Let’s stop pretending customer experience lives only inside marketing. It’s essential to your brand—how people discover your business, interact with you and ultimately decide if they’ll come back. Instead of being the sole owner, marketing should be the main orchestrator of CX, working across functions to combine customer data with branded content to strengthen loyalty.
PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey underscores why this orchestration matters. As AI-enabled personalization and customer engagement grow more important, many organizations still struggle to deliver consistently. To explore what distinguishes leaders from laggards, we looked at one key differentiator—tech enablement.
The impact of tech enablement comes into sharper focus when comparing organizations that leverage Adobe technologies with those that don’t. Our survey found that companies that are using Adobe solutions outperform in both technology maturity and CX outcomes. These companies tend to integrate marketing automation and data management more deeply and are ahead in how they track, personalize and measure customer engagement. In other words, they don’t just have more data but use it more intelligently to shape experiences that define their brands.
For CMOs, tech leaders and CX leaders, this shows what’s possible when technology and creativity converge. Customer experience isn’t just about marketing campaigns and the number of transactions. It’s intimately connected to building trust and measuring growth through smarter use of data, content and technology.
Evolving from instant clicks to lasting connections
Many brands used to obsess over performance marketing versus brand marketing, short-term traffic versus long-term identity. (Some still do.) As more companies embrace the experience supply chain—where every interaction reinforces the brand promise—those that use Adobe for marketing automation are employing more advanced metrics than those that don’t, survey data shows. Leveraging this type of data can be instrumental in turning fragmented interactions into connected experiences that strengthen loyalty and trust. As the survey data shows, organizations using Adobe tools are already advancing along this connected experience journey.
AI that can anticipate, safeguard, personalize—and accelerate customer growth
Chatbots have their place, but if that’s the extent of your AI use for CX, you’re probably in trouble. Even if some consumers are OK talking to a robot about billing issues or troubleshooting, we’ve found through our client experience that most want and expect anticipation, relevance and protection in their brand interactions.
Among survey respondents, Adobe users adopt AI for customer segmentation and targeting, fraud detection and sentiment analysis at higher rates than non-users. Meanwhile, chatbots and virtual assistants play a larger role in non-user AI strategies to enhance customer experience than Adobe users.
How Adobe users and non-users differ in their AI approach to CX
Sure, we all want to increase efficiency and reduce costs through AI. But strategic CMOs and tech leaders also know AI can be a growth engine if you go beyond the basics. Use AI to understand what customers might want before they tell you, to help safeguard them before they’re at risk and to personalize at a scale humans can’t match.
Move from basic digital signals to bottom-line results
Of course, your AI investments in customer experience are only as useful—and profitable—as your measurement of results. Are you confident in how well you track the conversion of a click, like or view to a transaction—and a lasting relationship after that?
In the quest to calculate true return on investment, both Adobe users and non-users rely most on the customer satisfaction score to measure loyalty. But compared to non-users, Adobe users lean more on financial metrics like customer acquisition cost and purchase value. Adobe users also are more likely to compare the effectiveness of AI versus human support than non-users (60% versus 51%).
This isn’t simply about adding more KPIs. It’s about choosing which metrics you can better connect directly to growth, efficiency and customer lifetime value. Making creative bets is great, but success hinges on making insights actionable and reliably measuring the business impact of those bets.
5 next steps for marketing and technology leaders
The writing is on the wall. Or should we say the algorithm has spoken? Companies that will thrive going forward should commit to treating customer experience as their brand, fuse content with data, push AI beyond the obvious and reimagine loyalty as advocacy. Here are five actions to start.
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