CX Today

From agentic AI to brand intelligence and Firefly's trust-first model, Constellation Research's Liz Miller drops unfiltered insights from the Vegas floor.

In this on-the-ground dispatch from Adobe Summit 2026, CX Today Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is one of the sharpest voices in the CX and marketing technology space – and she's not here to sugarcoat anything. 

From the buzz around Shantanu Narayan's succession to Adobe's evolving agentic AI platform strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise and gets into what actually matters for enterprise marketers right now. 

Adobe Summit is buzzing... and not just about leadership transitions. Liz Miller joins Rhys Fisher to break down what's actually moving the needle for CX leaders on the ground in Vegas. 

🔴 Adobe CX Enterprise reframed: It's not a new product, it's a clarified story. Liz explains how Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) has always been the foundation, and why this rebranding is about helping enterprises understand how all the pieces connect in an agentic world. 

🔴 Brand Intelligence is the standout: Adobe's new solution lets marketers track how their brand appears across LLMs and AI search, not just the traditional web. As agent-to-agent engagement becomes real, knowing how your agents get found is mission-critical. 

🔴 Firefly's trust-first architecture: Adobe didn't bolt on safety after the fact. Liz walks through why Content Authenticity and invisible watermarking aren't lip service; they're structural, and they matter deeply for enterprise brand security. 

🔴 The radiologist moment: Jensen Huang's story from the keynote – AI can now read 100% of CT scans, yet demand for radiologists is rising – perfectly captures why Adobe's decade-long AI investment is a strategy, not a slogan.

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Technology Journalist, Francesca Roche, sits down with Hideki Hashimura, CRM and CX Strategist at redk.
With MIT research showing 95% of enterprise Gen AI pilots failing to deliver measurable ROI, this conversation cuts through the hype to unpack what's really going wrong – and what genuine AI maturity looks like in customer service. If your organization has launched an AI chatbot and wondered why nothing has really changed, this one's for you.

Main Description

Most enterprise Gen AI pilots don't fail because of bad technology; they fail because of everything surrounding it. Hideki Hashimura of redk shares a no-nonsense breakdown of where organizations go wrong and how to build AI-powered customer service that actually scales.
The isolation problem: Most AI deployments are siloed – a chatbot here, a translation tool there – with no contextual learning or connection to wider service processes, which kills ROI before it starts.
AI maturity is an org problem, not a tech problem: True readiness means aligning people, process, and technology together. Agents are evolving into service architects, and closing that skills gap is the most critical step leaders are currently missing.
False positives are everywhere: Deploying an AI bot that handles surface-level queries isn't transformation. If customers still can't change a flight or request a refund, the foundation underneath the bot simply isn't built.
Pilot success must be tied to business KPIs: Define your north star metrics first – NPS, resolution rates, handling time – then build the pilot around impacting those specific numbers. Speed without strategic alignment is just expensive experimentation.
Find out more about redk's AI-readiness workshops here.
For more Customer Experience tech news visit CX Today.

Speaking with CX Today, Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Emplifi, explores why customer trust in digital community spaces is under mounting pressure, and what brands must do to course correct. As more of the customer journey takes place on community platforms like Reddit, review sites, and social channels, the stakes for getting this right have never been higher. Ganeshan draws on Emplifi’s latest consumer research with 85% of consumers saying they are willing to pay more for brands they consider authentic, and 93% saying that genuine engagement is what builds their trust in the first place.
In regard to AI transparency, Emplifi’s recent report found that disclosure has become a non-negotiable for today’s shoppers. Ganeshan highlights that 91% of consumers now expect a brand to be explicit about when and how it is using AI, whether that’s responding to a community post, routing a query, or generating dynamic content on a website. For brands still treating AI-powered interactions as invisible, this represents a significant trust gap. The data suggests that consumers apply the same rigorous expectations to community spaces as they do to direct brand touchpoints, and that inconsistency across channels is one of the fastest ways to erode confidence.
Ganeshan also argues that user-generated content is a trust accelerant, where consumers are far more likely to trust images and peer reviews than polished brand photography, they want to see products in real homes, real cars, and real lives, not studio settings. Combined with the growing influence of Reddit and similar platforms, this means brands can no longer afford to be passive bystanders in the spaces where their reputation is being shaped daily. The conversation is happening whether they participate or not, and showing up authentically, with clear privacy guardrails and consistent messaging separating trusted brands from those losing ground.
Looking ahead, Ganeshan anticipates that trust will move from being a peripheral concern to a core design principle for CMOs. Governance tools and AI-powered workflows will play a growing role in helping teams identify where human intervention is needed and where automation can operate safely at scale. The brands that win, she argues, will be those that approach every community interaction with the same transparency, consistency, and accountability they bring to every other part of the customer experience.

AI is already reshaping customer service, but Simon Thorpe, Director at Pegasystems, argues the biggest shift is not the technology itself. It is the rise in customer expectations and the pressure on CX teams to deliver consistent outcomes, fast. In this CX Today interview, Thorpe explains why many organisations are treating service as a strategic battleground, tied directly to retention, churn reduction, and trust.

Thorpe warns against the idea that AI is a silver bullet. If businesses layer automation on top of broken journeys and fragmented workflows, they will frustrate customers more quickly, not less. The focus, he says, should be on strong foundations: governance, transparency, auditability, and AI that is connected to real processes so leaders can explain what happened, when, and why. That matters even more in regulated enterprise environments where trust is non-negotiable.

Don’t miss the full interview for a practical take on building trustworthy, outcome-driven AI in CX.

Marketing budgets have been flat at 7.7% of company revenue — and over 40% of CMOs pushing for more are losing C-suite influence. Why? They can't prove ROI.

In this episode, Francesca Roche sits down with Marie Bahl, CMO of Uptempo, to unpack why enterprise marketing still lacks a proper system of record, how the breakdown between planning and measurement costs brands millions, and what it actually takes to earn a CFO's trust.

The pressure on marketing leaders isn't just internal — it reflects a wider industry shift. As AI reshapes how businesses operate and boards demand greater accountability across every function, marketing is being held to a standard it was never structurally built to meet. With martech stacks growing in complexity and economic headwinds forcing leaner operations, the teams that will come out ahead are those investing now in a proper data backbone — not more point solutions. The conversation is moving from "what did we spend?" to "what did we build?".