Retail rewired: How Adobe’s AI-powered experience stack is orchestrating the future of commerce

april 02, 2025

Valtech's POV on Adobe Summit 2025 & what it means for retail & CPG brands

The year retail stopped reacting and started orchestrating

Adobe Summit 2025 didn’t feel like a product showcase; it felt like a pivot point.

From keynotes to demos, Adobe made it clear: the next era of experience innovation isn’t just about tools or platforms. It’s about orchestration. It’s about uniting content, data, and activation into one cohesive system, powered by AI and built for the scale of modern commerce.

For retail and CPG brands, this is a critical shift. For years, these industries have been chasing personalization, agility and scale, often with disjointed stacks and siloed teams. The result? Fragmented journeys, missed insights, and content that’s either late, off-brand or underperforming.

This year at Summit, Adobe’s response is bold: with the introduction of generative agents that don’t just assist but act; automating, analyzing and activating across the entire experience lifecycle. Elevate content from a creative output to a business-critical supply chain. Move commerce from a managed service to a scalable SaaS engine.

And Adobe isn’t doing this in isolation. They’re architecting this change across partnerships (SAP, Microsoft, ServiceNow), across industries, and across the full Adobe Experience Cloud.

As global partners to many of the world’s top retail and CPG brands, we’ve been pushing this same vision forward, breaking silos, unifying architectures and operationalizing customer experience. Adobe’s platform evolution doesn’t just fit our vision, it accelerates it.

The experience stack reimagined

Let’s start at the center: Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Workfront, and Firefly. This isn’t a loose collection of tools anymore. Adobe has connected them into an intelligent, orchestrated system.

The new organizing principle? Content + Data + Journeys.

This framework now defines the Adobe Experience Cloud, from campaign planning to execution, from creative iteration to real-time personalization.

Here’s how it maps out:

• Content powered by AEM, Workfront, GenStudio, and Express: Brands can ideate, collaborate, and deploy at speed, while maintaining governance and agility.

• Data unified through Adobe Analytics, Real-Time CDP, and Audience Manager: Delivering insights that inform not just what to create, but who to reach and when.

• Journeys executed through Campaign, Journey Optimizer, Marketo, and Target: Ensuring activation isn’t just possible, but precision-tuned across touchpoints.

One of the standout features showcased at Summit was Experience Hub, a new UI layer that sits on top of AEM. It’s not just a dashboard. It’s an intelligent workspace that adapts to roles, surfaces relevant insights, recommends next steps, and connects creators, marketers and developers in real time.

What makes this so valuable in a retail or CPG context is the potential to eliminate the traditional lag between idea and activation. Creative doesn’t have to wait for briefs. Media doesn’t have to chase assets. Content doesn’t need six rounds of manual versioning.

For our clients, the biggest bottleneck isn’t tech, it’s workflow. The ability to connect strategy, creativity, and activation across global teams and markets is often what separates the fast movers from the rest. Adobe’s orchestration model puts that power back in play.

With the introduction of AI-powered copilots and generative UX throughout the stack, we’re also seeing a shift from “search and select” interfaces to “ask and activate” interfaces. This is more than UX polish. It’s a move toward intelligent operations, a place where your stack suggests, predicts and even executes alongside your teams.

Adobe commerce as a cloud service: A SaaS mindset

In the background of all the AI and orchestration noise, Adobe quietly made one of the most foundational announcements for commerce leaders: Adobe Commerce is officially shifting to a SaaS-based cloud model by mid-2025.

This move repositions Adobe Commerce from a customizable but infrastructure-heavy platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model to a nimble, scalable, API-first SaaS environment. For enterprise retailers and global CPG brands, this change isn’t just technical, it’s strategic.

What this means for users:

• Faster deployment of features: No more waiting on upgrades. Adobe owns the delivery pipeline, ensuring brands always operate on the latest stack.

• Reduced infrastructure burden: Brands can now focus on experience, not uptime. Security, scaling, and performance are handled natively.

• Lower total cost of ownership: No need for large internal DevOps teams to maintain infrastructure. Adobe’s SaaS backbone absorbs the overhead.

• Increased composability: The new model aligns with MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) principles, allowing greater modularity and integration flexibility.

In our work with Fortune 500 Retailers and CPG leaders, we’ve consistently guided clients toward future-proof commerce architectures. That means cloud-first, service-oriented, and integration-ready environments that support growth across regions, categories, and business models.

Adobe Commerce’s SaaS transition opens the door for even tighter integration with AEP, Firefly, and the entire content supply chain. It also enables faster experimentation and innovation across omnichannel experiences, whether that’s testing offers, launching new D2C storefronts, or building B2B portals.

Let’s also talk about business outcomes. According to Adobe, early pilots of the SaaS platform have shown:

• Up to 8% lift in conversion rates

• Hours instead of weeks to expand into new digital channels

• A massive reduction in operational complexity and cost

These are outcomes that matter to global Retail brands balancing margin pressure with customer expectations. And they’re the kind of operational levers Valtech helps unlock every day. This shift creates real strategic headroom for brands focused on growth, experimentation, and efficiency. In short: Adobe Commerce is no longer a platform you manage; it’s a service you scale.

From chaos to creative precision: Unlocking business value with intelligent content supply chains

For years, content operations have been the Achilles’ heel of retail and CPG. High demand, fragmented tools, manual workflows, and the constant chase for personalization have left even the most mature brands struggling to keep up.

Adobe’s answer? Build a unified, intelligent content supply chain, and make it operationally scalable through automation and orchestration.

