DocumentationAEMUser Guide

Current Release Notes for Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service release-notes

Last update: October 6, 2026
  • Applies to:
  • Experience Manager as a Cloud Service

CREATED FOR:

  • Admin

The following section outlines the feature release notes for the current (latest) version of Experience Manager as a Cloud Service.

NOTE
From here, you can navigate to release notes of previous versions such as 2024 or 2025.
Have a look at the Experience Manager Releases Roadmap to learn about the upcoming feature activations for Experience Manager as a Cloud Service.
NOTE
To receive a monthly email notification about updates to Experience Cloud release notes, subscribe to the Adobe Priority Product Update.

Release Date release-date

The release date of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service current feature release (2026.9.0) is September 24, 2026. The next feature release (2026.10.0) is planned for October 29, 2026.

Maintenance Release Notes maintenance

You can find the latest maintenance release notes here.

Release Overview overview

The 2026.9.0 release of Experience Manager as a Cloud Service delivers new capabilities across Assets, Forms, and Foundation, with a continued emphasis on AI-assisted authoring and discovery, richer Dynamic Media experiences, and developer productivity.

Highlights of this release

  • Smarter Assets discovery and organization — Content Hub adds AI Search for intent-based, multilingual results, Smart Collections that stay up to date automatically, and custom metadata sorting options.
  • Richer Dynamic Media experiences — A new, fully customizable video viewer with actionable analytics, AI-generated video captions, multi-caption and multi-audio track support, and attribute-based access control for secure delivery.
  • AI-assisted authoring and development — AEM agentic capabilities are now generally available in Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker, the AEM MCP Server adds Cloud Manager operations, and IDE agent skills expand with AEM query optimization and additional code-migration patterns.
  • Foundation and platform — Canary deployments to validate a release against production before it serves live traffic, OpenTelemetry-based APM (Limited Availability), and IMS authentication rich errors for easier troubleshooting.
  • Plan-ahead notices — Important timelines for Java API deprecations (September 28, 2026) and the upcoming Java 25 runtime upgrade help customers prepare their environments.

A range of beta, early adopter, and Limited Availability programs are also available this release. See the sections below for details.

AEM Beta Programs aem-beta-programs

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) beta programs are a way for customers to get access to prerelease features and code, provide feedback, and guide the future of AEM.

IMPORTANT
Beta releases may contain defects and are provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind. Adobe has no obligation to maintain, correct, update, change, modify or otherwise support (by way of Adobe Support Services or otherwise) the beta releases. Adobe advises customers to use caution and not rely on the correct functioning or performance of beta releases, or on any accompanying documentation or materials. Features and APIs in beta are subject to change without notice. Accordingly, any use of the beta releases is entirely at the customer’s own risk.

Benefits of participating

Getting early access to features that Adobe is developing lets customers and partners provide feedback and shape product development. It also helps them prepare to adopt new capabilities before general availability.

Current beta programs

The following sections list active beta programs.

Agents in AEM agents-in-aem

If you would like to explore the powerful, new AEM agentic capabilities across production, governance, optimization, discovery, and development, please learn about how you can access them here.

AEM Foundation (Beta programs) aem-foundation-beta-programs

See AEM Foundation beta programs.

Cloud Manager (Beta programs) cloud-manager-beta-programs

See Cloud Manager beta programs.

AEM Assets (Beta programs) aem-assets-beta-programs

See AEM Assets beta programs.

Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service assets

This section highlights new and recently available capabilities for Experience Manager Assets. It includes features that became Generally Available (GA) in the current release, as well as features that are currently in Limited Availability (LA) or Beta. LA and Beta features remain listed in this section until they become generally available.

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service Assets Limited Availability Features assets-limited-availability-features

Native Dynamic Media Template component in Adobe Journey Optimizer dynamic-media-component-ajo

The native Dynamic Media Template component lets marketers add and personalize AEM Dynamic Media templates directly in the Adobe Journey Optimizer email editor. Marketers can select existing templates or import layered PSD files, edit individual layers such as countdown timers, and configure text, CTAs, positioning, and timing without leaving the email editor. This enables governed, personalized, and dynamic email experiences, including open-time countdowns and personalized product content.

