Adobe Summit 2025: AI-powered upgrades steal the show in Vegas

Big tech vendor conferences always come with a slew of product announcements and enhancements and it was no different at Adobe Summit 2025. The company, known for products supporting the creative and marketing industries, kicked off at the Venetian with a wave of product upgrades and new tools putting Artificial Intelligence (what else) front and centre. The big question? How far can AI push creativity and marketing by augmenting human capability.

First out of the gate is Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, a tongue-twister that's going to be difficult to distil into an acronym. Beyond the increasingly capable chatbots, this is 'agentic AI' meaning it plans and acts with agency.

Agency means some level of autonomy, where the AI agent proactively makes decisions and takes actions to achieve specific goals without constant human oversight. Unlike traditional AI, which follows predefined rules or responds to direct inputs (e.g., a voice assistant answering a question), agentic AI can reason, plan, and adapt to changing conditions. It's like a digital teammate that doesn't just execute tasks but figures out how to get them done.

So what can Platform Agent Orchestrator do? Resize content, clean up data, sharpen audience targets, or spit out dashboards without anyone hovering over its shoulder. Analysis of X posts from Adobe Summit (gathered via Grok AI) tagged it a 'game-changer', with 10 new AI agents tackling tasks that used to bog down entire teams. That's right, AI came for the donkey work, so you can be more creative (if you've got it in you).

Moving on, Adobe GenStudio got a serious upgrade. This end-to-end content machine—planning, creating, managing, measuring is claimed to now run smoother and faster. New APIs and custom models let brands crank out tailored assets fast. A product demo impressed: make one video, Gen Studio will 'read' the text, reformat to specific requirements, then spit out the video in several different languages. Arthur C Clarke would be impressed; after all, he did say any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Firefly Services and Custom Models stepped up a notch. These generative AI tools help produce visuals and videos quicker, with 'brand safety' locked in; you're not plagiarising anyone, as it draws on licensed content. New APIs like Translate and Lip Sync turn spoken dialogue into any language, while Reframe tweaks videos for every platform. Custom Models keep it all on-brand, and the Substance 3D API (still in beta) blends 3D objects with AI-generated backgrounds, cutting production time, and moving marketing departments to the mass personalisation pursued by the likes of the Coca Cola Company.

Capping it off is Brand Concierge, a new app that plays traffic cop for AI agents across Adobe and third-party systems. It keeps campaigns tight and consistent no matter how many bots are in the mix.

The vibe at Summit? Electric. These tools aren't just tweaks—they're a leap. Seeing these tools in action reminds one of the point of AI: nobody likes drudgery, like manually dubbing a video or changing the aspect ratio so it fits on mobiles, or managing brand consistency across a global business. As demonstrated, those are problems of the past. But do bear in mind, as demonstrated typically cannot account for the messy reality of your IT estate.

There is, however, a wee kicker. Asked if they are using these tools in their marketing department, the highly capable person replied "Nope, not really down with all this tech stuff."