The promise of personalization has been in marketing conversations for years. What changes now is the infrastructure to actually deliver on it. Adobe helps enterprise brands move from fragmented customer data to connected experiences that feel individual.
In this episode of The Speed of Culture podcast, Matt Britton sits down with Rachel Thornton, CMO of Adobe Enterprise, live from CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Rachel unpacks how Adobe helps brands move from raw customer data to genuine personalization at scale, why she believes everyone is a creator, and how agentic AI is used in a marketing team.
The conversation also covers Adobe’s push into sports and fan engagement, the Semrush acquisition, and how to build brand integrity in a world where AI can generate content faster than any team can review it.
About our guest: With more than 20 years of experience in marketing leadership at some of the most recognizable names in tech, including AWS, Salesforce, and Cisco, Rachel is now pushing the frontier of AI, creativity, and customer experience.
At Adobe, she oversees how the company helps enterprise customers build personalized, data-driven experiences at scale, and she is closely involved in Adobe’s expanding work in sports, fan engagement, and agentic AI.
Key Takeaways:
[02:26] Adobe’s Core Strategy: Customer Needs Drive Every Innovation — Rachel frames Adobe’s evolution as a constant effort to stay in step with customers rather than ahead of them. From the pivot to cloud and mobile to the current focus on AI, each major shift has been anchored in what customers actually need next. The thread running through it all is helping brands move from understanding data to building meaningful customer profiles, and from those profiles, delivering the kind of personalized journey that makes a customer feel known. This is the foundation of what Adobe brings to enterprise marketers in 2026.
[05:55] Everyone Is a Creator — Rachel makes the case that creativity is no longer the domain of trained designers or dedicated creative teams. Whether someone is building a campaign, crafting a sales outreach, or launching a product, the act of creation sits at the center of the work. Adobe’s expanding suite, from Creative Cloud to Express to Firefly, is built around the idea that tools should remove barriers rather than create them. The result is that teams who once had to wait on others can now move independently, within brand guidelines, at the speed the moment requires.
[11:01] What AI Agents Actually Do for Marketers — Rachel pulls back the curtain on how agentic AI works inside Adobe’s own marketing team. Audience agents that recommend who to target based on campaign performance. Insights agents that surface findings without requiring a separate team to file a request. The picture she draws is less about dramatic automation and more about removing the friction that slows down good marketing decisions. Agents handle the repetitive, time-consuming work so that marketers can focus on the ideas and experiments that actually move the brand forward.
