33: Rethink customer experience orchestration with AI: Insights from Adobe Enterprise CMO Rachel Thornton

About this episode

Alan Hart interviews Rachel Thornton about how AI is transforming customer experience orchestration and the content supply chain in marketing.

How can marketing leaders deliver personalization at scale as content demands surge? How do brands protect discoverability as customers shift their search focus from SEO to answer engines and AI agents? At CES 2026, Alan Hart sat down with Rachel Thornton, Enterprise CMO at Adobe, to unpack the ways AI is reshaping customer experience orchestration and the content supply chain. Rachel explain s that real personalization drives a major increase in content needs, and that AI can compress production cycles so teams can create, test and optimize large volumes of campaign assets faster than humans alone while staying consistent and on - brand across channels. The conversation then turns to g enerative e ngine o ptimization (GEO ) and a nswer e ngine o ptimization (AEO ) where Rachel notes discoverability is increasingly dependent on how brands show up in AI-driven s earch results and in the broader ecosystem of content beyond their own websites. Throughout the conversation , Rachel reinforce s that making AI work requires coordinated change across data foundations, processes and skills, not just new tools. She also offer s practical lessons for other CMOs on centering customer needs…

People in this episode

Host: Alan Hart

Guest: Rachel Thornton

Topics covered

• customer experience orchestration
• AI in marketing
• personalization at scale
• content supply chain
• generative engine optimization
• answer engine optimization

Keywords

• AI
• personalization
• content marketing
• customer experience
• SEO
• discoverability
• marketing strategies
• content supply chain

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Adobe

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