‘You cannot change or build the marketing organization of the future with the creative organization of the past’: Adobe CEO lays out how work and collaboration are fundamentally changing
Marketing is more fast-paced than ever, with creatives now required to cater to more languages and geographies than ever as well as much faster refresh cycles.
“Marketing professionals face unprecedented pressure to create compelling content across channels, optimize campaigns, and deliver,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen declared in an open letter to shareholders.
But Adobe believes marketing teams will need to rethink far more than which tools their employees use to keep up with the shift.
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Speaking with the media at its annual Adobe Max conference, Creative VP Resh Sidhu warned that entire organizational structures could no longer be suited to the future of marketing.
Sidhu argued the importance for businesses to reconsider workflows, employee skills and their entire approach to creative production, hinting at the ongoing AI-driven evolution.
“You cannot change… or build the marketing organization of the future with the creative organization of the past,” she said.
Teams are under intense pressure to change how they work
The comments came in response to a question about whether AI could create a division between teams based on willingness and ability to use AI.
Discussions quickly turned to AI literacy – Product Marketing VP Deepa Subramaniam and Sidhu agreed that AI is already changing how their own teams operate, and rather than simply treating AI as another tool or piece of software, agents are increasingly being seen as digital colleagues.
But while the company is looking to incorporate AI fluency into its employee upskilling and support schemes, they argued that simply tracking how frequently employees interact with AI is virtually meaningless.
“We’re not counting tokens over here,” Sidhu said, referring to her team’s ‘customer zero’ status as the earliest adopter of new Adobe tools.
But leveraging AI crucially helps their teams – and broader marketing teams – to spend more time developing other concepts, testing alternatives and refining their campaigns beyond what’s been possible thus far. The execs also agreed that marketing can now start much earlier than at the marketing team, thanks to more people being able to experiment with their ideas through AI – something they perceive as improving quality of output by being able to access more perspectives.
But this adds its own complexities, because if AI is now enabling employees to work across other areas of the business, companies will need to reconsider how responsibilities are shared and how the future of inter-team collaboration looks.
While the two agreed that creators on an individual level must retain the choice about when, why and whether to use AI, the reality for business leaders is far more challenging.
As AI becomes more embedded into daily workflows, the focus is increasingly shifting to redefining entire work structures now that many processes have become more democratized.
The message was clear, though. The businesses that benefit most – and risk being left behind the least – will be those who fundamentally challenge what work looks like to redesign and adapt in readiness for the future.
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