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Our team had a blast at Adobe Summit 2026 last week!
Now that we’ve had a few days to decompress, we wanted to share some of our biggest takeaways from the event.
There were so many great sessions and interesting conversations this year. From major Marketo announcements to the continued rise of AI agents, this Summit felt like a turning point. Not just for the platform, but for the community around it.
Here’s what stood out to us.
If you’ve been in the Marketo world for a while, you know there have been lingering questions. Will the platform get the level of investment the community wants to see? When will things on the roadmap start to roll out? These are conversations we’ve been hearing for a while now.
But this Summit put a lot of that to rest.
The community energy was noticeably different. People were genuinely excited, having forward-looking conversations about what they could build, how they’d use the new tools, and what all of it means for their work. Marketo Champions were out in full force, and it wasn’t hard to see why. They had something real to advocate for this year.
On the product side, Marketo had features actually launching the same week as Summit. Not just roadmap previews, but tangible updates rolling out in real time. It was exciting to see that kind of momentum.
And the broader integration story got clearer too. The roadmap showed how Marketo connects with CDP and AJO in ways that make sense, and it paints a much more cohesive picture of where Adobe is taking things. The “is Marketo being sunset?” conversation feels like it’s completely over.
AI has been a recurring theme at Summit for a few years now. But at previous conferences, a lot of the conversation was theoretical. “Here’s what these tools might be able to do.” “Imagine a world where…”, and so on.
This year, however, there were far more real-life examples of companies using AI in scalable, meaningful ways. The sessions that got the most buzz were the ones that showed something working, gave attendees detailed instructions, and left people feeling like they could go home and actually do something with what they learned.
On the Marketo side specifically, the AI announcements felt grounded in the day-to-day reality of Marketing Ops. Callable agents for things like data management, segmentation, and standardization. Build with AI as a conversational interface where you interact with an agent to perform specific tasks. And a future direction where teams could eventually have multiple AI agents working together inside the platform at once, which was announced as “MarketoClaw”.
The theme across all of it was essentially: What’s been manual is becoming conversational. Less time clicking through menus, more time thinking about strategy. As one of our team members put it: “Finally, we’re going to have automation to set up the automations.”
The most exciting part to us isn’t about AI replacing what we do; it’s about AI taking away the parts we’ve been ready to move on from. The repetitive setup, the tedious data work, basically all the tasks that eat up hours but don’t require much creative thinking. That’s what’s being handed off, and it frees up space for the strategic work that actually moves the needle.
For anyone who hasn’t been deeply involved in AI initiatives yet, this Summit was definitely a serious wake-up call. AI was in almost every session title and woven into virtually every conversation at the event. It’s no longer a side topic or a “nice to have.” It’s the direction everything is moving.
One of the more significant announcements was Adobe’s release of its own MCP server for Marketo.
For context, several companies (including us at RP) had already built their own MCP connections to Marketo so we could plug in external AI tools. Adobe offering a native MCP server is a big step forward for the broader ecosystem.
What makes this interesting is what it signals. It’s essentially an acknowledgment that AI isn’t going to be a single-platform play. Adobe built native AI tools inside Marketo, and there was plenty of that on display at Summit. But the MCP server shows a recognition that the community will want to use other AI tools alongside one another.
That dual approach feels very true to what Marketo has always been about. Flexibility and customization. You can use what Adobe builds natively, or you can connect whatever external AI tools fit your workflow. The choice is yours, and you’re not locked into one path.
This is a shift worth paying attention to. The future of AI in MarTech isn’t going to live inside any single platform. It’s going to be about interoperability, and MCP is a big part of making that possible.
The “garbage in, garbage out” conversation is nothing new in Marketing Ops. Clean data, solid naming conventions, and good documentation have always mattered. But with AI now in the mix, there’s no hiding from it anymore.
Every Marketo instance is different. The quality of your field definitions, governance, and overall instance structure will directly impact how well AI agents can understand and operate within your environment. The most organized instances are going to see the benefits first, simply because agents can make sense of what they’re working with. Bad data leads to bad AI outputs, and AI only accelerates the decisions you’re making. So if those decisions are based on messy data, you’re just making bad calls faster.
The concerns we heard at Summit reflected this. People weren’t questioning whether the AI technology works. They were asking whether their organizations are set up to use it effectively. Internal adoption, access, governance, and readiness are the right areas of focus. Our team had some great conversations with clients at the event about what they can be doing right now to prepare for the capabilities Marketo is rolling out.
Summit 2026 brought real momentum back to the Marketo community.
The roadmap felt meaningful, the AI direction felt practical, and the conversations felt more forward-looking than they have in a long time. We’re excited about where Marketo is headed and how these changes will reshape the way we all work.
We’re already helping clients get their systems and teams ready for what’s coming. So if you want to talk through what this means for your organization or need help preparing your instance for AI, reach out to us! We’d love to chat.