Dynamic Media with OpenAPI capabilities: Multi-caption and multi-audio track support for videos multi-caption-multi-audio

Dynamic Media with OpenAPI capabilities now support multiple captions and multiple audio tracks for video assets. It enables organizations to deliver localized and accessible video experiences to global audiences by associating multiple language-specific caption and audio tracks with a single primary video. Authors can efficiently manage these tracks from a unified interface, simplifying multilingual content delivery and supporting regional accessibility requirements.

Dynamic Media with OpenAPI capabilities: AI-generated video captions ai-generated-video-captions

AI-generated video captions in Dynamic Media with OpenAPI capabilities use artificial intelligence to generate captions automatically for video content. This feature is designed to improve accessibility and enhance the user experience by providing accurate, real-time captions. The AI analyzes the video’s audio track to transcribe speech and create captions, which can be edited for accuracy or customization. These captions help meet accessibility requirements and improve video engagement for audiences who rely on or prefer text-based video support.

Dynamic Media with OpenAPI capabilities: Secure Delivery with Attribute-based Access Control secure-delivery-attribute-based-access-control

Attribute-based access control lets admins govern access to Dynamic Media with OpenAPI capabilities assets using metadata-driven rules defined for each user group. IMS-based restrictions allow DAM admins and brand managers to restrict delivery of specific assets to designated Adobe IMS users or groups. Users outside the permitted list receive a 404 response, and the asset is not delivered. This provides a secure way to manage asset delivery for campaigns, product launches, and other controlled distribution scenarios.

Dynamic Media: New Video Viewer new-video-viewer

The new video viewer delivers a performant, accessible, and fully customizable playback experience. Configurable playback modifiers, including autoplay, loop, and muted, give you complete control over viewer behavior. Custom CSS support ensures a consistent, on-brand experience across all touchpoints. Actionable analytics track views, watch time, completion rate, and engagement score, providing your teams with meaningful insights into video performance.

Content Hub: AI Search ai-search-content-hub

AEM Assets Content Hub now includes AI Search, an advanced search capability that understands the meaning and intent behind user queries instead of relying only on exact keyword matches. AI Search delivers more accurate and context relevant results by recognizing relationships between words, concepts, and user intent. It supports multilingual queries, handles misspellings and typos, understands synonyms, and surfaces relevant assets even when users do not use exact metadata terms.

For example, a search for Woman drinking coffee can also return assets tagged with related terms such as Lady, Girl, Latte, or Cappuccino.

Administrators can enable or disable AI Search in Content Hub using the Configurations menu by selecting either AI Search or traditional keyword search.

Content Hub: Custom Sorting options custom-sorting-options-content-hub

Content Hub now allows administrators to enable custom metadata fields as sorting options on the Content Hub home page. In addition to the default sorting options, Size, Modified, Name, and Relevance, administrators can configure business-specific metadata fields such as Channel, Region, SKU, or Campaign to help users organize search results more effectively.

Content Hub: Smart Collections smart-collections

Smart Collections enable you to automatically organize assets based on defined search criteria.
When you create a Smart Collection, the collection stores the search query and filter criteria instead of storing individual assets. Assets that match the configured criteria are automatically displayed in the collection.

Smart Collections automatically remain up to date. When newly approved assets satisfy the configured search criteria, they are automatically added to the collection.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3503809?learn=on

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service Assets Beta Features assets-beta-program-features

Dynamic Media: Video Engagement Report video-engagement-report

Turn video playback into actionable insight by providing per-video engagement metrics for the New Video Viewer, including views, impressions, watch time, completion rate, and engagement score, delivered as a monthly CSV to help teams measure content performance.

To participate or learn more, send an email to dm-beta-feedback@adobe.com.

