Business growth with Adobe’s Vision Forward roadmap

Transcript

Hi, this is Russell with Adobe Commerce. This is the second video out of three that were on a previously recorded webinar. But for now, let’s just continue with this session on Business Growth with Adobe Vision Forward Roadmap. Let’s start with data. Data is the foundation of every great customer experience and commerce is no different. And in 2026, commerce specifically, or cloud service will become much richer part of that ecosystem. We are going to bring the real-time data sharing between commerce and Adobe Experience platform natively into commerce so you can share all your order card, browse data with Adobe Experience platform with privacy and governance built in. That means that you can build and activate audiences in real-time CDP and those audiences will automatically sync back into commerce for personalized pricing, promotions, and campaigns. Please note that this functionality is already available in past and we are working on activating this real-time personalization feature natively in Adobe Commerce as a cloud service. The exciting part is that this aligns perfectly with the rest of the digital experience applications like Experience Manager, Journey Optimizer, and Target.

Those applications are already doing that, which means if you are using any of those applications, you get one view of your customer, one set of audiences, one measurement on return on investment across all of your suite of applications. All right, so one of the things that we consistently hear from customers like yourself is that coordinating a promotion or launch feels harder than it should be. You have different teams, different time zones, you’re working with different systems. And our roadmap and our vision is going to fix that. We are going to introduce a native campaign orchestration layer within Commerce, which will allow you to stage, schedule, preview, and launch promotions, content updates, and pricing changes across multiple storefronts, channels, and geographies all in one place. It gives you true control over timing and coordination, so every launch will feel orchestrated and not crushed. It will give you more confidence to roll out promotions and stage changes, preview them prior to launch, and it will make your day-to-day operations significantly simpler with this functionality. All right, so moving on, this is specifically for our B2B customers, and we are making it dramatically faster to build and deploy modern storefronts. And coming later this year, we will introduce B2B drop-ins for edge delivery services, a pre-built set of components for company management, requisition lists, ports, and purchase order flow, which means you will have a B2B storefront ready to go on our new edge delivery services platform. This is scheduled to come out towards the end of the year, and you should think of this as a plug-and-play B2B. You will be able to go from concept to live storefronts in a matter of weeks instead of months without really sacrificing flexibility or brand control. So just keep a lookout for our B2B storefront later this year. And we are not stopping there. We have a full roadmap to continue storefront innovation for B2B, and it’s just not about having a great buying interface. It’s about making complex purchases feel simple.

So the other enhancements that are scheduled for B2B storefronts specifically are quick and bulk ordering. So your buyers can enter SKUs, select product variants, and upload spreadsheets to place large orders.

For larger organizations, we are adding multi-level company hierarchies, a company switcher feature on the storefront where a single buyer can purchase across multiple companies, giving you greater control, giving buyers the option to buy across multiple organizations. And with our seller-assisted buying, your sales reps can step in to support customers directly, guiding them, configuring them, completing orders on their behalf wherever needed. The goal is to make B2B as seamless and as personalized as B2C, built on speed, trust, and collaboration. All right. So let’s talk about payments. This is where conversion happens. Payments are really built where trust is gained. And we have payments as a focus going forward.

We are expanding our integrated payments in cloud service. So with cloud service, Adobe payments is already a native functionality. It comes preconfigured, preinstalled, where you can enter your credentials and start using payment services out of the box. We are going to be expanding the functionality to support global methods, fast lane checkout and stronger fraud protection.

We are also going to add support for B2B, adding ACH, invoice links, and flexible payment terms directly within ports and purchase order workflow functionality. And enterprise merchants will get subscription billing, multi-site support, point of sale integration. We’ll all layer that with our AI-powered payment agent that dynamically surfaces payment methods and reduces failed transactions. So vision here is simple, payments that work harder for you and not the other way around. So we have a great roadmap in front of us to improve payments specifically for B2B merchants. All right, moving forward.

All right, so this is another area where we are going to be investing heavily. And this is a merchant experience, specifically admin. That’s what we call in commerce. And this is an area we are going to double down, triple down, and make sure you get an amazing experience just working in Adobe Commerce to run your day-to-day operations.

And right now, you have set up where you are standing up the application.

And it may take hours, maybe sometimes days, depending on the complexity of what you’re doing.

We want to make it simpler where you are able to stand up your commerce instance and be productive in a matter of minutes and not hours, not days.

