratized the tools: Small businesses have access to the same AI ecosystem major companies are building their strategies around.
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