Dynamic Media: Operations and Error Report operations-and-error-report

Give teams visibility into delivery health by reporting operational activity such as delivery request counts, smart crops, video encodes, and templates created, while surfacing failed delivery URLs with their referrer and failure count so issues can be pinpointed and fixed.

To participate or learn more, send an email to dm-beta-feedback@adobe.com.

Dynamic Media Template: Auto Translate auto-translate

Eliminate repetitive manual localization by using AI to automatically translate text and turn a single master template into variants across multiple locales, while preserving the visual integrity of your designs.

To participate or learn more, send an email to dm-beta-feedback@adobe.com.

Multi-portal Content Hub multi-portal-content-hub

Deliver tailored Content Hub experiences for each brand or business unit, while managing content centrally from a single source of truth.

To participate or learn more, send an email to aemcontenthubbeta@adobe.com.

AI-powered content onboarding and content supply chain automation ai-powered-content-onboarding-content-supply-chain-automation

The Content Supply Chain Agent provides two cooperating AI-powered agents:

  • CSC Blueprint Agent maps your end-to-end content supply chain, identifies gaps and anti-patterns, and helps define an agreed future state and prioritized action plan.
  • CSC Integration Agent implements governed content and metadata movement between systems through configured connections, supporting both one-time migrations and recurring synchronization.

To participate or learn more, send an email to aem-assets-coinnovation-interest@adobe.com.

UI Extensibility for Assets View ui-extensibility-assets-view-beta

Assets View supports UI Extensibility, a developer-first capability that empowers customers to tailor the out-of-the-box experience to meet their specific business requirements.
Customers can leverage existing stable extension points by following Adobe’s developer documentation to build and deploy extensions with minimal effort. For use cases where a required extension point is not yet available, Adobe works directly with customers to explore the requirements and assess the technical feasibility of delivering new extensibility APIs tailored to their needs, and may deliver such new APIs as Beta Releases.
Additionally, Adobe has developed a GenAI-powered extension generation tool currently available in an internal early adoption phase. This tool can significantly accelerate extension development time. Customers participating in this beta program will receive access to the tool and are encouraged to share feedback to help shape its evolution.
To participate or learn more, send an email to ASSETSVIEWUIEXTENSIBILITY@adobe.com.

Brand Aware Metadata (BAM) brand-aware-metadata-beta

AEM Assets now supports Brand Aware Metadata, an AI-powered capability that automatically generates custom metadata for assets when uploaded or re-processed. This reduces the need for manual entry by orders of magnitude, helping teams find assets and deliver new experiences much faster. Customers maintain a library of prompts that define how AI should populate any given metadata field, tailored to their own brand vocabulary and taxonomy. This prompt library includes a playground to preview results and a prompt optimizer that automatically drafts suggested improvements.

Adobe is actively expanding BAM’s capabilities through direct co-innovation with customers. Where a specific use case is not yet supported, Adobe works with participating customers to understand their needs and may deliver expanded capabilities as the beta progresses. Customers in this program gain early access to new features as they ship and are encouraged to share feedback that directly shapes the roadmap.

To participate or learn more, send an email to AEM-ASSETS-BRANDAWAREMETADATA@adobe.com.

Assets Sourcing portal for AEM Assets asset-sourcing-aem-assets

The Assets Sourcing Portal provides a secure, self-service experience for collecting assets from external contributors without granting them access to Adobe Experience Manager Assets. Contributors can upload assets, provide the required metadata, and submit content directly to a designated intake location while administrators maintain control over asset organization and governance.

Adobe works with participating customers to understand their needs and may deliver expanded capabilities as the limited availability program progresses. Customers in this program gain early access to new features as they ship and are encouraged to share feedback that directly shapes the roadmap.

To participate or learn more, send an email to AEM-Assets-Sourcing-Portal@adobe.com.