With our new merchant center, you will get automatic configured profiles. You will get options to stand up and provision storefronts, connect app builder right out of the gate. And you can launch with sample data if you want to run POCs. We’ll provide you pre-built teams, integrated assets.

So the entire ecosystem of applications that are available as part of Adobe Commerce as a cloud service will all be working together in a matter of minutes at your fingertips.

So whether you want to expand your business to a new channel or you want to run a quick POC or you want to work on Go Live, this will make it extremely simpler. And the next phase of onboarding is a seamless merchant experience.

And in seamless merchant experience, once you are onboarded, we want to make sure that your experience across all of the Adobe applications, whether it’s commerce or you have optimizer and app builder, you have edge delivery services or product visuals, your asset management, we want to make sure the experience stays seamless.

And the next generation admin, which we are calling it merchant center, will unify the experience across all of the tools that you are using and will be powered by AI. You will see commerce agents embedded directly into the merchant center, ready to help you with common tasks from configuring promotions to troubleshooting data sinks. And your developers can extend this experience using our admin UI SDK, which is already available. So if you want to add custom menu menus or pages through app builder, the SDK will allow you to do that. And this is where we start to see true agentic commerce, where AI doesn’t replace human judgment, but it amplifies it. All right. So as part of the merchant center, we will be working on a new enhanced catalog management UI. So the catalog management in our merchant center is going to get a major upgrade.

We’re going to be working on a new visual catalog UI that will let your merchandiser see, manage, preview their catalogs in context across storefronts, channels, and price books. And we will be adding a dedicated price book UI and support for complex product bundles, enhanced catalog views. So your teams can test and validate before they publish the catalog changes across channels. The idea is simple here. We want to empower your merchandisers with visibility and control without needing developers in the loop. So the merchant center as a whole from onboarding to seamless experience across all of the Adobe applications and this new catalog management UI is going to get a serious and major upgrade in coming quarters.

All right. Moving forward.

So now let’s talk about your health metrics and just visibility into how your platform is running. So running at scale requires confidence and that comes from visibility. On our roadmap, we have a functionality to build full platform health dashboard and this will be available for both cloud service as well as optimizer products where you can track latencies, throughputs, errors, and availability. We have AI assistance that will help summarize any incidents that happen. They’ll suggest resolution and even alert you with approaches eliminating limits. And with front-end performance monitoring built in for your storefront, you will have a single plane of glass where you can monitor all your infrastructure as well as application needs. So it’ll give you more confidence to run your business and troubleshoot any issues that you encounter. All right. So moving forward, this is the last section I have which is also very near and dear to my heart, which is developer experience because extensibility is where the real differentiation happens. And one of the biggest things we have on our roadmap moving forward and which is coming soon is App Builder database. We are adding a support for fully managed high performance document DB storage layer with App Builder. We are currently in early testing. We will be opening this functionality for beta testing likely next month and we are looking to make this functionality generally available in the first half of 2026.

What this unlocks is a lot of power. The developers will have enhanced storage options. So if you want to build a custom microservice on App Builder, which is data storage intensive, if you have complex queries, complex data models that cannot be fit into the core data model of commerce, you now have the option natively available with App Builder to build out that functionality, which doesn’t require you to provision additional storage infrastructure on AWS or Azure. All of this tooling and functionalities available to you as part of App Builder out of the box. And then it’s designed for enterprise-grade use. So if you, whether you’re building product, custom product configurators, or you want to build custom forms, or you are building data intensive integrations with other applications, you will be able to do all of that with App Builder out of the box. And we believe this is a major step forward, making App Builder a full stack development environment. And it just connects directly to the next piece of the story, which is observability and developer experience. Which is the next thing I’m going to talk.

And as you know, developers are the reason innovation happens on our platform. It’s been the case since the old Magento going back a decade. And it’s very clear to us. And developers have been asking about observability, specifically when it comes to App Builder. When something goes wrong, they just want to know and troubleshoot faster. So we are embracing OpenTelemetry, which is an interface that allows you to share your logs with other observability applications. And App Builder across the stack, whether it’s events or webhooks or admin UI SDK or starter kits, all of these different tools will now support OpenTelemetry. So you can bring in your own observability platform.

And App Builder platform is going to forward the logs and data to your observability platform. And your developers can build their own observability dashboard specifically for App Builder. And that’s how we are going to make the move to SaaS smoother and stronger.

And this also sets the stage for our next session. Well, that’s it for this session on Business Growth with Adobe Vision Forward Roadmap. Be sure to catch the other two videos in the series for Business Growth with Adobe Commerce here on Experience League.