Adobe Summit Day 1 Keynote 2025 | Adobe

Please welcome Shantanu Narayen.

Good morning, good morning. Welcome to Adobe Summit. It's so great to see so many of you here with us in Las Vegas, and also welcome to the thousands who are tuning in online. Thank you all for joining us as we come together for our 23rd Adobe Summit. It's incredible to reflect on how creativity has evolved and the transformative role that it's played in creating and delivering digital experiences. I really believe we're in the Golden Age of design, and enterprises all across the globe are investing in people and technology to elevate the look and feel of all of their communications. It's incredible to reflect on how much marketers drive in terms of the creative work as brands look to stand out as well as engage with customers more effectively across all channels. And AI is accelerating and expanding the creative aperture for everyone even further. It's opening the content floodgates, tapping into everybody's imagination, and massively expanding the number of creative assets that are being designed, edited, and delivered. Since Adobe's founding, we have been passionate about helping people and enterprises unleash their creativity and share their stories and brand with the world. And today, we're enabling everyone with a creative idea to bring it to life across all media types, whether through imaging, design, video, 3D, AR, VR, and across desktop, web, and mobile. We're advancing creative expression with our amazing global community and reimagining how we deliver AI so that we can deliver even more magic. We continue to innovate in flagship products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, and Express, as well as to infuse generative AI seamlessly across all of Creative Cloud so that we ensure that you can create with the power and precision of your imagination. And our new Photoshop web and mobile app, for example, is just part of our strategy to put all of our innovation in the palm of your hand. A new Firefly application is a comprehensive destination for ideation and creation, enabling you to generate stunning images, vectors, and now video and voice all in one place. In fact, the Firefly video model is now available in public beta and is the first generative AI video model that is IP friendly and commercially safe, so you can confidently use it for all of your production-ready content. And Firefly and support for third-party models will also be available in conjunction with Creative Cloud. But it's not just creative pros. Every student, business professional, and small business is also looking for quick and easy AI-first applications to help them stand out. We believe that creativity is the new productivity, as communications have become increasingly more expressive and visual. And so with every product launch, we're expanding the lens to make creativity accessible to more people, what we call creativity for all. Adobe revolutionized how digital content is shared, viewed, as well as preserved with Adobe Acrobat as well as PDF, and it's now become the de facto standard for document productivity. We recently released AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, unlocking even greater value from the trillions of PDFs around the world because it empowers everyone to shift from reading documents to having an interactive conversation with a PDF, generating summaries, extracting insights, as well as using it to compose visual presentations and reports. We reimagined creativity for a broader set of customers with Adobe Express, the quick and easy create-anything app, and we're bringing the powerful technology of products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere to Express to deliver the best of Adobe to customers of every skill. And we believe that the combined power of Acrobat and Express will make the journey from document creation to consumption smoother than ever. With all of this explosive growth of content, Adobe has focused even more on bringing creativity and marketing closer together. Our goal is to help you create and deliver personalized content at scale across channels, from mobile apps to social media, email, as well as advertising, because we want you to build the emotional connections with your customers and delight them with even more connected experiences that deliver greater customer loyalty as well as lifetime value. Adobe GenStudio is our overarching vision to bring together creative and production workflow, asset management, delivery and activation, as well as analytics and insight for the entire content lifecycle. And so everyone from small and medium businesses, digital agencies, to marketing departments in the largest enterprises can achieve high-velocity creative expression with instant activation. In 2009, our insight was that no other software company was exclusively focused on marketing professionals. We had a vision and passion to serve marketers with a comprehensive technology stack and created the digital marketing category. We started with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager, web content management and analytics, to empower every business to have a digital presence. We've continued to expand on that vision and have been investing for over a decade to serve marketers, IT professionals, as well as business owners. And that was the motivation for us to build the entire Adobe Experience Platform and bring together content, data, and journeys in the pursuit of extending digital marketing to customer experience management. And thanks to our partnership with every one of you today, Adobe is one of the largest providers of marketing technology in the world. But in the era of AI, we're even more focused on enabling you to truly unify creativity, marketing, and generative AI so you can deliver those personalized, conversational experiences at a global scale. It starts with a customer data platform that helps you create and manage your audiences through a unified customer profile that we can hydrate with content created through GenStudio. The Adobe Real-Time CDP, which is built on the Adobe Experience Platform, helps you curate audiences for what we are now calling intelligent orchestration, so you can deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time. And the AI innovations that we're delivering, we believe, can supercharge your decision-making with real-time insights so you can correct at any point in your campaign to maximize performance. We're incredibly excited to show you all of the innovations that we're working on later this morning. Adobe's highly differentiated approach to AI is rooted in the belief that creativity is a uniquely human trait, but that AI has the power to assist and amplify human ingenuity to enhance productivity. We've innovated across all four layers of this AI stack, spanning data, models, agents, and interfaces, because we believe that's the only way to deliver AI in a way that enhances your work. We train our category-leading Firefly models on licensed, high-quality data assets to offer commercially safe solutions, and we enable enterprises to create your own custom models that leverage your assets as well as understand your unique brand value. But we also partner with other third-party models, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others. And we're now augmenting this data and model strategy with creative, document, and customer experience agents to reason as well as perform tasks and help you achieve your business outcomes more quickly. And together, these form the foundation of the Adobe AI platform, powering the applications and interfaces you use every day across your creative and marketing workflows. For us, the impact of AI on the creative and business community is deeply personal. It guides our approach to ensuring that we deliver trustworthy and transparent generative AI, and we're advancing industry standards for creator attribution with what we call Content Credentials, and are thrilled that over 4,500 members have joined the Adobe Content Authenticity Initiative to promote content provenance. Our mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences is more critical than ever before. We're focused on unleashing creativity across every facet of digital experiences, starting with the ideation around a concept, to the creation and development of all content, to personalization and orchestration across every channel, while understanding its impact and reach. It's an incredibly exciting time to stand at the intersection of creativity, productivity, and marketing. The transformation that we drive together starts with creative ideation that will redefine customer experiences for billions of people across every industry around the world. Thank you so much for spending time with us and, even more critical, for inspiring us to do our best work. I'll now turn it over to Anil Chakravarthy, who's president of the digital experience business, to share how we're bringing together creativity and marketing to help accelerate your success in the age of AI. Thank you and have a great show.