Support for additional asset types in Adobe Express integration assets-express-integration-asset-types-beta

Adobe Express integration with Assets helps all users create and edit on-brand content and increase content reuse. We have worked on supporting a growing list of asset / file types to be supported by the integration, and some of them are available early to customers interested in using them:

Asset view UI - “Open in Express” to import an asset into a new Express document in the embedded Express editor:

  • .mp4 video assets

Assets plugin in Adobe Express to import an asset into the current Express document:

  • .ai Adobe Illustrator assets
  • .indd Adobe InDesign assets
  • .mov video assets
  • .mp3 audio assets
  • .gif animated assets

To participate or learn more, send an email to aem-assets-express@adobe.com.

Experience Manager Forms as a Cloud Service forms

Early Access Features in AEM Forms

Table component in Adaptive Forms based on Core Components

Adaptive Forms based on Core Components can now include a Table component to present complex, structured data in tabular layouts. Government and financial services forms often require tabular layouts for numeric data, line items, and multi-column inputs. The Table component supports:

  • Structured row and column authoring with header and body rows
  • Repeatable rows with add and remove actions at runtime
  • Column sorting with ascending and descending order
  • Disable sorting on individual columns for accessibility compliance
  • Proportional column widths
  • Merge and split table row cells
  • Replace default text box cells with other Adaptive Form components
  • Row-level calculations using the Rule Editor
  • Table rendering in Submission PDF (Document of Record).

    For more information, see Add a table to an Adaptive Form (Core Components).

Document conversion APIs

Added support for new document conversion APIs that enable applications to convert documents to supported formats and optimize PDFs for printing and processing. The following APIs are available:

  • HTML to PDF – Converts HTML documents to PDF while preserving page layout and styling.
  • PostScript (PS) to PDF – Converts PostScript documents to PDF.
  • PDF to Image – Converts PDF documents into one or more image files.
  • PDF to PostScript (PS) – Converts PDF documents to PostScript format.
  • Flatten PDF Transparency – Flattens transparent objects in PDF documents to improve compatibility with print and document processing workflows.

Locale support for Interactive Communication

Interactive Communication Editor now allows authors to configure the locale for an Interactive Communication. The selected locale determines language and region-specific formatting, such as dates, numbers, and currencies, enabling localised content for different audiences

Virus scanning and custom validation for file attachments

Validate file attachments in Adaptive Forms before or on submission using custom validation logic, such as integrating a malware or virus scanning service. You can use form rules to trigger validation, or configure validation to run on form submission. Both approaches reject invalid or infected files before persistence, helping protect sensitive data and systems. For details, see Implement a custom validator and Tutorial: Antivirus scanning integration.

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service Foundation foundation

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service Foundation New Features foundation-new

Canary Deployments - Validate Features Before Accepting Live Traffic canary-deployments

Available for AEM Cloud Service, Canary deployments let you validate a new release against production infrastructure before it serves customer traffic.

Deploy the build alongside your current stable release on the publish tier, then route selected requests to it with a request header. All other traffic continues to be served by the stable release, unaffected. The author tier remains on the stable version throughout.

During the validation window of 3 hours, you can:

  • Promote the canary release to serve all live traffic, or
  • Cancel it and keep the current release running.

AEM Agentic Capabilities with CX Coworker capabilities-cx

Starting early September, AEM agentic capabilities are generally available in Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker. Coworker is an AI-powered teammate for your marketing and CX teams, they describe what they need in plain language, while AEM agentic capabilities specialize in creating, updating, and readying content and experiences, all under the brand and governance controls you already have in place. Together, teams can unlock core use cases like managing content faster, discovering and readying assets for channels, and brand governance and trust.

A quick way to think about it: being seen and recommended by AI increasingly depends on high-quality, consistent content and the context around it. This helps your team produce and manage that content with more speed, quality, and scale, supporting your brand’s visibility and affinity as more of your customers discover and decide through AI.

NOTE
  • No action is required on your side; access will be enabled automatically.
  • Once you are enabled, only the Coworker immersive experience will be available for now. The in-product right-rail panel experience will be released soon.
  • If you have questions, please email cx-coworker-questions@adobe.com.

New capabilities in AEM MCP aem-mcp

AEM MCP Server allows you to configure a single URL in your chat application or coding agent to access a growing set of capabilities.

