33: Rethink customer experience orchestration with AI: Insights from Adobe Enterprise CMO Rachel Thornton
Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart · Alan B. Hart
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Show Notes
How can marketing leaders deliver personalization at scale as content demands surge? How do brands protect discoverability as customers shift their search focus from SEO to answer engines and AI agents?
At CES 2026, Alan Hart sat down with Rachel Thornton, Enterprise CMO at Adobe, to unpack the ways AI is reshaping customer experience orchestration and the content supply chain. Rachel explains that real personalization drives a major increase in content needs, and that AI can compress production cycles so teams can create, test and optimize large volumes of campaign assets faster than humans alone while staying consistent and on-brand across channels. The conversation then turns to generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) where Rachel notes discoverability is increasingly dependent on how brands show up in AI-driven search results and in the broader ecosystem of content beyond their own websites.
Throughout the conversation, Rachel reinforces that making AI work requires coordinated change across data foundations, processes and skills, not just new tools. She also offers practical lessons for other CMOs on centering customer needs and building a culture of curiosity and experimentation, so teams keep learning as the marketing playbook evolves.
In this episode, you'll learn:
Ways AI enables personalization at scale
Strategies to modernize the content supply chain
How AI is shifting marketing and the adjustments marketers can make to stay discoverable
Key highlights:
[00:00] Introduction
[01:00] A love of reading
[01:40] Rachel's career path
[02:50] Life as the Enterprise CMO
[03:55] How AI is changing the marketing role
[06:05] Content supply chain at its best
[07:45] Using AI to its full potential
[09:20] Discoverability in the AI era
[11:45] Lessons for CMOs
[13:20] Examples of companies doing marketing well
[14:15] An experience that defines you: Customer face time
[16:05] Advice to your younger self: It's not linear. Try new things!
[16:45] A topic marketers need to learn more about: AI
[17:40] What are you curious about: Robots
[18:30] Largest opportunity to marketers today: "Everybody is a creator at heart"
[19:50] CES trends: Embedded AI
Resources mentioned:
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing
Project Fizzion (Coca-Cola x Adobe)
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