The Future of Agentic AI and Its Impact on Customer Experience – Six Five On The Road

At Adobe Summit, Tiffani Bova, Chief Strategy and Research Officer at The Futurum Group, hosts Adobe‘s Loni Stark, Vice President, Strategy and Product, for a conversation exploring the transformative power of Agentic AI in customer interaction. They reveal how emerging AI capabilities are reshaping business models, and share examples that illustrate the shift towards hyper-personalized, customer-centric experiences.

Key takeaways include:

🔷Agentic AI: Beyond the Basics: Adobe is showcasing Agentic AI as a powerful tool for automation, optimization, and creating more human-like, interactive customer experiences, moving beyond traditional AI applications.
🔷Human-AI Synergy for Enhanced CX: The crucial role of blending human expertise with AI capabilities to craft seamless and impactful customer journeys.
🔷Empowering Practitioners for Ethical AI: Adobe is developing tools designed to empower practitioners in effectively configuring and utilizing Agentic AI, with a strong focus on training and ethical considerations.
🔷Personalization and Brand Engagement: Agentic AI is poised to revolutionize personalization, fostering genuine connections and driving emotional engagement to cultivate stronger brand loyalty and advocacy.

Learn more at Adobe.

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Tiffani Bova: Hello and welcome to Six Five On The Road. I am here at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. My name is Tiffani Bova and I am joined by Loni Stark, VP of Strategy and Products at Adobe and we are going to have an amazing conversation about Agentic AI and its impact on customer experience. Welcome, Loni.

Loni Stark: Thanks, Tiffani, for having me.

Tiffani Bova: Well, before we get started, I always like to just bring it down and say, let’s start at the beginning. There’s a lot of conversation about Agentic AI at the Summit this week, but I want to start with the definition because I think so much is getting tossed around about this particular topic and it’s the shining object in the corner right now. But give me some insight into how you would and Adobe obviously would define it.

Loni Stark: Yeah. Thank you. Well, first of all, Adobe’s been around with AI for a while with predictive AI, with the 1 trillion per week experience platform data that we collect, as well as with generative AI. What’s exciting about Agentic AI is really the ability to have AI start to plan, infer goals and be able to take action. So all of the investments that have been made around a brand’s content and data can now be pulled together so that these agents can start to automate different tasks, but also optimize based on goals, with or without a human being in the loop.

Tiffani Bova: Well, you know, marketers have always been so hyper focused on improving customer experience. You know, for the last 20 years, they’ve been investing in technology, finding ways to improve the journeys of their customers, whether it’s B2B or B2C.Right? In the entire sort of portfolio. But what have you seen, you know, for interesting use cases where you’ve gone, wow, like that, that’s innovative, but also extremely impactful to the business..

Loni Stark: We’re seeing that the brands that we work with who obviously care about customer experiences leverage Agentic AI in two different areas. The first has been, for a longer period of time you’ve seen, is using agents to help them gain greater insights into the work that they often do. So we just announced Adobe Experience Manager Sites Optimizer. And that has been something where we’ve observed that people who launch websites who care about the experience, they have to do a lot of manual work in the past around looking at things for SEO optimization, figuring out broken backlinks, figuring out where the bounce rate for certain traffic isn’t hitting the mark. And that is something that now we have agents that can go and constantly look at that information, alert those marketers of where a change needs to be made, suggest what that change needs to be made, as well as optimize. So that’s an example of where we see the help of the practitioners to be able to do this. The second has been just the reimagination of the actual consumer or customer experience. And that is something we call Adobe Brand Concierge, which we just introduced. And what this Agentic AI first application will help to do is help marketers build an actual conversational multimodal experience that really becomes a brand ambassador on their websites or on mobile apps.

Tiffani Bova: Well, what’s interesting is, you know, for so long in conversations over the last, let’s call it 60 or 90 days, as Agentic has gotten hot, people like, ah, this is just a bot, right? This is just the next generation of a bot. And when you start sharing some of the examples you just gave, people are like, oh, wait a minute, like this isn’t kind of basic tasks of, you know, answering something in a customer call center or even online, we’re pointing a client or a customer to your FAQs or to how to reach out or how to do a return. Like the very basics. This is really taking a look across so many different parts of the business and looking for those signals and data so that they can make those better decisions. The practitioner as well as the brand overall. Fair?

