Adobe rolls out AI agents for online marketing tools 

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Adobe on Tuesday said it is rolling out artificial intelligence "agents" that brands can use to help consumers navigate their websites.

Adobe is known for consumer apps such as Photoshop but also sells a suite of business-to-business software tools used in online marketing, which made up a quarter of Adobe's $21.5 billion in sales in its most recent fiscal year.

The new tools use AI technology to help brands target marketing messages to different users based on their online activity.

For example, content can be tailored to a young person's profile if they reached a website through a TikTok ad versus an older person's profile if they clicked on a result from a search query.

Amit Ahuja, senior vice president of Adobe's experience cloud unit, said users increasingly expect to interact with websites through chatbots as they do with apps such as ChatGPT.

Adobe's tools ensure that a business can offer that capability with a better awareness of the user.

For example, if a person lands on a travel booking site after clicking an ad on Instagram and asks about booking a trip, the site's chatbot can check both inventory as well as what kind of destination was shown in the ad, providing a better idea of what to suggest to the user.

Ahuja said AI functions help websites co-ordinate both functions, which were previously managed in completely different ways "with different guardrails".

Adobe is also releasing other new tools for digital marketers. One tool, for example, allows marketing professionals to tell AI agents their goals for making website changes to increase digital sales. The agent in response can recommend ways to get it done and then make the changes.

Ahuja said Adobe's aim is to speed up "what would have taken months in the past, where I'm waiting for a coding team or somebody to go fix it."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Sam Holmes)