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Shantanu, and hello everyone. I'm thrilled to be here with you at Adobe Summit. We're really excited to connect in person with our customers, our partners, and our community. And for everyone participating online, thank you for joining us. What an incredible global community. Thank you again. Your work inspires us to innovate. Look at these amazing businesses on screen, and we're excited to hear from them, these industry leaders, during our keynotes as well as the strategy sessions that follow the keynotes every day. And their inspiring stories of companies showing us what's possible in customer experience using our products to serve and delight their customers. And this just touches the surface of the terrific work being done around the world and across industries today by all of you. Truly impressive. Thank you for sharing your stories. At Summit, we hear from you each year that the opportunity to connect with your peers is incredibly valuable. The best of the best are here at Summit, so please take the opportunity to network, to learn, and to share your expertise. Shantanu talked about the evolution of Adobe. We created the digital marketing category 15 years ago and brought together creativity and marketing. It started with Adobe Analytics through our acquisition of Omniture, and many of you have been our customers since then, and we really appreciate the trust and the partnership. We then expanded our portfolio significantly with Adobe Experience Manager for web content management and Audience Manager for delivering audience segments based on customer data. Then, to enable digital customer journeys, we added Adobe Campaign for email marketing and Adobe Target for content optimization. We established digital marketing leadership on the three key dimensions: content, customer data, and customer journeys. And these apps continue to be the foundation of digital marketing today. Let me give you a proof point: the Super Bowl just last month. Many of you rely on Adobe to create and deliver the experiences that make your brand stand out during the big game. In fact, I'm pleased that the National Football League has named Adobe as an official Fan Experience partner of theirs. Just a few stats about the Super Bowl: Adobe Analytics processed over 1.5 billion server hits. We delivered over 550 million emails by Adobe Campaign, as well as 1.7 million concurrent media streams. And AEM supported over 500 million multimedia experiences, including dynamic images and video. We have seen strong adoption of AEM Cloud Service with Edge Delivery Services after launching it a year ago, helping you achieve the fastest web performance, gain more organic traffic, and increase engagement with your customers. And just last month, our customers created over 1,000 new sites with Edge Delivery, and over 300 companies have already adopted AEM Sites Generate Variations, which we launched last year to help you create an experiment using GenAI. Another great example of creativity and marketing coming together. And thank you for trusting us to power your digital marketing. But in the mid-2010s, we saw that our products were critical beyond digital marketing. They were essential for the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition to engagement to retention to loyalty. So we created the category of customer experience management to help you address the convergence of digital marketing with the end-to-end customer experience. We introduced new best-in-class applications, including Adobe Commerce and Adobe Marketo Engage, and a couple of years later we added Workfront to our portfolio to help you organize marketing workflows and to serve as the foundation for your content supply chain. Then, in 2019, we launched the Adobe Experience Platform with unified customer profiles to deliver real-time experience, which was critical to help you achieve the vision of customer experience management. We built new apps natively on AEP to help you enable this: Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Mix Modeler. It has been an incredible success. Thank you for working closely with us to continuously drive that innovation and industry-leading performance. Today, AEP manages over 43 billion profiles on your behalf. We activate at peak each day over 76 billion activations, consistent real-time performance with less than 100 milliseconds response time. Each day, 14 billion engagement events on the edge, and 1.2 trillion experiences activated every year across offers, push messages, and emails. We're now further expanding access to the Adobe Experience Platform. AEP runs on Azure today, and we're really excited that AEP is also coming soon to Amazon Web Services. You asked for multi-cloud support, and we are delivering. And this is really cloud scale that you can count on. Thank you. And the goal is to be built from the ground up to be secure, trusted, and extensible. And all of this was created with a singular focus to help you achieve the imperative of personalization at scale: real-time personalization to hundreds of millions of consumers and thousands of businesses, something that's only possible by seamlessly integrating your content supply chain and stitching customer data and journeys into a unified customer experience. Today, though, we're in the beginning, the early innings, of a new era defined by generative AI and agent technology. It means that customers expect seamless, connected, real-time, two-way, personalized conversations with your brand across any touchpoint, across any channel, of course while respecting their individual preferences and their privacy. To deliver on this, you need to actively orchestrate. You have to orchestrate across your teams, your AI agents, your apps, your workflows, your partners. You've got to bring all that together while keeping your business goals, your growth goals, front and center. As Shantanu mentioned, this is now the era of customer experience orchestration, where your content, customer data, your journeys all work in harmony with AI. And so you anticipate what your customers want, you engage in natural language conversations across any channel, you respond in real time, and you continuously delight them. And this is the era where you pinpoint your marketing and your customer experience investments to the things that matter the most to your customers. You ensure that your tech stack and your processes are the most efficient given the current environment. And ultimately, you supercharge customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and growth by delivering personalization specific to every individual, whether they're a consumer or whether you're a B2B business. To achieve this true one-to-one personalization at scale requires a perfect blend of creativity, marketing, and AI. And know this is a formula that we know firsthand at Adobe with our own digital business through Adobe.com. In fact, it's critical to how we run our own digital business, and we built the Adobe AI platform based on that. It informs our innovation agenda and our product strategy, and we'll be sharing more of that throughout the course of Summit. Now, in the meantime, there's no better way to bring what we have discussed to life than through a real-world example, in this case with one of the most iconic brands in the world: Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola Company is rightly recognized as a leader in creativity and marketing. So I am really excited to welcome Shantanu back to stage with the Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, James Quincey. Over to you, Shantanu.