In addition to Content operations (pages, content fragments, and assets) and Experience Governance checks, AEM MCP now supports Cloud Manager operations to manage programs, environments, and pipelines.

Cloud Manager operations were previously only available through the deprecated domain-specific MCPs. Customers using those should switch to the AEM MCP Server.

The AEM MCP Server is also used by the AEM Claude Connector and AEM ChatGPT Plugin.

OpenTelemetry for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (Limited Availability) optel

In Limited Availability (see note below for access), AEM as a Cloud Service supports OpenTelemetry. OTel is an open, industry-standard way to get traces, metrics, and logs together, sent to the APM provider of your choice.

Use this integration to:

  • Investigate slow or failing requests
  • Track JVM health and resource usage over time
  • Build dashboards and alerts for your AEM tiers
  • Correlate AEM behavior with other services during incidents

OpenTelemetry will be in Limited Availability on October 19th. To get on the list for access, email aemcs-otel-access@adobe.com, describing your use case and how you intend on ingesting the data.

AEM Query Optimization in the Code Assessment Agent Skill (IDE AI Tooling) code-assessment-skill

AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and similar tools) have broad knowledge of AEM’s underlying technologies, but don’t necessarily know best practices for generating and optimizing code or how to debug common AEM development issues. For this, Adobe provides installable agent skills, which instruct your coding agent.

Available October 1st, one such skill – code assessment – has expanded its capabilities to include query optimization. It checks whether a JCR/Oak query is actually served by an index — and flags index definitions that look correct but are subtly misconfigured in ways that cause missed queries or silently incomplete results.

If interested in AI tooling for developers, consider watching the Adobe Developers Live 2026 session AI-Powered development with AEM CS & AEM Edge Functions.

New Capabilities in Cloud Migration Agent Skill cloud-migration-skill

The AI-Assisted Code Migration skill migrates AEM 6.5 (or earlier) Java-stack projects to AEM as a Cloud Service in the IDE. The skill now generates a read-only migration runbook that assesses the whole project and lists every applicable pattern before it changes any code.

The skill now includes these patterns:

  • Legacy UI: Classic UI, ExtJS, and Coral 2 dialogs convert to Coral 3, and custom ExtJS design widgets migrate to Granite UI.
  • Template modernization: static templates convert to editable templates with AEM Modernize Tools rewrite rules.
  • Guava cache to Caffeine: Guava cache usage switches to Caffeine, the supported Cloud Service cache library.
  • Dispatcher configuration conversion: AMS and on-premise Apache HTTPD and Dispatcher configurations convert to the Cloud Service structure.
  • Unsupported run mode (URC) detection: the skill flags OSGi configuration folders with unsupported run modes and reorders them safely where possible.
  • Vault package dependency detection: the skill flags filevault-package-maven-plugin (or content-package-maven-plugin) configurations that are missing a <dependencies> block, which blocks Cloud Service package deploys.

Existing supported patterns include Sling Scheduler, ResourceChangeListener, Replication API, OSGi EventListener and EventHandler, Assets API, HTL lint fixes, and OSGi configuration conversion.

For more information, see AI-Assisted Code Migration to AEM as a Cloud Service.

onthl### Experience Manager as a Cloud Service Foundation Important Notices

IMS Authentication Rich Errors ims-auth-rich-errors

To help troubleshoot IMS integrations, imsauth has added support for rich errors.

Instead of returning only an HTTP status code, these errors provide additional context to help diagnose and resolve issues that can block authentication and access.

Java API Deprecations java-api-deprecation

It is critical to remove usage of deprecated APIs before September 28, 2026.

Since April 14, 2026, Cloud Manager pipelines that contain code using APIs targeting 2/26/2026 removal fail during the Code Quality step. Deployments will be blocked until the deprecated API usage is removed. This may prevent you from releasing time-sensitive updates and could impact your business operations.

