2026.01.0 AEM Release Overview Video

Transcript

It’s time for another great release of Adobe Experience Manager.

In this release, we’ll walk through exciting new updates, enhancements, and features. Let’s check it out. Delivering Intent-Aware experiences starts with the ability to generate winning experiences faster. And activation puts the content to work. In order to drive Intent-Aware experiences, optimization needs to happen continuously. Trust and governance is embedded in Experience Manager in every aspect, from generation to optimization. And foundational services leverage AI to power the broad range of AEM application. This release brings several innovations and features to enhance your experience. Features like Edge Delivery Updates, Multilingual and Semantic AI Search, Interactive Communications Associate User Interface, and Content MCP Server Updates.

Let’s start with the first innovation that unlocks better content generation through intelligence.

Edge Delivery Updates JSON to HTML. This enables transformation from content fragments or any JSON data into fully formed HTML pages tailored for Edge Delivery services.

Customers who manage their content as content fragments can now reuse the same content on EDS pages.

This integration will not impact page performance. Websites can still get ALHS 100. For developers, time to value as this feature reduces required project work.

Value for Business Content Velocity, Consistency. AI Tools Supercharge EDS development with tools for AI assisted coding. Specific Adobe Experience Manager skills will tackle development, testing, and migration tasks according to AEM best practices. Every project should use these tools now. This results in better time to value and increased code quality. Next up are enhancements for how to activate content.

AI Search Multilingual and Semantic.

Adobe Experience Manager now handles natural language search phrases such as a family at the beach or studio portrait with a dark background, providing relevant results without precise matches on file names, metadata values, or tags.

By providing great results for more broad and descriptive searches, AEM assets is more discoverable and produces more opportunity to remix, reuse existing assets before new ones are licensed or created. Because it’s an enrichment of metadata rather than visual recognition, it can easily be adopted alongside the use of business specific attributes.

Lastly, it is inherently multilingual. Users can accomplish all of this in their preferred language, regardless of what language was used to create the asset or write the metadata.

Let’s take a quick look at how AI Search is improving the experience in AEM assets.

Go from my workspace over to settings and we’ll see that in the search tab we now have two options, AI Search and Keyword. Keyword search is what you’re used to and it works really nicely if you have say a product SKU and you want back very specific results to that. Where it’s not as effective is if we have a situation that we want to create, like a couple enjoying coffee. And we want to find out if our AEM has what we need already before we go license or generate something new.

Now with the keyword search on, we get no results here.

Let’s go back to our settings and flip on AI Search and try again. Let’s see that this AEM does in fact have some relevant results for us. We just needed that AI enrichment to find them.

Now that’s not all that AI Search is doing for us here.

Let’s take that search and translate it into Portuguese and we’ll go back. With that same search in, what this is demonstrating is that our users can search in whatever their preferred language is and get back the same relevance and results as though they were searching in the same language that the assets were generated in or that the metadata was provided in. Okay, let’s try again. Start over on keyword search and we have an adventure sports brand in this AEM instance Riding a wave.

We know we have some results that should pop up here, but keyword search is not getting it done. Looking back to AI Search, try again. Let me see lots of results here. This is not being done through image recognition, but rather the enrichment on the metadata of your assets.

And what that allows is for more tightly coupled relationship between your custom properties and the results that you get. I’m going to try that same search in French just to demonstrate that you can in fact get results in yet another language.

And there you have it. Authors can also set validations to ensure accurate and controlled data input.

In this last section, let’s explore agentic AI enhancements.

Content MCP Server.

The Content MCP Server is designed to make AEM content accessible to the AI tools and agent platforms your team already uses. Power users and developers can work in chat apps, IDEs, and other surfaces to connect AEM to custom copilots, automations, and development processes.

As an example, a developer working in an IDE like cursor could execute a prompt to quickly update AEM content on their dev environment to test a new feature. Note that because MCP is a low-level integration layer to content APIs and intentionally flexible, be cautious around content modifications and governance considerations.

Practitioners may prefer using AEM agents through AI assistant for more guided executions and more robust guardrails.

Use MCP when you’re building your own agent logic. Use AEM agents when you want a safer, managed path.

AEM Cloud Service has two Content MCP Servers, Read-Only and Read-Write, with tools for working with pages, content fragments, and assets.

These MCP servers support ChatGPT, Clod, Cursor, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Contact Adobe if you have questions about other MCP clients.

Read Experience League documentation to learn how to configure MCP clients and use the feature. These innovations are designed to help you move faster, collaborate better, and deliver more intelligent experiences at scale.

Check out the release notes on Experience League to learn more, and don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe to stay up to date on what’s next.

Thanks for watching. We’ll see you in the next release.