I'm delighted to welcome a leader who's redefined innovation, sustainability, and global impact at one of the world's most iconic brands. As Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, James Quincey has driven transformation, expanding beyond classic beverages to meet the demands of a changing world. And with a career spanning multiple continents and cultures, he brings a global perspective on leadership, innovation, and reinvention. Please join me in welcoming James Quincey. So while I pour myself a drink as well, James, go on. Rumor has it that at your first employee meeting as CEO of Coke, you neither wore a suit for the first time and you had a beverage from the Coca-Cola Company, but that was not Coke. True?

True. What message were you trying to send? I was trying to send two messages. One was we needed to move with the times. We were in the South, we were very formal, hierarchical, stuck in our ways type culture at the time, and we needed to break out of it. And so the message — and actually, if you look at when I would announce and all the fancy shows like this that we did and investor stuff and blah blah blah, if you'd ask people the next week what's the one thing they could remember, and the answer was he wore jeans and it wasn't Friday. I know that's weird for all you tech people, but like that was a big deal 10 years ago at the Coke company. And I got a lot of hate mail from local tailors whose business was to put people in suits and all things. But the message was very clear about the culture had to change. And the second thing was about the product. We had got ourselves trapped strategically in the idea we wanted to be a total beverage company, but everything we looked at people said but it has to be Coke first and you have to love Coke the most. But you can't have a total — you can't have all these different apps if one has to be loved more than the others. You need to be able to choose. You need to be able to choose Topo Chico, and I need to be able to choose Coke. And if you don't allow that, you trap everyone in a brand strategy that doesn't let the people choose. You're trying to sell what you make rather than make what sells. And so the two things had to be broken down. And the reason I did it by what I wore and by what I drank is a very famous old CMO of Coke once said everything communicates, and largely it's not what's on the PowerPoint, it's not what's on the screen with all the fancy technology, it's not what the CEO actually says, it's what he does. And the thing they can remember is I was wearing jeans and I wasn't drinking a Coke on that day, and that was a very powerful communication for them.

That's great. We'll go back a little bit. I mean, one thing we both have in common is we were actually aspiring electronics engineers, so we could spend our time talking about transmission lines and capacitors and inductors, but I don't think people are here for that. But just a little bit about your personal journey. I know you were in consulting for many years, you joined Coke in '96, and then you actually had a significant amount of global positions that you had and drove growth in Latin America, Mexico, Asia. Just maybe a little bit about the leadership lessons, and especially the global ones.

I think the first thing I would say is there wasn't a grand plan. So all of you out there who haven't had a 20-year career plan written out for the last 19 years, I didn't either. I'm not saying that's necessarily the best advice for everyone to just go with the flow, but I had joined companies, whether it was in consulting or at Coke, that were very interested in growing the people and their capabilities, and so the opportunities came along. So I didn't have to have a weird career plan; I just went and did things that were interesting. So I always say as one of my bits of advice is do something that you're really interested in, because the chances of you getting out of bed in the morning and giving your best are much higher if you like what you're doing than if you don't like what you're doing. So like what you're doing. The second thing that I would say, particularly as it related to Coke and Adobe, is absolutely the same: growth is what drives the machine forward. And so in each of those general management jobs, there came a time where something bold needed to be done, some reinvention was needed. And so having the courage to make the bold decision and go all in on something — I mean, you changed the way Adobe was connected to creativity and marketing. Every one of those jobs had a moment when there was a super big decision that was needed, and being courageous enough to do it is relatively rare in general management. Lots of other people, there's lots of process and blah blah blah and it goes on forever, but actually going no, this is the moment for the big decision, it always came at some point.

Well, you talked about reinvention, and Coke certainly — I think a lot of people here may not even know that while Coke was known for the first 100 years, you've really transformed it to this total beverage company. As I read it, 200 brands, and 30 of which are more than a billion dollars of business. So for everybody in this audience, how do you think about innovation? I saw a presentation of yours where you called yourself the chief agitator for innovation. So maybe touch on that, James.

