Adobe Summit London 2026

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Last week, I had great fun attending the Adobe Summit London 2026.

Partly great hearing about the latest innovations in AI and partly great catching up with the friendliest man in marketing, Joe Glover.

Two stats from the opening keynote that stuck with me.

1: Organic web search traffic is down 20%

2: Conversion rate for AI search is 42% higher then before

It’s a reminder that so many of the norms of marketing have fundamentally changed.

I remember my old marketing professor asking us students over a decade ago to imagine a world without Google.

We found it almost impossible.

You can’t just pay to appear top of Google to secure all your traffic. Instead, you’ll need to pop up in chats with dozens of different LLMs, and that’s much much harder.

Adobe showed a few incredibly powerful tools to get around this.

The first was the ability to do 1:1 personalisation. When I first started in marketing, personalisation was [FIRST NAME] and British spelling. Today, Adobe is helping brands like Sky create AI-personalised websites tweaked depending on who is visiting the site. A hard-working father of four sees a totally different page to a student at Oxford.

The second was audience-simulated engagement. Here, Adobe helps its users test their content and media with a hypothetical AI-simulated focus group. The LLMs run your content through a bunch of different personas to test how people should react. Obviously nothing compares to real behavioural data, but it feels like an exciting substitute.

One thing remains the same, however.

Despite all these innovations, a great campaign will still beat a mediocre one.

I think Adobe’s main benefit for marketers is taking a marketer’s best work and scaling it far and wide.

Which means marketers can’t ignore the key part of the job: understanding people and making campaigns that engage them.

That won’t change.

Thanks for having me, Adobe!