Loni Stark: Yeah. When you mentioned chatbots, I often get that question, like conversation AI, do you mean like chatbots? And so we actually, from a product perspective, did a lot of research with consumers on why chatbots failed? Right. And what is a conversational AI needs to be in a way that really feels like a concierge when you walk into a hotel and you have your favorite concierge that helps you out. And what we found is consumers really want to always feel like they’re in control. So this idea of natural language understanding is really important. The second is visually rich, so it’s not just text, but being able to have almost. We envision the site being like the conversation that changes based on whether you’re being inspired to go on a trip like a cruise or be able to purchase an outfit for an event. And then the third is being able to take action for you and make it convenient. So not just answering the question, but you say, hey, let me follow up with an email with a lookbook to inspire you for that event. So things like that we’re hearing from consumers is what they’re looking for in terms of that next generation Agentic AI experience.

Tiffani Bova: So those are some really great use cases for practitioners and for brands. Are there any examples of companies where you’ve seen them really maximize their capabilities? I know it’s early days, but. But still, it’s always good to see progress.

Loni Stark: I would say that we’re still in the early days, so there’s not, I would say, maximizing. But Hershey’s, which we love, right. They use AEM site optimizer and were able to use the agents that we have as part of that to really optimize their SEO. So being able to use that to boost the SEO, another large sporting goods retailer was able to actually generate new variations of content that they were able to test and increase the engagement rate of that content. And it was all done with AEM sites Optimizer. As far as the consumer experiences, we have been working with brands. So where brand concierge, we’ve seen some of the early days is around more generative search. So companies are willing to launch those out to start. So natural language search for content. And we have been working with customers on a more conversational AI experience that I’m sure will be coming soon.

Tiffani Bova: Well, conversational AI, Agentic AI, I feel like, and I’m leading you, I kind of know the answer to this question. But, you know, we’re. We’re at this cusp of technology giving another push on this evolution of customer experience and what it means for brands. And do you think that it’s driven by what brands want to do? Obviously they want to get closer to their customer. But do you think that consumers are now really expecting companies to leverage technology in these ways that makes them say, hold on, we’ve been doing it this way for a really long time. Technology has caught up or jumped, leapfrogged what we were doing in the past. We really should reimagine it ourselves. You think it’s customer driven or do you think it’s brand driven at this point in these new models?

Loni Stark: I think that my belief is that for great customer experiences, it’s got to be something we as people really want first, because it is about us. We’re the customer, we’re the consumer. And there I’ve been part of the pioneering of websites and even website experiences. And if you remember, maybe the first websites, now that we look back, were terrible. They were text based and then we got to images and we got to great site design. And I think the same thing is happening where when you look at how we really want to interact with each other, we’ve been bending towards the way machines want to interact. And I think with this new era of Agentic AI Gen AI, that technology is going to become more humanistic. And so all of the psychology research in this area points that we as people react better when the technology is more humanistic. That’s why I’m a believer in where we’re going with conversational and with just multi-modal experiences, visual language. Because this is how I think humans since the very beginning want to connect and interact. And the brands we work with who want to build great customer experiences, they really want that brand love. And so if, you know, as a marketer, myself as a product person, this is an exciting time to really be able to achieve that within the technologies we have.

Tiffani Bova: But I believe it needs a mindset shift, right? Because many people look at this technology as a way to reduce costs and increase productivity instead of going, hold on a second, it may do those things. But if that’s the only reason you don’t get all that we’re talking about here, right? This improvement of experience, like really leaning into it versus just saying I want more out of my call center agents, right? And I’m human, the human side of it, right? Let them augment those very transactional tasks that are mundane and redundant and let my humans be more critically thinking. And this is really about saying, hold on, let me look across the entire journey. And I think you guys have announced at Summit this week some amazing things around the customer experience and orchestration of that. And maybe you can dig in a little bit to the orchestration layer of this.

Loni Stark: Yeah. So what we announced was an experienced platform agent orchestrator. And what that is is we believe in a world where there’s going to be multiple agents, we have announced 10 of them that are purpose built for marketing and customer experience. And this agent orchestrator is really about having the ability to reason, to pull in the data, to really coordinate these agents across the board. Because we do think that brands are going to need that in order to deliver these great experiences. You’re right. When we first started, the brands were really looking to get efficiencies and I think that’s still valid. We want that element. But the possibilities, I think with Agentic AI is being able to provide that white glove customer experience that we just haven’t been able to scale so that everyone can have their own personal concierge.