Yeah, innovation firstly comes in many different shapes and sizes for us. It can be a niche thing where we're just putting something out there to get attention and bring people back to the core franchise. So putting out a Coke and Oreo flavor, it's never going to last forever, but it brings attention back to Coke, the main brand. So innovation has multiple roles: whether you're trying to create a new thing permanently or whether you're trying to bring people back to an existing franchise. It can be about the packaging, it can be about the marketing, it can be about the way we do the marketing. But when we're talking about the core product, it's really about trying to serve unmet needs and expand the universe. As the industry has grown, you started with Coca-Cola, you started with a cola, and then you got eventually after decades and decades and decades, people say well what about a calorie-free one, and then someone said well what about a cafe, so they're always looking for the fill-ins around the big ideas. The problem at Coke is we have more ideas than are ever going to work. And so whilst I have one role which is chief agitator to do something, whether it's continue to make the core brands relevant for the next 10 years as they have been for the last 140 years or do something new, I'm also — and the PR people tried to stop me in the old days from saying it — I'm the chief zombie killer. Because whilst we have 200 brands now, 5 years ago we had 400. And that's the brands. If you think they come in multiple package sizes, the number of brands times number of packages is in the thousands. And every brand manager turns up — I don't know if it's the same at Adobe — and they see a product that's struggling and hasn't worked for the last three years and they go, I can fix it, just one more campaign, we can do it, one more reprogramming or whatever, we'll produce the content for you. And then we've got lots of people who love your stuff and they prod, but no, it's like no, the time has come, it needs to be put to bed. And so actually the 200 used to be 400, and in the middle of Coke we took the decision to kill half the brands. So I agitate, but I'm also if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and it's got to go.

We'll get into marketing because the entire audience here is about marketing, but before that, just one other thing that fascinated me about the Coca-Cola Company is your ecosystem of partners, the bottling partners that you have. You have 33 million customer outlets, and I think you've talked about how people across the entire chain should be profitable. So maybe just the business strategy around having this incredible ecosystem of partners.

So let me describe it and then say why. The Coke company focuses on the brands, the marketing, the innovation, the strategy, and the orchestration. We then have several hundred what we call bottling partners. They physically receive a concentrate, the secret concentrate from us, they then get water, fizz, sugar, other ingredients, and they physically put them in bottles, put them on the trucks, and take them to the 33 million physical outlets around the world that we deliver to each week. And we're selling approximately 2.2 billion 8-ounce servings of our products every single day. So today there'll be 2.2 billion of our products consumed. So it's a massive physical system. And that's just us and the bottlers. Then you get the metal and everything else. It works for us because we cannot be good at everything. When I started, we owned 40% of the bottling system, and we were at best mediocre at being bottlers, and at times were on a trend to be mediocre on other things too. And we had to be true to ourselves. We're really good at one set of things, and we can find another set of people who are really good at bottling, which is a very different — it's much more asset heavy, it's much more — the margins are less, it's much more people. So there's 750,000 people who work in the Coke system, us and the bottlers, of which less than 50,000 are in the Coke company. And I'm including some of the bottling companies we still own. The vast majority of the people and assets are here, and they're great at running those things, and we're great at running the marketing. And when the franchise system works, it's unbeatable because you have both the global perspective and scale of the company and its brands, and yet each bottler is local to the place they're in. There are 60-plus bottlers in the US, there are multiple bottlers in Mexico, they're all different, and they love the bit of the world they're in. They own that dirt and go to market every day for that dirt, and we don't forget about any corner of the world.

So let's talk about building brands then. And you know, when you talk about global versus local, 2.2 billion 8-ounce servings sold every day, I mean how do you decide how do you build brands globally versus what's local?

Yeah, that's an eternal struggle. And the starting point is we need to make the brands relevant for each group of consumers. So the relevance of the brand is the key. And what that generally turns into is a set of decisions: we're going to prioritize brands that can be global. So I'm not looking to acquire a portfolio of zillions of things that are just relevant to one city at a time. I would prioritize things that can be relevant around the world. But if you take something like brand Coca-Cola, the focus of the marketing is the core idea. There's some things that are true about humanity across the world: optimism, happiness, the idea of a better world. There's nowhere that that's not true, and it's linked to the Coca-Cola brand. But how that's brought to life in each country has to be profoundly local. So we have both global programs and a global framework or a corridor in which Coca-Cola and all the other brands must operate, but then it's brought to life differently in every country. In India, it's with biryani. In other places, it's with tacos in Mexico, it's with burgers in the US. So it's profoundly brought to life. If it's Coke and meals, the idea is sharing a Coke at a meal is a universal idea, but the meal and the location of the meal and whether it's a couple of people or the whole family is a very local thing. Food is much more local than beverages. If you break the industries down, food is profoundly local versus beverages. And so what that looks like in every country is different.

You touched on Share a Coke, and one of the things that I was really amazed with is how you've actually engaged by having customers in your marketing for decades. And you know, the story around how you started the Share a Coke with the intention of everybody being allowed to have their name on a brand, I mean that was pioneered well before social marketing or social media. Maybe how do you think about integrating customers in your campaigns, and the pros and cons of that?