At the heart of this transformation is Adobe GenStudio Foundation — a new, integrated interface that unifies planning, production, distribution and performance analytics across the entire Adobe ecosystem. It’s not just a “content pipeline.” It’s a closed-loop operating model, one where data feeds creativity, creativity drives conversion and every step is measurable.

Here’s how the ecosystem works together:

• Workfront manages briefs, timelines, and cross-functional collaboration

• Creative Cloud + Firefly drives asset production with GenAI-powered tooling

• Express enables local market teams to quickly customize and activate assets

• GenStudio tracks asset performance, feedback loops, and campaign effectiveness

For retailers and CPG companies, under pressure to move fast and stay relevant, Adobe’s intelligent content supply chain delivers on two critical outcomes:

1. Speed to market – Brands can move from campaign idea to in-market activation in days, not weeks

2. Variation at scale – Personalization becomes possible without overloading creative teams

Take Firefly Services, for instance. It’s no longer just an AI image generator. It now includes video generation, structured content variants, brand-compliant templates, and no-code creative automation, all accessible via APIs and user-friendly UI. Combine this with Adobe Express and you’ve got a self-serve creative engine for regional teams, channel owners, or franchisees. This is where strategy meets scale—and scale meets simplicity.

For many retail and CPG organizations, content complexity is a daily operational pain point. By integrating GenStudio and Firefly Services into their stack, they can shift from one-size-fits-all content to truly adaptive, hyper-personalized storytelling, without ballooning costs or creative headcount.

Valtech also sees this as an opportunity to embed content governance directly into the supply chain. Think automated brand checks, legal approval workflows, AI-based performance predictions, all before content even goes live. For global brands managing hundreds of SKUs, channels, and campaigns? This isn’t just innovation. It’s operational efficiency.

Agent orchestration: The rise of autonomous experience engines

One of the most paradigm-shifting announcements from Adobe Summit 2025 was the debut of Agent Orchestration within Adobe Experience Platform.

Instead of simply layering in isolated AI features, Adobe introduced a transformative new approach: a multi-agent framework where specialized, task-specific AI agents work collaboratively — learning, adapting and making decisions on behalf of marketing and commerce teams.

These aren’t chatbots. They’re autonomous, intelligent agents capable of analyzing data, generating content, testing experiences, and activating campaigns — seamlessly across Adobe’s ecosystem. And this isn’t a far-off vision. Adobe launched ten pre-trained, production-ready agents, all coordinated by the Agent Orchestrator — a reasoning engine that dynamically manages agent tasks based on defined business goals, operational rules and real-time context.

What does this mean in practice? Here’s how it plays out in retail:

All of this happens without needing six tools, five teams, and a four-week delay. For you, this represents a fundamental shift: instead of manually crafting every customer journey, you can now define the system that intelligently designs and adapts those experiences in real time.

With Valtech and Adobe, we move from building individual experiences to engineering experience logic—a scalable, dynamic framework that reacts to customer behavior, business priorities, and market signals instantly. The result? Faster time to market, reduced operational complexity, and a truly adaptive customer experience strategy that grows with your business.

While most organizations won’t start with full agent autonomy, you can begin to lay the foundation:

• Creating agent-aligned taxonomies for content, segments, and products

• Building the right governance structures around AI actions

• Training teams to partner with agents, not replace them

It’s not about human vs. AI. It’s about human + system orchestration at scale.

Orchestration in motion: Turning technology into real-time business outcomes

When Adobe talks about Customer Experience Orchestration, it’s more than an inspiration — it’s a fully integrated stack that brings GenStudio, Firefly, AEP, Commerce and intelligent Agents into one cohesive loop.

For retail and CPG brands, this is a game-changer.

You’re no longer managing disconnected workflows across planning, content creation, segmentation, activation, and measurement. Instead, you’re operating in a unified, intelligent system, where each part of the customer experience is connected, measurable and increasingly autonomous.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

• Create on-brand content in GenStudio with Firefly

• Orchestrate production workflows via Workfront

• Activate experiences through Adobe Campaign and Target

• Analyze behavior with Adobe Analytics and Real-Time CDP

• Optimize continuously using agents like Journey and Experimentation

What does this mean for you?

• No more lag between insight and action. Teams can respond to real-time signals, not last month’s reports.

• No more manual stitching of tools and teams. Orchestration is built in—so you reduce friction and increase speed.

• No more “personalization someday.” You can now deliver tailored experiences at scale, with less effort and more precision.

From Valtech’s perspective, this validates the architectural strategy we’ve helped clients build for years. Adobe’s orchestration-first model empowers brands to move from campaigns to continuous engagement, from manual journeys to adaptive systems, and from MarTech integration to ExperienceOps.

For you, that means fewer handoffs, faster execution, and a more intelligent way to scale customer experiences—without scaling complexity.

From platform thinking to orchestrated experience systems

Adobe Summit 2025 made one thing clear: the future isn’t about more technology — it’s about smarter orchestration.

For retail and CPG brands facing fragmented systems, rising content demands, and increasingly personalized customer expectations, Adobe’s new experience stack unlocks something essential: clarity, control, and scale.

No more wondering which asset is driving results.

No more delays between insight and action.

No more siloed efforts between creative, marketing, and commerce.

Instead, you gain a unified system — intelligent, adaptive, and orchestrated in real time. It doesn’t just support your teams — it empowers them to move faster, collaborate better, and deliver more personalized experiences with less friction.

At Valtech, we don’t just implement tools — we design systems that transform how your business operates. Adobe’s 2025 roadmap gives us the most advanced building blocks yet to deliver those systems with greater agility, automation and measurable impact.