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By Nick 4 min read

Adobe AI and Digital Trends 2026: 4 takeaways and the one nobody is watching

Adobe's annual report surveyed 3,000 executives and 4,000 consumers. Generative AI is delivering, agentic AI is raising expectations… and data is the big bottleneck.

Data dashboard with a 39% circular gauge and a rising bar and line chart

Every year, Adobe and Oxford Economics publish the AI and Digital Trends report, one of the most complete snapshots of how companies are using technology to improve customer experience. The 2026 edition —the 16th— surveyed 3,000 executives and practitioners and 4,000 consumers worldwide.

We read the report, and these are the four takeaways we find most relevant, with a practical reading of each.

1. You have 2 to 5 seconds

Half of consumers say content on social media, digital ads and promotional emails has just 2 to 5 seconds to capture their attention. Adobe's diagnosis is clear: people are overwhelmed by content that is irrelevant, poorly timed or outright misleading.

At the same time, how customers decide is changing:

  • 51% prioritize value for price when deciding to trust a brand.
  • 25% already use AI platforms like ChatGPT as their main research tool before buying.
  • 49% would use AI to get personalized product recommendations.

Our take: relevance is no longer a differentiator, it's table stakes. And a growing share of the "first contact" with your brand happens inside an AI assistant, not on your site.

2. Generative AI is already delivering

Here's the good news. Organizations that adopted generative AI report concrete improvements:

  • 76% improved the speed and volume of content production.
  • 69% see gains in employee productivity.
  • 65% see marketing-driven revenue growth.

Our take: the "let's try it and see" phase is over. Generative AI has proven its value, especially in content. The challenge now is scaling it with process and governance, not just pilots.

3. High expectations for agentic AI (and a more cautious customer)

The next wave is agentic AI: agents that don't just generate, but carry out tasks end to end.

  • 63% of organizations expect it to free their teams for more strategic and creative work.
  • 42% plan to design distinct "personalities" for their agents depending on the audience.

But on the other side, one in five consumers rejects the idea of using a personal agent altogether.

Our take: agents are coming, but customer trust has to be earned. Transparency, control and an experience that truly saves time will make the difference between adoption and rejection.

4. The one nobody is watching: data

For us, this is the most important finding in the report:

  • Only 39% of organizations have a shared customer data platform (CDP) capable of supporting agentic AI.
  • Fewer than half (44%) consider their data quality sufficient for AI initiatives.
  • Just 31% have a framework to measure the ROI of agentic AI.

The data gap holding back agentic AI: 63% expect it to free their teams, but only 44% have sufficient data quality, 39% a CDP able to support it and 31% a framework to measure its ROI

Put simply: most companies want agents, but lack the foundation to make them work. An agent is only as good as the data it can access. Without unified, clean, real-time data, agentic AI remains a promise.

What to do with all this

If we had to turn the report into an action plan:

  1. Unify your customer data. Before the next agent, invest in the foundation: unified profiles, data quality and governance.
  2. Scale what already works. If generative AI delivered in content, extend it to more teams with clear processes.
  3. Design for trust. Every AI experience should be useful, transparent and easy for the customer to control.
  4. Decide how you'll measure. Without ROI metrics, any agentic AI initiative is hard to defend and hard to scale.
  5. Get ready to be found by AI. If 1 in 4 customers researches in ChatGPT, your catalog and content need to be ready for it.

In short

The 2026 report shows an industry already getting results from generative AI and looking eagerly at agentic AI, but with an outstanding debt in data. The companies that fix that foundation first will be the ones that capture the value of the next wave.

At Improntus we support brands across that whole chain: data, platforms and experiences. If you'd like to talk about applying these findings to your business, let's talk.

Sources: Adobe's 2026 AI and Digital Trends Report: four key takeaways and Adobe 2026 AI and Digital Trends Report, Adobe, February 2026.

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