Yeah, so I mean firstly, on Share a Coke, it was really one of the first pieces of digital marketing at scale. The reason it never happened before is not because the idea of personalization never existed; it just was not practical at scale. I mean, in your intro, you have creativity and you have scale. For me, I can find plenty of creative people with lots of ideas, whether it's customers or my pushback is how will it ever be big? And so think digital marketing. You could always print your own label and stick it on a can, but when I make 2.2 billion a day, for those of you interested in the technology of how you make a label on a bottle, the label on the bottle comes in a mega reel, like I'm not exaggerating, huge reel of labels that is tens of thousands on a reel. But to print that reel is like printing a newspaper. In the old days when it was analog, they all had to be the same, and so every bottle had to be the same. But with digital printing, the digital printer can print a different name on every label on the reel. You can have thousands of different names. And so suddenly it was one of the first times that the digitization of the execution of marketing could produce a much more personalized experience. That was probably like almost 20 years ago now, and that was the beginning of actually being able to do personalization at physical scale. You could do it in emails, but physical personalization. Now you can go to the Las Vegas Coke store here and in 30 seconds they'll print whatever you want, beautiful high-tech printing. And so that kind of personalization scale really matters when you want to then engage with customers. Actually, we call customers the people, the end consumer. We call them consumers; it gets very confusing. Customers are the retailers for us. But the end consumer really wants to be the center of their own story and narrative, and that's part of what all this personalized creativity is about: engaging them in their own narrative. Now we could enter into debate as to how social media is putting people at the center of their own universes and the pros and cons of that and where it's leading us, but that is part of what's going on. They want to be the center of their own story, or a protagonist in their own story. And so this digitization, not just of the virtual world but the physical world, can make them protagonist in their own story, which is profoundly attractive.

You know, more recently, I think during the holiday season you actually pushed the envelope with using AI in some of these campaigns, and a lot of people may not know you actually started that work well before AI sort of became mainstream. Maybe just the role of technology and AI in marketing, and as you thought about that campaign, what were you trying to focus on?

Yeah, we made a — I mean, we've always been in AI in the process, in the analytical side, and obviously as a massive marketer, as we've been able to personalize communication whether it be emails, people have personalized voice communication or text or whatever. The opportunity to go to GenAI, the breakthrough in GenAI, we had no idea how to use it. We jumped on the train because we said look, that's where the world's going, let's at least get on and let's understand, because we're big and that tends to make us slow if we're not in at the beginning. For us to get to scale, we often end up too late. And so we started with GenAI on the pictures. And actually, one of the first scale usages of GenAI on pictures was with point of sale material. We print a lot of point of sale material. Those 33 million outlets we go to, most of the mom and pop stores in the emerging world, and there's a picture of a Coke, someone drinking it with an ad. In the old days, there was a photographer and a specialist somewhere putting all that together. Now there's a GenAI program that can have a picture of me and you having a pizza or a curry sharing the drinks we want to drink. And if they want to change the...

Well, thank you, James. I think we're going to have to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us.

Drink you've got to me got they just press the button on the G and they can print it and sent it to the sword so this revolutionary static imagery has occurred that's making a huge change the way marketing happens physically printed. The next stage was okay when's video coming and that has come now. The ad we made for Christmas, for those you can't see it you can look it up on the internet, it's a nice Christmas ad with the polar bears and the truck. What's interesting about it is a few things: one, it was cheaper to make than historical regular ads; it was much quicker to make, so it was a huge productivity opportunity. The limitations, what couldn't it do? It cannot produce resolution on people's faces that humans will buy into, so the boundary is still inanimate or kind of animal scale resolution of the picture. We generally want to make ads with people in, so it's super interesting because you can make a video with music and voice and you can customize it endlessly, and we can talk about where customization could take us. So it's super exciting, but it is not yet at the stage when it can make all our ads because we want people in them, and humans are incredibly effective at noticing AI that's not actually a human. It will get there, I don't know how long it's going to take, but when it breaks through and marry that idea with what is the ultimate unit cost of making that, I think it's going to be a huge wave of marketing revolution and creativity.

So maybe just looking around the corner, if you had a wish list of how you would like creativity and AI to help you transform how you market to consumers, what do you see around the corner?

As someone once said to me, you can't see over the horizon. I think there's going to be a struggle between two ends of the spectrum. One is as the technology develops, and especially as humans can be resolved into the gen AI programs, the question will become in part what is the cost of every time I make it. Because let me give you the kind of the futuristic one end of the spectrum: the cheaper it gets to make gen AI, the easier it is for me to put you in the ad on your phone and put someone else in the ad on their phone because I just pick up your picture and drop it in the ad. So I made you the protagonist of the ad. If that's cheap to do, great. I put you in. The next stage is to say, well, you looked at your phone but you didn't buy the product, and I know you didn't buy it. So today what happens is it goes back to a bunch of humans and they gnash their teeth and they go, okay, what can we do to make you click yes? In the future, the AI can do that. It can go, well, okay, he didn't click yes, but let me, if it's cheap to redo the ad, I'll just make a few changes in the ad like an A/B test and redo the ad and then reshow it to you and see if he clicks, and I'll keep changing it until he clicks yes. So the lower the cost of the ad, the more I can set up gen AI plus some sort of intelligent engine to chase you until you click yes. At the other end of the spectrum will be a whole load of annoyed consumers, and they will start going, man, this has gone from Minority Report to something really weird. Now I'm in it, I want to buy those apps that block everything, and so I block everything. And where does Coke then spend its money? Maybe I have to spend it on live experiences because the only thing you can't avoid is a live experience. Look at how live experiences are growing, look at how the music industry is trending, all the money is in the live experiences. So this interplay between creativity, the cost of the creativity, people's level of annoyance between being flooded and live experiences, in the center will be the quality of the creativity. I'm willing to let in the best stuff, I don't want to be spammed with rubbish. And that interplay between these three different poles, I think, would put a premium on core creativity.

