Adobe's Platform Power Play

In the animated classic 'The Sorceror's Apprentice", Mickey Mouse enchants his mop to help with his chores - soon the mop takes over, and magic is out of control and chaos ensues.

Well, last month Adobe launched the enchanted mop of marketing: Brand Concierge.

My view is that orchestration is the most important capability of a leader, team and organisation in these contemporary times. Without it, we drown in complexity and missed opportunities. With it, we can surf waves of growth in real time.

Every orchestra needs a conductor. Someone who interprets the score, sets the tempo, and coordinates the musicians to create harmony from potential chaos. In the world of customer experience, brands have traditionally played this role: orchestrating touchpoints, channels, and messages to create coherent customer journeys.

But as Adobe unveiled its AI Platform for Customer Experience Orchestration (CXO) at Summit 2025 last month, a profound power shift became visible. Beyond the technical capabilities and partnership announcements lay something more fundamental: a battle for who gets to hold the conductor's baton.

The most dangerous aspect of Adobe's orchestration play isn't the technology itself. It's the subtle transfer of control, from brands who know their customers intimately to platforms who promise efficiency at the cost of autonomy.

And now, announced just last week, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has been named the first-ever "Creative Champion" Award by Cannes Lions for democratising creativity through technology.

For decades, brands have assembled customer experiences from diverse tools, tactics, and technologies. They've composed the melody, arranged the parts, and conducted the performance, with technology vendors merely providing the instruments.

Adobe's new platform—with its Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator and "Brand Concierge"—promises to automate this complexity away. The conductor's baton is gently pried from the brand's hand and replaced with a ticket to sit in the audience and watch the performance.

The timing of this orchestration battle is particularly significant. Just months before Adobe's announcements, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared the "copilot era" over, positioning Salesforce's Agentforce as the future of autonomous AI agents. Microsoft's Satya Nadella responded by expanding Copilot into agent territory, creating a three-way battle for orchestration dominance. The public feuding between Benioff and Microsoft over AI capabilities has only intensified the stakes.

This isn't unique to Adobe. Salesforce has rebranded its Einstein Copilot as "Agentforce," with CEO Marc Benioff declaring the "copilot era" over. Microsoft has embedded its Copilot with orchestration capabilities across its enterprise suite. The consulting giants are building orchestration practices to design and implement these systems.

All share a common message: conducting is too complex, too demanding for mere humans.

Better to automate it.

But who writes the score when you surrender the podium?

As the battle for orchestration dominance unfolds, three distinct approaches have emerged, each with its own vision of how the customer experience symphony should sound.

1. The Platform Consolidators: Adobe & Salesforce

These marketing clouds promise a unified experience through a single integrated platform. Their orchestration pitch centres on consolidation—bring everything into our ecosystem, and we'll make it work seamlessly.

Adobe's Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator exemplifies this approach. It manages AI agents both from Adobe and third parties, but all through Adobe's interface, using Adobe's data models, with Adobe's understanding of what makes effective customer experiences.

Core Proposition: "We own the customer data and creative process, so let us orchestrate everything."

Silent Cost: You're locked into their vision of what good looks like. Their roadmap becomes your roadmap, their priorities your priorities.

2. The Enterprise Integrators: Microsoft & IBM

These technology giants approach orchestration from their entrenched position in enterprise infrastructure. Microsoft's evolution from Copilot to autonomous agents focuses on connecting orchestration to core business processes, not just marketing workflows.

Core Proposition: "We already run your business, let us orchestrate your customer experience too."

Silent Cost: You get seamless business integration but sacrifice marketing specialisation and creative excellence.

3. The Tailored Craftspeople: Consulting Firms & Specialists

From Accenture to specialised players like 6sense and Qualtrics, these providers offer custom-built orchestration tailored to each brand's unique needs.

Core Proposition: "We'll build orchestration that's uniquely yours."

Silent Cost: Higher complexity, cost, and dependence on their expertise to maintain and evolve.

Each of these approaches produces a fundamentally different symphony. The first creates consistent, predictable performances at the cost of distinction. The second connects business processes efficiently but may lack creative inspiration. The third produces the most distinctive music but at the highest cost and complexity.

Interestingly, Adobe announced strategic partnerships with many of these competitors, including Microsoft, IBM, and ServiceNow—suggesting the orchestration battle may ultimately be about integration capabilities rather than pure displacement.

When multiple brands adopt the same orchestration platform, configured similarly, optimised toward similar KPIs, a troubling question emerges: what happens when every orchestra plays the same notes, in the same way, conducted by the same AI?

The answer is commoditisation.

Consider Adobe's "Brand Concierge"—AI agents that guide consumers from exploration to purchase. When multiple brands deploy similar concierges, optimised by similar algorithms, using similar data models, the uniqueness that differentiates brands inevitably erodes.

This isn't speculation—it's the natural outcome of algorithmic optimization. When multiple systems optimise toward similar goals, they converge on similar solutions. We've already seen this in digital advertising, where algorithm-driven campaigns across competitors often appear indistinguishable.

The core danger isn't choosing the wrong orchestration platform. It's choosing any orchestration platform as your conductor, rather than as an instrument in your orchestra.

The brands that will thrive won't be those who select the best orchestration technology. They'll be those who maintain their role as conductors while leveraging platforms as sophisticated instruments in their orchestra.

This requires a fundamental mindset shift—from viewing orchestration as something to be outsourced to viewing it as your core strategic advantage. We call this the Maestro Mindset, and it consists of five principles:

1. Compose Your Own Score

Define your customer experience strategy independent of any platform's capabilities or limitations. Start with what your customers need, not what your technology can deliver.

2. Select Musicians, Not Orchestras

Choose orchestration components based on specific strengths, not comprehensive capabilities. Use Adobe for content workflows, Microsoft for business process integration, and specialised tools for unique needs.

3. Maintain Score Ownership

Build a customer data foundation that you control, independent of any orchestration platform. Your understanding of customers should exist outside any vendor's ecosystem.

4. Conduct Rehearsals

Test orchestration approaches at small scales before full implementation. Pilot different approaches in parallel to understand their true impact on customer experience.

5. Train Your Replacement

Develop internal orchestration capabilities—people who understand both the technology and your business. Never completely delegate orchestration expertise to external parties.

The Maestro Mindset doesn't reject orchestration platforms. It simply puts them in their proper place—as instruments to be played, not conductors to be followed.

As marketing complexity accelerates, as platforms consolidate power, as AI rewrites rules, the temptation to surrender the conductor's baton becomes overwhelming. Adobe's orchestration play—like those from Salesforce, Microsoft, and others—offers an appealing simplification of an increasingly chaotic customer experience landscape.

But the brands that will thrive in this new era will be those who resist this temptation. They'll maintain their role as composers of distinctive customer experiences, conductors of complex multichannel journeys, and critics who constantly evaluate whether the performance meets their standards.

They'll use platforms selectively, integrate capabilities thoughtfully, and build their own orchestration expertise. Their customer experiences won't be platform-defined but platform-enabled.

In the battle for the conductor's podium, these brands understand the most important truth: no technology platform, however sophisticated, can interpret your brand's unique voice as well as you can. The most impressive AI can execute a score brilliantly, but it cannot compose the music that will uniquely move your customers.

That remains, now and forever, the role of the brand.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 20 May 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.