Adobe Summit Day Two: The Rise of Creative Intelligence

By the Code and Theory Enterprise Experience Transformation Team

March 20, 2025

Get your data in order. Get your content together. Put people at the center. These were some of the most prevalent themes from Adobe Summit Day Two.

But we know that’s just the starting line … not the win. The real shift happens after that, when precision actually connects, systems start telling stories and personalization doesn’t feel like a trick, but truth. It’s not about perfect orchestration. It’s about making it feel real, natural, alive and human. When things work right, it doesn’t feel like marketing at all.

With that, here are the five biggest takeaways from Las Vegas:

1. Artificial Intelligence Is Nothing Without Creative Intelligence

Authenticity. Community. Emotion. These were the key themes from basketball all-stars Carmelo Anthony and Kelsey Plum, and Code and Theory co-founder Dan Gardner. Each opined on where technology lives in the customer and fan experience.

Gardner says, “People start at the wrong place. Don’t start with the tech platform. You have to start with emotion. Artificial intelligence allows us to engage with computers in human-like ways. But you need creative intelligence. Creative intelligence has to sit on top of tech to give us exceptional experiences. Exceptional experiences allow you to get to emotions. It has to be connected. If you silo it, it won’t happen. Start with the consumer, the user, the fan. Where are those connection points? Then, use AI to create the experiences they want.”

Fandom is not linear anymore, starting and stopping at the season. It’s never-ending. It is pervasive. Tap into the fandom and passion where it is every day to create stories and moments. All sports are stories. Human stories. Rivalries. Having a cohesive plan to connect. That’s the connection.

But too often, “the internet sucks,” according to Gardner. People are limited in thinking about what the internet will be, likening it to those who swore newspapers would never disappear “because people liked the way it felt.”

Anthony added that “analytics suck” for athletes for the opposite reason. Too often, athletes get fixated on numbers, forgetting how it actually feels on the court.

Plum paid homage to her mother in her journey and threw shade at social media, calling Instagram “the devil’s app.” All told, they agreed that passion is the driving force of tech, sports, business and fandom.

2. The Agency Playbook Is Being Rewritten By GenAI

In a world where consumers are bombarded with repetitive content, creativity must evolve beyond mere production to drive real value. The highest contribution a human can make is leveraging skills to uncover high-value opportunities for clients, not churning out redundant assets.

The market demands this shift — clients are no longer just seeking execution; they’re looking for strategic thinking that propels their business forward. As AI automates the drudgery of production, creative professionals must transition from task execution to identifying growth opportunities, deepening client relationships and delivering meaningful impact. The marketing landscape isn’t waiting — it’s already forcing this transformation.

Yet the question of human creativity looms large. Why have some brands and agencies leaned into AI, while others hesitate? The fear of job loss is real, but the greater risk is resisting change. Legal and technological barriers are shifting, and those who fail to embrace AI will find themselves edged out. As Code and Theory CEO Michael Treff said at Adobe Summit with Adobe’s Hannah Elsakr, “If you don't embrace AI at a creative organization, you are not going to work in the organization for much longer.”

The future belongs to those who use AI as a tool for liberation — unlocking new ways to create, predict and add value. This demands a deeper partnership between agencies, brands and technology providers, ensuring that AI is not just a tool but a force multiplier for strategic decision-making.

3. How Lenovo Is Harnessing GenAI With GenStudio for Performance Marketing

Lenovo is a brand that has traditionally operated at the lower end of the funnel. But the only way to reach net-new audiences is by accelerating content by orders of magnitude. Jennifer Downes, Lenovo CMO Global eCommerce, knew her organization wasn’t set up to achieve that.

Downes saw that content production was comprehensively siloed, with no one looking laterally within the organization for inspiration or repurposing. Duplication and uncertainty ruled, making it difficult to scale.

Downes availed herself of Adobe’s GenStudio, where she conducted a pilot test with an actual campaign she had just launched, essentially recreating the process as if she wasn’t working with an agency. What took the agency three weeks to complete was done in minutes in GenStudio. Her team could develop more assets across more channels without compromising quality. It was efficiency of performance on steroids.

Downes’ biggest learning so far? Start small. Do the pilot. Limit users to a small number of people. Make them advocates and help them become teachers.

4. Be the Proteus, Not the Sisyphus of Customer Experience Orchestration

When putting customers front and center and turning them into lifelong partners, marketers have often behaved like Sisyphus, the tragic figure from Greek mythology who rolls the same boulder up the hill forever.

Sundeep Parsa, Adobe VP-Experience Platform, Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Customer Journey Products, has some good news. “Advances in technology have put marketers on the cusp of effecting customer experience transformation,” said Parsa. “We can stop acting like Sisyphus and instead become Proteus.” Proteus, the shape-shifting sea god in Greek mythology, was famous for his superpower of flexible adaptability.

Parsa believes agentic AI will allow brands to become protean, a powerful new ally for one-on-one personalization at scale. The average consumer gets 5,000 brand messages a day — that’s 2 million a year — and all too many of them leave them cold. Instead, consumers crave and expect seamless, integrated experiences through multiple touchpoints that are rewarding. With agentic AI, creating unified experiences doesn’t have to feel like Mission Impossible.

AI can be a brand’s ally for optimizing three key pillars of unified customer experience personalization at scale — data, content and journeys. The volume of data is growing at an unprecedented rate. By the end of this year, experts predict we will have 60% more data than in 2020. Yet the growth in data analyst and scientist roles is not keeping pace. This is where agentic AI can step in to help. Together, predictive and GenAI can allow us to get a semantic understanding of data much faster. We can genuinely democratize data access.

When it comes to content management — the quintessential Sisyphean endeavor — personalization demands more and more content variations. Gen AI is transforming the production of high-impact content at a speed and scale that was previously unimaginable.

Unified journey orchestration is a foundational capability to develop long-lasting customer relationships. Orchestrating experiences across customer life cycles is complex. Plans have to adapt to

changing consumer behavior at scale. AI-infused customer journeys are the solution. 

5. Put the Customer at the Center, Always

There was a pivotal moment that pushed Marriott International to become a truly customer-centric organization, says Chris Norton, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Data Activation and Personalization.

One central turning point concerned Marriott’s commitment to a range of product extensions, including its luxury, high-end cruise business under the banner of its The Ritz-Carlton brand, and it has a growing boutique retail business. “Yes, our hotel guests no longer have to steal our beautiful sheets; they can just go into our boutique and buy them,” joked Norton. He said these line extensions have been at the heart of Marriott’s newfound holistic understanding of the customers’ travel journeys. This deeper understanding has led to greater engagement and has shaped how Marriott has fine-tuned its operations to orient everything to customer needs.

Another central inflection point has been the evolution of the Marriott app from a pure booking apparatus into a digital customer experience concierge. Norton refers to this evolution as “our journey from money to love” and said that the mission has been to redefine loyalty beyond only the transactional. He wants customers to think of Marriott Bonvoy as a pathway to all the things that the customer enjoys in life and not just as a way to redeem award points.

Marriott has devoted much bandwidth to getting to know customers more in depth, which was hard to do at scale until recently. However, with martech investments in the Adobe stack, Norton and his team have leveraged the troves of information for customer personalization at scale. The Adobe Experience Platform has enabled this new customer-centric audience strategy. 

To learn about the highlights from Adobe Summit day one, click here.