Maybe last question, as you sit at the center of one of these largest companies with an iconic brand, we all think about purpose and we all think about responsibility. So maybe just a little bit about, as CEO of Coke, how do you think about advancing purpose for companies?

Yeah, well first you got to understand what it is. And I think we have reflected on purpose over the years and come back to the very essence of where we started, which was to refresh the world and make a difference. It's all about the business we're in. Refresh the world, we're a beverage business, we're not in any other businesses. People say should you do X or Y, and I go like, if we're good at beverages, what's the chances of us being good at the next thing? Much lower. So let's just keep investing in beverages, especially as the opportunity is still massive. And make a difference is in the end the inside, and you mentioned one of the ideas which was everyone who touches the Coke business needs to make money. It's not set up so that we try and capture everything. We want everyone to be excited about working with Coke, and they need to make money to do so, because in the end there cannot be a sustainable successful business if the ecosystem and the society it exists in is not also sustainable and successful. And that then feeds into how we approach the economics, everyone needs to make some money, how we approach things like water or waste packaging. We have an objective to return all the water we use, because if there's a problem with the water, the first person to be blamed will be us, irrespective of how much water we use. So we're very focused on making sure that every element of the business, from the economics to the side effects, are all taken into consideration, and we can say we are for a set of policies that allow the business to be sustainable and grow in the very long term.

Let's end with a quick word association. I'll just give you a word and whatever word comes to mind as a result of that. Birmingham? Getting better. Not Alabama, he means England. Yes. Aston Villa? Our time has come. Champions League? Champions League final coming. Consumer? Center. Olympics? Gold. Ice Hotel? Ice Hotel, awesome experience, got to be done. The Coca-Cola Company? Iconic. James Quincey? Unforgettable. Please join me in thanking James Quincey for being here. Thank you.

