Opening Keynote

Transcript

Hello, Marketing Nation.

I am Bhatstra Mukherjee and I have the honor of opening this year’s Adobe Experience Makers The Skill Exchange Marketo Engage track. Welcome. And for the next 15 minutes, I will speak to you about AI agents, specifically in the context of B2B marketing, which is your specialty, and how you as practitioners can get ready for what we’re calling B2B 3.0. At the start of each speaking engagement, I like to remind myself of who I am and you can benefit from my habit. I am a product manager at Adobe, driving our product roadmap strategy and development for what we now call B2B customer journeys. And B2B customer journeys encompasses Marketo Engage, Marketo Measure, Dynamic Chat, and more lately, Journey Optimizer B2B edition. And we continue to build new applications, especially in this world of AI agents. In my free time, I love to travel and I like to garden. I love wildlife and birds. And as you can see, I photograph everything.

Because I will be mentioning some roadmap content, I just want to give you a quick note that all roadmap content is confidential and subject to change at Adobe’s discretion.

So, we believe that B2B marketing technology is undergoing its third major transformation in the past 25 years. If you recall, B2B 1.0 was all about digitizing your Rolodex, your business cards, and turning them into digital records in a customer relationship management system or CRM. But the focus of 1.0 was mostly Salesforce automation. And then with B2B 2.0, the late 90s, early 2000s, companies like Marketo came along and automated marketing. And what that meant is everything from lead acquisition to lead lifecycle management became automated in the system. We later introduced account-based marketing as well. But now we’ve come to this era of B2B 3.0 where AI plays a major role. It’s a core component of automation for the entire customer experience. It’s not just about lead creation and automation and acquisition. It’s not even just about leads at all. It’s not even just about account-based marketing. We’ve introduced this idea that it really boils down to buying groups for B2B organization. Who are the right people in an account that you want to target in your marketing activities? Moreover, this partnership between marketing and sales becomes more important as you target these accounts and the people in them. Now AI plays a great role here because instead of doing just linear engagement with customers, and linear decision-making, you want something that’s more dynamic, more personalized, and AI can help you drive those experiences. We’re also noticing that, and you are too, based on what you tell me, is that your end customers are spending less time with sales reps today and spending more time in self-service mode going to different sources. And they may not even be your website, but other web properties and tools like GPT tools out there. And they are basically driving this whole experience themselves rather than you, the brand, driving it for them. So we’re trying to help you automate this entire customer experience across the entire life cycle with you in the driver’s seat, but also AI riding shotgun in the car. Just every keynote address needs to have a statistic to impress you. The statistic I would like to share with you today is something we got from our friends at IDC. With B2B 3.0, the market expects that agentic AI in particular is going to be another level of transformative technology. And the stat we have is that of all the Fortune 500 professionals we surveyed, 55% are expecting that within the next few years, there will be AI-driven experience agents delivering the personalized customer experiences you want to get to when you’re engaging your leads and contacts. But we also know that for all of you, it’s not just about the experience you give your customers, it’s about efficiencies and productivity boosts through AI and through greater intelligence in your core workflows. So for example, as Marketo engage users, how can you do more with less through automation? So we believe AI agents can help with that as well. And that’s why we believe that adopting AI agents is a key to success for marketing teams. Just want to give a shout out to two of our many speakers today who are going to be talking about marketing automation in general, but in these particular sessions, Josh and Tyron will be talking about how AI can help you in Marketo engage in different ways. And what I’m really trying to say is that we at Adobe are not the only ones talking about AI and marketing. All of you are as well.

Okay, so AI agents are coming, all AI all the time. Are you ready for this? As you think about that, think about this perception that many people have, which is that AI agents are coming to take our jobs. They are going to replace human personas. Ah, that’s scary. Okay, maybe there’s some truth to this notion. Many things in life are becoming more autonomous, self-driving cars, one of which almost caused an accident on Highway 101 today. But I digress.

I think there’s still a role for humans in this picture. I don’t think AI agents are going to fully replace marketers. I’d like to offer you this perspective from Adobe. Our approach and our belief is grounded in this idea that AI in the workplace should be amplifying, not replacing human potential. Creativity is still a domain of humans. It is a uniquely human trait, true creativity. And we believe that this technology is transformative. It will usher in a new era of creativity and personalized experiences, but it’s going to change how you work. And I’m going to talk a lot of today about how you should be working or how you should in the world of AI agents.

So we’re talking about human in the loop. That’s when AI agents assist and complement the work that you do as a human persona, not replace you.

So AI transformation is rooted in a number of things. Of course, there’s technology. It’s central to this transformation. And we want to talk about what B2B 3.0 involves in terms of agentic AI, as well as generative AI and predictive AI. But I want to really focus on people, process and cultural aspects of this organization’s shift. You should put as much thought into that aspect and planning about that as you would in technology, implementation and operations. But let’s talk about technology, because obviously this is a technology forum. We are at a pivotal moment. You know about predictive AI, which is machine learning training on your big data sets and statistical algorithms to make predictions and recommendations. Predictive audiences in Marketo is an example of that. Generative AI has already transformed how you create content. We have in our new email editor, for example, AI assistant for content generation in the email designer in Marketo. And maybe you use other tools like GBT tools to generate content in your personal lives with Adobe Express, the Firefly generating images. OK, but agentic AI is the next leap. And that means you’re not just generating things, but you’re also reasoning, you’re planning and you’re acting. And that means it’s a shift from simple execution of campaigns to full blown customer life cycle orchestration and from content creation, you’re moving to experience design. So these agents we’re going to talk about in the coming months that you’re going to start to see in Adobe products are part of that shift.