Starting September 28, 2026, environments still using these deprecated APIs will not receive critical Adobe release updates and will not be subject to Adobe’s standard commitments around performance and availability. As a result, you will not receive new features or bug fixes, application stability and uptime may be negatively affected, and security risk exposure may increase further.

See the deprecation article for full details, but for convenience, these APIs are listed below:

Expand to see the Java API deprecations
  • org.apache.sling.commons.auth
  • org.apache.felix.webconsole
  • org.eclipse.jetty
  • com.mongodb
  • org.apache.abdera
  • org.apache.felix.http.whiteboard
  • org.apache.cocoon.xml
  • ch.qos.logback
  • org.slf4j.spi
  • org.slf4j.event
  • org.apache.log4j
  • com.google.common
  • com.drew
  • org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.plugins.memory

Preparing for Java 25: AEM Cloud Service Runtime Upgrade Timeline

Java 25 is the next long-term support (LTS) release after Java 21, delivering improvements across performance, developer productivity, and security:

  • Performance — Reduced memory footprint, more efficient garbage collection, and faster JVM warm-up benefit cloud-native deployments.
  • Developer productivity — Cleaner object initialization, more expressive pattern matching, and simplified concurrent task management reduce boilerplate and improve code clarity.
  • Security — Modernized cryptographic key derivation API to simplify common security workflows.

To help organizations plan testing and validation ahead of the necessary Java 25 runtime upgrade, Adobe is providing the following target dates. Any updates to this timeline will be communicated via release notes.

Timeframe
Milestone
Mid-October 2026
AEM Cloud Service SDK supports Java 25 runtime. The Java 25 JDK is available for download from the Adobe Software Distribution portal.
November 2026
Customers are encouraged to optionally enable the Java 25 runtime in their Cloud environments to validate behavior. Early adoption maximizes time to surface and resolve issues.
February – May 2027
Adobe will gradually migrate lower environments (RDE, Dev) to the Java 25 runtime. Customers should validate behavior and report unexpected issues, and are encouraged to enable staging and production environments as well. A temporary rollback to Java 21 is available while resolving any problems.
June 2027
All environment runtimes (including staging and production) migrate to Java 25. Java 21 runtime is decommissioned. The AEM Cloud Service SDK will no longer support Java 21.

AEM Cloud Service continues to support compiling customer code with Java 11, Java 17, and Java 21. However, Adobe recommends building with Java 25 (once available in AEM) to take full advantage of the latest language features and performance improvements.

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service Foundation Early Adopter Features foundation-early-adopter

Edge Authentication for Edge Delivery Services (Beta Program) edge-authentication

Edge Authentication lets you restrict access to Edge Delivery Services pages to only those who have authenticated with your identity provider (IdP). This is achieved by deploying an OpenID Connect (OIDC) configuration YAML file.

If interested, please email aemcs-edgecompute-feedback@adobe.com with a brief description of your use case and any questions you may have.

CX Enterprise Coworker: AEM Developer-Focused Capabilities (Beta Program) coworker-ai-troubleshooting-beta

Today for developers, Coworker supports AI prompts to drive Cloud Manager. We’re further expanding agentic AI support for developer use cases — troubleshooting, insights, and productivity — in areas including:

  • CDN and dispatcher (e.g., Why is my site slow? Why do I see stale content?)
  • Replication (e.g., Why is my replication queue blocked?)
  • Workflows (e.g., List any failed workflows)
  • Code modernization (e.g., Propose a patch to replace deprecated APIs)

To join the Beta Program, email aem-devagent@adobe.com describing your interest.

Experience Manager Guides guides

You can find a complete list of new and enhanced features of the latest release of Adobe Experience Manager Guides here.

Cloud Manager cloud-manager

You can find a complete list of Cloud Manager monthly releases here.

Migration Tools migration-tools

You can find a complete list of Migration Tools releases here.

Universal Editor universal-editor

You can find a complete list of Universal Editor releases here.

Generate Variations generate-variations

You can find a complete list of Generate Variations releases here.

Experience Cloud Release Notes experience-cloud

You can find information about releases of other Experience Cloud applications here.

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