Thank you. James was outstanding, wasn't it? Really terrific insights for all of us from an industry powerhouse on leadership, brands, and bringing creativity and marketing and AI together to serve the bigger purpose. As James and Shantanu discussed, the opportunities for AI and marketing are significant. Generative AI and agentic technology have the potential to transform creativity and marketing, and at Adobe we have accelerated our innovation engine to help you gain the maximum value from these technologies. Shantanu talked about the Adobe AI platform. Our focus is squarely on agentic offerings that are purpose-built for customer experience orchestration, and our approach removes bottlenecks and dramatically increases your capacity, enabling your teams to focus on their unique strengths, the kind of strengths that James talked about: creativity, marketing strategy, business insights, and customer delight. So today I'm excited to announce the Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator. The Agent Orchestrator provides the foundation to enable you to unlock the full potential of agentic capabilities and deliver true one-on-one personalized experiences at scale. By building the Agent Orchestrator natively on AEP, we are delivering the trust, the transparency, security, and the guardrails you need to incorporate gen AI with complete confidence across your customer experiences. Now we believe that agents need to be open and extensible, so we're providing orchestration across both third-party and your agents that you have built, as well as our own purpose-built agents. And we are committed to interoperability to ensure that our agents are easily accessible in other orchestration environments. So let me walk you through a couple of the critical elements of the AEP Agent Orchestrator. First, purpose-built agents. Today I'm excited to announce a set of 10 new purpose-built agents, with others coming soon, and together they will supercharge your team's capacity to deliver personalized experiences at scale by an order of magnitude. Each customer experience agent addresses a specific area where marketing and CX teams are overburdened and where your current processes can become bottlenecks. The agents help you deliver specific business outcomes and free your teams to focus on the work that matters most. So let's take a closer look at a couple of these agents. The Site Optimization Agent serves as a powerful ally for product owners and marketing managers who are responsible for the overall performance and business impact of their web experiences. The agent keeps web experiences operating at peak performance by finding opportunities to optimize the site and then executing on those optimizations across your web experiences, including paid speed, traffic acquisition, engagement, and conversion. The Site Optimization Agent is able to identify optimization opportunities including current site implementation, your content and your code repositories, traffic and engagement, and page speed performance, and then suggest prescriptive code and content enhancements to automatically capitalize on those optimization opportunities. And importantly, it can assist marketers in deploying these recommendations through an automated workflow. So every AEM customer, we believe, should really check out the Site Optimization Agent. It can have a significant impact on the performance of your web properties. Let me take a look at the second one, the Audience Agent. It's a perfect partner to marketers and MarTech ops teams, streamlining the complexity of audience management and optimization. Finding the right audience, we all know, is hard. The Audience Agent assists practitioners who manage hundreds or even thousands of audiences by curating and segmenting target audiences, defining personas for campaigns, and optimizing audience targeting. So with capabilities like detecting audience anomalies, identifying overlapping or duplicate segments, and analyzing engagement behaviors and conversion signals, the Audience Agent aligns the best target audience to your business goals. And it simplifies audience creation and refinement by estimating audience sizes, identifying growth opportunities, and leveraging expansion and lookalike models. So by automating these critical tasks, the Audience Agent enables audience specialists, campaign managers, and marketing operations teams to focus on more strategic aspects like growing and retaining your key audiences, ultimately driving more effective and impactful marketing initiatives. Again, it runs on AEP and every Real-Time CDP and Adobe Journey Optimizer customer should really check out the Audience Agent. So I gave you a flavor of these two agents, so there are 10 new agents. The second critical element of the AEP Agent Orchestrator is multi-agent collaboration. The Agent Orchestrator uses adaptive decision making to coordinate across multiple agents, again agents in our family of agents as well as ones that you have in your ecosystem, to accomplish key goals while balancing computational efficiency, execution time, and resource utilization. The third key aspect is the reasoning engine, which uses inference models, processes context-specific data, constructs predictive models, and builds orchestration plans to understand the consumer's intent and make decisions to continuously optimize towards a goal. And finally, the customer experience models. These are proprietary fine-tuned small language models within the Agent Orchestrator. They're grounded in your CX data and use cases while maintaining your privacy and your data governance, and they are essential to maintaining precision and high quality in chain-of-thought reasoning. So that's what makes it possible for them to understand intent, avoid hallucinations, and clearly explain their reasoning if required. So based on the Agent Orchestrator, today I'm pleased to announce a brand new agentic app, the Adobe Brand Concierge. Built on the Agent Orchestrator, Brand Concierge will help you configure and manage AI agents that guide your consumers and your customers from exploration to purchase to loyalty. It enables real-time, immersive, and personalized experiences. It's multimodal, supporting interactions across text, voice, images, and video. And because it's powered by content from AEM and insights from AEP, the Brand Concierge helps you personalize every engagement based on the customer's preferences and previous interactions. It's all anchored in first-party data to ensure reliability and brand compliance. So as you embrace agentic AI to supercharge the daily work of your teams and drive business growth, the interoperability between the AI agents in different ecosystems will become critical. We are working with leading software companies, cloud platforms, and SI agencies to deliver the interoperability you need for customer experience orchestration. And with these partners, we will support agent use cases across the customer lifecycle, including marketing, customer service, ERP, HR, collaboration and productivity, and data management. So let me highlight a couple of them. With Microsoft, we're developing the Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot. This will enable marketing practitioners to interact with content, journeys, data, and insights from Adobe apps using natural language prompts within the Copilot directly in the Microsoft 365 apps that they are using: Word, PowerPoint, and Teams. So I encourage you to check out the video that Satya Nadella just posted on LinkedIn today about how he's excited about the Adobe Marketing Agent working with Microsoft Copilot. With SAP, we are working to combine Adobe's experience orchestration and gen AI technology with SAP's business suite. This will help you uncover new insights and create experiences through agentic interactions. For example, a marketing practitioner who's analyzing campaign ROI could be prompted by the Adobe Data Insights Agent to incorporate cost data from SAP and get a better view into the ROI. And with ServiceNow, Adobe and ServiceNow are working to bring together agentic AI for connected service and marketing. By integrating Adobe's expertise in customer experience with the Now Assist framework, you will be able to automate agentic workflows and deliver personalized experiences at scale. Our collaboration with ServiceNow has the potential to help you drive significant productivity and unlock new insights. We'll actually have ServiceNow's Chief Marketing Officer, Colin Fleming, with us in tomorrow's keynote talking about the great work that he and his team are doing. So that's the overview of our comprehensive portfolio to support you with best-in-class apps, a real-time cloud-scale platform, and now agent orchestration, purpose-built agents designed specifically to support the high-value cases you need to deliver compelling customer experiences, all built on a strong agentic ecosystem. These are the ingredients that you need to deliver on that promise of bringing creativity and marketing and AI together for personalization at scale. To share how we can put this to work for you and to share a little more about where Adobe is headed in the future, let me welcome our own Chief Marketing Officer, Lara Balaz. Lara and her team are customer zero for our products, and they are at the heart of creativity and marketing and AI coming together. So Lara, over to you.