So what are the characteristics of an AI agent? For some of you, this may be basic. You already know this. But for those of you who are not familiar really quickly, there are three big aspects to what an agent is. Number one, it’s interacting. It’s interacting with you as the person is also interacting with other agents in concert to try to achieve what it understands your goal to be. OK, it could be multimodal. We’re looking at AI system turning into instead of a right rail conversation where you’re asking questions about help and support, it’s a full blown immersive conversational experience, which is an alternative to doing things through traditional click and drag and drop and action oriented wise. It’s complementary. Second, it has intelligence to go and reason through a problem, propose a plan and then develop a multi step approach to reach your desired outcome. And then finally, it is action oriented. It’s not just looking for answers to questions. It is also being independent or semi independent where it’s looking to complete a series of tasks. And this is all foundational to the idea of AI agents.

So as we look across Adobe applications, right, especially the big applications in the B2B space that our team focuses on, right, we’re talking about Journey Optimizer, B2B edition, MarketoEngage, of course, your favorite product in the whole world, and Realtime CDP, B2B We’re talking about an agent orchestrator layer in Adobe Experience Platform that will power a number of different agents with broad skill sets that will help different human personas like marketing operations specialists, campaign operations specialists, demand generation specialists across our different applications in a unified conversational experience through the AI assistant as your main UI. And we’re bringing these across our different applications. You’re going to start seeing these things starting from this fall 2025 in our products. Now, one of those is going to be a journey agent. Imagine the new person journeys capability we announced at Summit that we’re going to come out with. You’ll have a canvas and a visual way of doing what you do today with programs and campaigns. But imagine if in addition to this manual way of doing things, which is complex and tedious, we offered you an agentic way of doing it, where through natural language, you interact with an AI agent in AI assistant with the rich conversational experience, and we build a journey flow for you in an automated fashion based on your prompts.

This takes me to how you do things with this new conversational experience and with AI agents, people, process and culture. Let’s start with the culture and organization level. AI agents are going to run repetitive, tedious tasks more efficiently. That will leave you to do more strategic, creative work. And that’s our goal. But you also need to have oversight to make sure that the so-called responsible AI is indeed following your ethical standards and your company’s policies. Secondly, it’s going to reshape your work. You may need to re-divide how you do things. For example, today, three different specialists in your marketing ops team may be doing tasks X, Y, and Z. But if you have a unified AI system driven conversational experience, maybe we allow you together with multiple agent orchestrators or AI agents to accomplish those three tasks in one thread. What does that mean for your system permissions? What does that mean for your roles and responsibilities? Do you need to reorganize your team? That’s something you need to think about. And finally, how do you engage with your customers? Today, things are very manual intensive as much as you try to make it personalized and But if AI agents start to interact more and more independently with your visitors to your website, for example, what does that do to how you think about customer engagement? So in short, AI will enable operational teams such as yours to automate repetitive tasks, focus on strategic planning, and drive measurable business outcomes. What this really means, right, it boils down to the role of your teams moving from a tactical role to a more transformational role. So as you think about how you empower your employees to reimagine new ways of working with AI, number one, you need to identify what are the key skills and cultural shifts your organization and your team members need to thrive in this new economy in b2b 3.0 and transform an AI driven workplace. Secondly, secondly, analyze training approaches for the skills and behaviors that you need. Think about what, how you approach training. And we think about training, we think about not just the mechanics of how you educate your team members and how you educate yourselves, but also have a culture of continuous, continuous role specific and experiential learning and skill development with feedback loop. Now the three skills that I’d like to focus highlight today for marketing operations specifically are prompt engineering, data fluency, and agent configuration. Really quickly, let me just introduce two and three to you. Data fluency is about understanding how to query and interpret AI generated insights. Also how to know the difference between something that looks authentic and accurate and something that looks fishy, right? Because the machines may not always get them right.

Point three is agent configuration. For those of you who are admin users, and many of the people in this audience are, how to manage AI agents for orchestration, especially as Adobe introduces tools like an agent orchestrator composer or agent composer to help you compose custom agents to run agentic processes and workflows. Well, let me focus a little bit in the closing minutes on prompt engineering. So prompt engineering really quickly is about crafting effective prompts for Gen AI and agentic tools. I see there are six criteria that are generally agreed on that make a good prompt. But rather than talk to you in abstract, let me focus on these six criteria in the context of a specific example. This is an example of a good prompt. And what it boils down to is it has clear intent. I define a goal. I want to create a journey. It could be an account journey or person journey. That’s what I want AI to do for me. I’m avoiding ambiguity. Next context, Rich. I probably got a host of details about the channels I want to use, the types of audiences I want to target, and the timeframe. I have a structured format. I use paragraphs, bulleted lists. I’m assigning a role to the AI agent and saying, hey, I want you to pretend you’re a journey designer.

There’s an open versus closed framing context. Here it’s closed framing. Why? I want to be very precise because an agent needs to do a series of tasks. And then finally, as I go through a conversation with this agent, I’m going to iteratively refine the response so that I get the results I want. So in closing, what I want to say is this. AI will not replace marketers, but marketers who use AI will outpace and outshine those who don’t. So don’t let the future technologies orchestrate your career. You need to orchestrate your future and upskill. With that, I’d like to thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the Skill Exchange Marketer Engaged track. I’m really excited about these sessions, and I know you’ll get a lot of information out of it from the experts. Thank you.