Adobe Summit kicks off next week in Las Vegas, and I’ll be there for the fourth time. At this point the trip has a familiar rhythm — but that doesn’t mean I’m going through the motions. Year four gives you a different lens on the event. You stop being surprised by the scale and start paying attention to the throughline: where Adobe has been quietly investing for two or three years and is now ready to talk about publicly.
Here’s what’s on my radar heading in.
Why I Keep Going Back
Summit is one of the few conferences where the gap between what’s announced on stage and what lands in production six months later is genuinely narrow. I’ve been to enough conferences where the keynote demos feel like concept cars — impressive, but vaporware. Summit demos tend to show up in the product. That track record is why enterprise teams send people here, and it’s why I keep going.
This year, the throughline I’m expecting is agentic AI. The signals have been building across Adobe’s product suite and I want to see how they bring it together on stage.
Agentic AI Across the Adobe Stack
The shift from generative AI features to agentic AI capabilities is where I’m focusing most of my attention this year. We’ve had AI-assisted content generation in various Adobe tools for a couple of years now. What I’m expecting Adobe to talk about in 2026 is AI that acts — that takes sequences of steps, makes decisions, and completes multi-stage workflows without a human in the loop for every action.
I’m particularly interested in how this plays out across the content supply chain. The honest question for enterprise teams is: are your governance and approval workflows ready for agentic AI? Most aren’t. If your approval process is still a series of email threads and manual handoffs, you’ll either slow the AI down to the point of uselessness or let it move faster than your risk team is comfortable with. I’m hoping the Summit sessions give me a clearer picture of how Adobe is thinking about this problem — and what guardrails they’re building into the platform.
New Capabilities for Enterprise Build Velocity
Beyond the AI narrative, I’m watching for product updates that help enterprise teams ship faster on Adobe Experience Cloud.
Edge Delivery Services has been maturing steadily and I want to see where it stands now for large-scale enterprise deployments — not just microsites and campaign pages. The Universal Editor story has been improving and I’m curious how Adobe frames the EDS + structured content integration this year.
Adobe GenStudio is another one I’m tracking. The pitch — a centralised platform for on-brand content production at scale, with AI-assisted generation and workflow built in — is resonating with marketing organisations trying to ship more content without proportionally growing their creative teams. I want to hear from teams who have actually deployed it at scale.
The Networking Is Half the Point
Four Summits in, I’d say this as clearly as I can: the sessions are valuable, but the people are the reason to go.
The conversations that happen between sessions, on the expo floor, over dinner — those are where you get candid, unfiltered perspectives from practitioners solving the same problems you are. No marketing layer, no slide deck polish. Just people who have been in the weeds on the same platforms and want to compare notes.
I’ve come home from every Summit with at least two or three connections that turned into ongoing conversations — people I still reach out to when I’m working through a hard architectural decision or trying to get a read on where a product is actually heading versus where the roadmap says it’s heading. That kind of network doesn’t happen by accident. You have to show up, introduce yourself, and stay curious.
If you’re attending this year, don’t spend every hour in sessions. Leave room to talk to people.
What to Expect If You’re Thinking About Going
The keynotes set the narrative and are worth watching even if you can’t attend in person — Adobe makes them available post-event. But the real value is in the breakout sessions and the labs. The labs give you hands-on time with features that are recently released or in early access. I’ve walked out of labs with things I could put in front of my team the following week.
The Sneaks session is always worth attending. It’s Adobe’s showcase for experimental work that may or may not make it to product — but the hit rate on Sneaks actually shipping has historically been reasonable. It’s a useful signal for where Adobe is investing R&D.
Going In with Questions
I’m heading to Summit with a specific set of questions I want answered — on agentic AI governance, on EDS at enterprise scale, on where GenStudio fits in an organisation that already has a mature AEM content operations practice. I’ll share what I learn when I’m back.
If you’re going to be there, find me. Always happy to connect with other practitioners in the Adobe ecosystem.