Tiffani Bova: But I think that the real nugget in what you just said is this is about human and technology. It’s the blurring and the blending of the two. Meaning you almost won’t know when one hands off to the other or one hands off back, or if it is a human or if it’s all Agentic AI or if it’s a combination of both. And I think that’s what’s so exciting is that if the consumer in this case, right. Feels, wow, that was an amazing experience. If it was human and technology, or technology alone. Or humans alone. The goal here is an incredible experience.

Loni Stark: Yes. And what we found is that people still want to know whether they’re talking to a real human or to an agent. But if the agent is giving them a great experience, that in itself confers brand loyalty, brand love. So people are okay with the fact that it’s an agent if it’s delivering real value. And yes, that connection with humans is important. Agents amplify the expertise of humans.

Tiffani Bova: And when you, when you think about humans in the digital labor force and how companies are going to sort of deal with this, you know, in really thinking about, I don’t want to replace the humans, but now I have these Agentic AIs, kind of this digital employee and how do I create an environment for the employees themselves in working with these agents. Any thoughts there?

Loni Stark: I think one of the areas from a product innovation perspective we spend a lot of time on is researching how practitioners actually will be able to design this new generation of experiences. What kind of tools do they need? We take it for granted that we have word processors, website designers, and journey orchestration. This is a whole new set of experiences. And so we’re already seeing interfaces that we’re innovating on which are conversational so that even as a practitioner you can have a conversation to configure and build your concierge as an example, or to have ways of setting guardrails and brand voice in sites optimizer on experimentation accelerator to be able to work with these agents.

Tiffani Bova: Well, I think this also lends itself to the practitioners needing to be trained, skilled, up leveled, reskilled, whatever terms you want to use. But I would say there’s probably some lessons learned in what we’ve done with technology over the last 20 or 25 years and just kind of tossing it to the employee and saying, go figure it out. Right. Or use it how you want to use it. You said guardrails and I think that’s really important. Right. The ethical use of it, you know, really trying not to put bias into it. All the things that go with AI that get a little bit of a bad rap, if you will. But I always feel like we don’t spend enough time talking about training the people who will actually use it so that they feel like this will actually make my day better. I will find more joy in what I do, I will get more satisfaction, I’ll be more engaged. I show up to want to deliver these great experiences, but I’ve been overwhelmed and this may help me do what I came here to do. And I’m most excited about that.

Loni Stark: I am too. What we found is that even this last wave of digital marketing and digital experience has caused people to have to gain use skills. And one of the things with Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant is actually that that agent has helped practitioners cull through all that data and actually use natural language to be able to understand what the data is telling me. So just as much as there are new things to learn, there are also opportunity to simplify for marketers all of that data that’s coming in, all of the experiences they can create by being able to generate suggestions, by being able to uplevel insights so that the marketer can be more of a decision maker and not have to spend all their time digging into the output of machines.

Tiffani Bova: Yeah, I think this is really where it’s going to land. I’d love to just give you an opportunity as we get ready to wrap up. Is there anything that has surprised you where you’ve gone? I didn’t think about that use case for the practitioner or someone really pushed the envelope on what’s capable. You as a product person. Right. Someone who’s driving strategy in many parts of Adobe where you went whoa, that really stopped you in your tracks where you wanted to learn more and dig into what it was. Does anything stand out?

Loni Stark: One thing actually I’ll say is some of our consumer research around their interactions as we were building the product for brand concierge that came up which was that as we started to develop this thing that had a conversation with consumers, they weren’t questioning that it was not human. Instead there were parts of that conversation where the consumer said I want to be known because I am a photographer or this is my passion and I don’t want to be put into a box of a category. I want the concierge to recognize and see me more. And that was really interesting because it really shows the potential and the expectation of consumers for the kind of interactions they want to have with brands. And I think that this era is going to take this idea of personalized experiences to something where consumers and people actually feel like it’s personalized, not that brands are saying we’re personalizing, if that makes sense.

Tiffani Bova: Makes sense. Well, if you could sum up in one sentence what excites you the most about the intersection of Agentic AI and Adobe’s vision, what would it be?

Loni Stark: I think the coming together of all the work that we put in around customer data, brand content and for it to come together and orchestrate it into an experience that drives emotion and brand love.

Tiffani Bova: Who doesn’t want that? That’s great. Thank you so much. Well, thanks for tuning in to Six Five On The Road. I am here at Adobe Summit. Don’t forget to hit subscribe. Follow us on socials and check out our coverage at SixFiveMedia.com See you later.

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