Adobe takes a stab at rewriting B2B playbook with agentic AI tools

In B2B markets, where purchase decisions often stretch over months and involve multiple stakeholders, Adobe is pushing a bold bet: that agentic AI can now meaningfully reshape both how buyers decide and how marketers intervene. Last week, it announced a suite of AI agents built for B2B sales and marketing teams, tools intended to simplify what are historically long, opaque buying cycles.

At stake is more than marketing efficiency. The promise is to shift the role of sales and marketing from campaign execution to more strategic orchestration, and to do so in a world where 70% of buyers reportedly complete their research before speaking to a salesperson. In that landscape, Adobe contends, the old funnel is failing, and the new battleground is real-time, cross-channel, AI-led interaction.

Complexity, committees and fragmented data

B2B purchases rarely hinge on a single decision-maker. Instead, committees with evolving views must converge on consensus.

Each participant brings different priorities, necessitating careful nudging and personalised content over a drawn-out journey. The core challenge, according to Adobe, is twofold: identifying the relevant decision-makers (and the buying group around them) and keeping them engaged across multiple channels, all while navigating internal procurement processes.

Adobe describes its new agents as tools that foster human with AI collaboration. Instead of AI taking over, humans and AI work side by side to target decision-makers more efficiently.

Brands including Cisco are already piloting these tools. As Brett Rafuse, vice president of demand marketing at Cisco, put it, “We have been longtime users of Adobe Experience Cloud… Adobe’s AI agents will be another unlock for our organization. By shortening the time it takes to identify key decision makers and orchestrate compelling cross-channel journeys, we can boost account engagement and accelerate deal closure.”

Behind the scenes, Adobe’s agents run on its Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, which enables reasoning and multi-agent collaboration. The agents are surfaced within enterprise applications such as Adobe’s Journey Optimizer B2B Edition and Customer Journey Analytics B2B Edition, bringing AI capabilities into established workflows.

What the agents can do today

Adobe’s initial B2B agents now include an Audience Agent or Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, which examines structured and unstructured data —from CRM records to web content — and surfaces insights to help marketers define audiences. It identifies buyer personas, recommends likely buying group members, and helps build high-value groups usable in omni-channel campaigns.

Adobe also says that the Account Qualification Agent is forthcoming within Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. This agent will help business development representatives (BDRs) by evaluating prospects’ needs, budget, authority and timeline, providing summarised insights on accounts to streamline qualification. It promises automation across research, outreach and analytics.

The Journey Agent streamlines the creation and orchestration of campaigns across email, web, mobile and other channels. Users specify goals, and the agent builds journeys and optimises touchpoints by detecting drop-offs and fine-tuning interactions.

The Data Insights Agent simplifies insight generation from cross-channel data across accounts and buying groups. Its conversational interface allows marketing, sales and product teams to forecast, visualise, and troubleshoot CX initiatives.

Further down the pipeline, Adobe plans to release ‘Brand Concierge’, an AI-first application that turns casual browsing into hyper-personalised conversational experiences. Within that app, a ‘Product Advisor Agent’ will support product discovery and enable customers to book meetings with BDRs. Brand Concierge will support multimodal interaction—text, voice and images—and connect to the Account Qualification Agent pre- and post-meeting. These agents, Adobe claims, free teams from manual tasks so they can focus more on high-value work and deeper customer relationships.

Strategy behind the moves

Adobe’s announcements build on a trajectory laid out earlier in 2025. At Adobe Summit in March, the company unveiled its reinforced vision: unified customer experiences managed through data, content and journey orchestration. In that keynote, it emphasised that fragmented workflows across data, content and journeys inhibit brands from gaining a single, actionable view of the customer.

The new agents are manifestations of that vision—purpose-built AI injected into core CX tools. They operate on Adobe’s AI Platform, integrating AI agents from Adobe and from third parties. These commercially safe Firefly models and other secure external models also have first-party data insights.

Underpinning it all is Experience Platform, which consolidates customer data, CX language models and agent orchestration.

As Amit Ahuja, senior vice president of digital experience business at Adobe, stated at the Summit, “Delivering a unified customer experience requires a much more agile and streamlined operation that solves real customer pain points… Adobe is uniquely positioned to help brands meet this moment, with deep expertise in unifying AI, data and content production workflows to execute the right digital experiences with precision, while uncovering unseen problems.”

The timing underscores Adobe’s push beyond its roots in consumer marketing, seeking to meet firms struggling to modernise B2B operations. In August 2024, it had launched a B2B cloud app integrating generative AI to connect sales and buying teams, generating persona content. Earlier that year, Adobe had teamed up with Microsoft to build an AI assistant for Experience Platform that could identify audiences and send messages across email, calendar and SMS channels.

Turning AI from automation to experience

Many organisations today treat AI as a faster execution layer for old strategies, which includes more automated emails, cold outreach and noise. That, Adobe argues, is not real innovation, but amplification of the same old.

Instead, customer expectations are shifting: buyers now expect on-demand expertise, seamless self-service, and immediate credibility. They don’t want to wait days for a rep, or to fill out a form just to be contacted.

Many begin their journeys using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that aggregate and compare vendor content before engaging a human. As Adobe frames it, “The real opportunity is using AI to reimagine the buyer experience itself, turning every interaction into something intelligent, adaptive, and value-driven.”

The risks are obvious. Without responsible guardrails, agents may deliver misleading or overconfident recommendations. The agentic systems must be auditable, guided and aligned with brand compliance. Teams need to understand where AI decisions originate, and when human oversight intervenes.

Yet the allure is strong. When agents reduce friction at decision points—in identifying buying groups, optimising journey paths or qualifying accounts—they may convert what once took weeks or months into days.

Early signals, challenges and skepticism

One early indicator is Cisco’s participation. Their adoption signals at least some confidence that the tools can integrate with existing enterprise stacks. But wide-scale adoption in complex B2B environments often stumbles on legacy systems, data silos and organisational inertia.

The technology must also overcome scepticism. Many teams have tried ‘AI enhancements’ before only to be disappointed. Success depends not only on technical competence but on adoption and trust. Brands will be watching to see whether marketing and sales professionals actually shift from manual tactics to higher-level orchestration.

Another variable is competitive response. Adobe is not alone: rivals in marketing clouds, automation and AI are racing to embed agent frameworks within their own ecosystems. Brands will compare not just features, but integration, governance, scalability and total cost of ownership.

Finally, metrics will matter. It is one thing for AI to propose buyer groups or journey flows; it is another to validate that those proposals translate into pipeline lift, shorter sales cycles, and better deal economics.

A turning point; if execution follows

Adobe’s new B2B AI agents arrive at an inflection point for makers of marketing and sales technology. The shift from process automation to experience design is underway, and the winners will be those who deliver measurable uplift, not just flashy demos.

Marketers and agency leads reading this should ask: Will these agents truly infuse agility into my workflows? Or will they replicate our worst habits at faster speed? As B2B buying becomes more autonomous and AI-mediated, the question is whether these AI agents become value accelerators—or just more noise.

If Adobe can prove that its agents reliably help firms identify decision-makers more swiftly, orchestrate journeys more intelligently, and generate pipeline more predictably, then we may quietly remember 2025 as the year agentic AI crossed from theory into practice.