Insights and Actions from Adobe Summit 2026

How leaders build the connective tissue that puts AI tools to work

Seventy-six percent of executives say they're behind on AI transformation, according to research conducted by WSJ Intelligence. Many enterprises have already made serious, sustained commitments to the right platforms, partnerships and vision for what the modern marketing infrastructure should look like.

Adobe has done its part. The question is whether organizations have built the connective tissue to put AI tools to use.

What Adobe has already built

The available tools are genuinely extraordinary. Adobe Experience Platform, Firefly and GenStudio for Performance Marketing comprise a fundamentally different creative and marketing operating environment than anything that existed just five years ago. Adobe has built the infrastructure for intelligent, personalized content at a scale and sophistication the industry has been promising for a decade. The capability is real, and the potential is enormous. Yet most organizations still only access a fraction of it.

Closing the utilization gap is the defining challenge for enterprise marketing leaders right now.

In practice, organizations activate Firefly on top of a creative workflow built around manual review cycles and disconnected brand governance. They deploy GenStudio pointed at a content taxonomy that hasn’t been audited in years. They license Experience Platform without the data model that connects audience intelligence to creative decisioning in real time. The software is ready, but the overarching operating environment is still waiting to be built.

The connective tissue organizations still need

Adobe's full potential lives in the connective tissue: a content schema that makes assets reusable and intelligent across channels, a brand knowledge layer that lets AI generate from something coherent and ownable, and feedback loops that connect content performance back into creative strategy.

That connective tissue has to be intentionally designed. It requires organization-wide architectural work that unlocks what the platform was built to deliver.

How Brands Close the Gap

The brands closing the gap fastest have asked themselves a foundational question: What should our organization look like to take full advantage of what Adobe has made possible? Solving this entails redesigning the following:

01

Briefs are structured.

02

Brand decisions are encoded.

03

Assets are tagged and made reusable across the enterprise.

04

Creative output feeds back into learning systems.

Building the operating environment

The infrastructure for value accumulation, deliberately built in parallel with the technology, separates transformational outcomes from costly underutilization.

This is a systems problem. Solving it requires someone who thinks in systems, someone who understands that a content strategy is also a data strategy. That a brand architecture also functions as a schema, and a creative brief also serves as machine instruction.

Code and Theory calls this approach “living creative systems,” the operational and architectural infrastructure that converts enterprise technology investment into compounding creative and business value. We've built living creative systems with the NFL, TIME and Amazon, using Adobe's marketing ecosystem. The pattern holds everywhere. The organizations that unlock value build the systems these tools were designed to power.

The investment has been made. The infrastructure to realize it is the work still ahead.

About Code and Theory Network

The Code and Theory Network is the only network with a balance of 50% creative and 50% engineers at scale. The technology and creative network within Stagwell Group is built to experience change for businesses that need to navigate the complexity of changing consumer behaviors, emerging technologies and AI. With a global footprint and the capabilities to work across the entire consumer journey, we crave the hardest problems to solve. The network includes the flagship agency Code and Theory as well as Kettle, instrument, Left Field Labs, Mediacurrent, Rhythm and Truelogic. Code and Theory clients include Amazon, Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, NFL, Pfizer and Yeti.

Let’s get to work. Start a conversation.

newbiz@codeandtheory.com

Code and Theory is a proud member of Stagwell Group. Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our 13,000+ specialists in 34+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com

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