Thank you so much, Anil. And it is so awesome to be here on this Summit stage. Before I came to Adobe, I was a customer of Adobe's for many years, and I spoke at Summit, so you can imagine how excited I am to be here today and to be running the global marketing organization that puts this event on with all the beautiful imagery. So excited to be here and part of Summit. I am what you call a career marketer. I've had the privilege to work at terrific brands and products: lifestyle brands, fintech, B2B, B2C. And no matter what industry, what really works in marketing is the creative. It is today's innovation that's fueling creativity and marketing coming together to make an impact. I believe, I truly believe that when creativity, marketing, and innovation come together, it brings us together, it inspires us, and it transforms the world around us. It's that ability to tell amazing stories, compelling stories with breakthrough images, video, sound design, that creates personal connection. And it's that at Adobe that fuels our teams to innovate, to push the envelope, and to deliver people tools that not only delight them but expand their creativity. And it's what we're building our AI platform in service to. Just look at this beautiful creative. It's eye candy. As marketers, as creators, we love it, we're inspired by it, but importantly, when our consumers and customers see it, they're inspired and they take action. I've never loved my job more because of all of this, but I know that this job is not easy. Being a marketer is not easy today. Trust me, marketing has been transformed at a velocity that we never thought possible, generally driven by generative AI and a lot of technology that's been coming to the forefront. Along with this, we have social media apps, mobile apps, digital platforms beyond what we ever expected. And that's great for us as consumers, we love it, we love to ingest all of this content, but breaking through is harder than ever before. So you have to find meaningful ways with creative that stands apart. It is a mandate. Personalization at scale is a mandate. Marketers know this. They don't get on board, they're going to be left behind. And we know that the companies that adapt, that adopt the technology, they will see cash savings and they will scale further and faster than they ever thought possible. We know because we have experienced it firsthand, just like you. We have in-house creatives working with marketers, working with agencies, working in teams, and we struggle to keep pace with the volume, the variety, the quality of content that is required to fill today's digital channels. We've gone through the long process to create that content where you brief, ideate, collaborate, elaborate, review, you go back again. It can take weeks, sometimes months to land, and we know that that is just not acceptable in today's environment that's so fast-moving. So we at Adobe said, okay, this is not good. We're going to take this as a challenge. We realized, stepping back, the process really hasn't changed for about two decades. So we thought, let's take the power of our AI-driven tools like Adobe Firefly to deliver new creativity, new agility, new fluidity, bringing teams together to create breakthrough work that is on brand, on brand importantly, and commercially safe. So we were inspired to embark on a new project. We call it Project Catalyze, a project with a vision to create a digital ideation space, a tool that can reinvent campaign ideation. We believe it could be a game changer for companies. So let's right now, let's take a look at what this could look like. We're going to show you a workflow and a campaign we created. It's a real campaign, it did take months, but you can see how now you could in the future it could take just record speed. Sloan is a brand manager who needs to kick off creative campaign ideation. She turns to a new gen AI-driven tool by Adobe. Her goal: to drive awareness of Photoshop's gen AI capabilities for creative professionals. AI suggests a simple and best-practiced structure to guide the ideation, and Sloan is ready to jump in. The tool surfaces high-performing social posts with key performance data and insights in order of impact. The biggest takeaway: helping people unlock imagination in fun ways that drive engagement. Sloan invites her colleagues into the campaign board to collaborate. Now the team is reviewing key insights, dropping in notes, and refining the campaign around the theme 'Imagination Unlocked.' They're guided to the next step to better understand the target audience, creative professionals. The tool next surfaces details on the target audience, and based on the data they're seeing, Sloan and team discuss how to break into social channels. The tool responds, finding opportunities that suggest a focus on video formats based on past and predictive engagement from this audience. The tool now generates suggestions for messaging and content options using past campaign language, audience insights, and previous high-performing content. The team selects key elements. The tool generates a mood board to guide the brainstorm on the campaign's central ideas, pulling in brand-approved assets and generating new ones that align with the campaign direction. The team loves the concept. Ready to engage the agency, Sloan generates this multimedia brief and video example asset with other reference content, all shared from this collaborative ideation space.

All right, so that's pretty cool, right? Well, like I said, that beautiful campaign, it did take months to create, but you can see how this would take days, maybe less than a day. So we're excited about the possibility of this tool. And what I really love about it is that we could take it here and show it for the first time, get your feedback, because you are really the best audience to give us that feedback. So with that, I have to say I could not be prouder to be part of Adobe, that trusted partner who's always looking around the corner and understanding how things can be done for the better using creativity, marketing, and AI. And now I want to welcome my colleague from our digital media business to the stage, David Wadhwani. And what David's going to do is he's going to show tools that we have today that help you manage this entire supply chain of content. So you'll see it all come together. Thank you so much.

Thanks, David. I am so excited to walk you all through the Adobe Max London 2025 campaign leveraging Adobe GenStudio and the content supply chain solutions that enable content velocity, scaled production, and end-to-end campaign delivery. Now, as a marketing and operations leader, I typically spend every day chasing everyone and everything. With Adobe's recent innovations, I'm able to streamline mine and my collaborators' work, and I do this by starting in Workfront Planning. Workfront Planning allows me to see the full end-to-end campaign delivery. I can see what's in flight and what is still being planned. It shows me my plans, how I want to execute on those plans, and attaches marketing and metadata governance. And for today, we're going to spend our time in this Adobe Max London campaign. I've already done quite a bit of work, but there's still some left to do. So jumping in, I have a full view of my campaign. I have the brief, content projects, and of course key collaborators. Now, the brief is the foundation of every campaign. It lets everyone know the expectations and how I want the goals to work. So right now, I've added ingredients like objective, purpose, persona, key messages, and channels. This is looking really good. Jumping into content, I have everything, every asset connected to my campaign. And what I'm really excited to show you today is the AI-powered Content Advisor. There's already eight assets that have been found, and a little bit about how this works: it's taking my campaign metadata, historical performance, and context to let me know what might work well in this campaign. Let me take a look. These first four are looking really good. Let's select those and then add them to the campaign. Now these are here for reference to let everyone know and align on creative delivery. Now, one of the hardest things about running a successful campaign is streamlining and tracking the work. Luckily, with Adobe Workfront, we have automated AI-powered templates that I use to start this campaign, and these templates pull from my organizational templates. I use the Corporate Events template right here with a few tweaks. I now have a full project plan. When I'm ready to kick off the next piece of the project, I just select where I want to go. Asset production is where we're headed, and then I simply switch 'Not Started' to 'Ready,' and this sets off a whole bunch of automation, including emailing Wes, notifying all the other stakeholders that we are in the next phase and that creative has started. Back to you, David.