Leading Marketing Teams Through AI Disruption and Beyond

Running a marketing organization across Asia is no small feat. With its cultural diversity, varying levels of digital maturity, and rapidly evolving customer expectations, the region presents immense complexity. Adding to that complexity is the accelerated adoption of AI, which is fundamentally reshaping the role of today’s marketing leader.

Sitting right at the intersection of these forces is Preeti Rao, Adobe's Asia Marketing Director. Leading the company’s marketing in one of the world’s most dynamic regions, she is responsible not only for Adobe’s growth but also for transforming its marketing organizations to operate in an AI-driven world.

In the recent conversation with CDOTrends, Rao shared her experience in operationalizing AI across diverse markets, balancing the demand of B2B and B2C marketers, and using its own technology as “customer zero” to shape the future of marketing.

AI as a strategic layer across data, content, and activation

AI, Rao noted, is no longer an innovation initiative; it is a foundational capability. “No organization today can escape AI,” she said. “It is redefining every facet of business, including marketing.”

For executives managing customer data, AI’s strategic value lies in its ability to unify insights and execution. In Asia’s multilingual, culturally nuanced markets, Rao said AI enables marketers to analyze customer data across the region, identify behavioral patterns, and turn insights into localized engagement — while upholding brand consistency.

Beyond analytics, AI is transforming the full marketing lifecycle: from planning and content creation to activation, real-time measurement, and continuous optimization. Generative and agentic AI, in particular, are accelerating this shift by automating operational complexity and enabling personalization at scale.

“With AI, marketers are far more empowered — with better tools, intelligence, and confidence to move faster and smarter,” Rao said.

Serving both B2B and B2C — scaling content with relevance

Rao noted one of the unique challenges at Adobe is managing a customer base that spans both B2B and B2C marketers — each with distinct expectations and success metrics.

B2B marketers focus on groups of decision makers, longer sales cycles, and measurable business outcomes such as leads, pipeline, and ROI. Meanwhile, B2C marketers prioritize speed, scale, and content velocity — and are often directly responsible for revenue.

As a CMO, the risk is fragmentation. That challenge becomes even more pronounced in Asia, where digital maturity, regulatory environments, and customer behaviors vary significantly across markets. According to Rao, success depends on recognizing these differences while designing integrated engagement strategies.

“At the end of the day, every marketer — B2B or B2C — is accountable for growth and business impact,” she said. “The focus is achieving scale while upholding audience relevance.”

Adobe turns theory into practice

Amidst these challenges, Rao said Adobe also has a distinct advantage — being both the creator and the user of its portfolio of creative, productivity, and customer experience orchestration technologies.

“We are customer zero for all our products,” she said. “We use our own tech as marketers and feed real-world insights back to our product and engineering teams.”

This is the philosophy behind the “Adobe on Adobe” program. It represents a deliberate shift in operating model — placing marketers firmly in the driver’s seat to apply GenAI and agentic capabilities for content creation, data analysis, and campaign activation. “This creates space for our creativity, strategic thinking, and innovation to thrive,” she said.

Rebuilding the content supply chain with GenAI

One tangible example of this transformation is content. As a global organization running campaigns across multiple channels and more than 40 languages, Adobe faced increasing pressure on its creative and marketing teams.

“Traditional workflows were simply not built for today’s volume and velocity of content,” Rao said.

To address this challenge, the company’s global marketing team has adopted Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing to modernize the content supply chain. The platform enables large-scale creative testing, rapid content refresh and localization, real-time campaign execution, and clearer measurement of creative performance.

The results underscore AI’s business impact. “We are still on a learning journey, but the results have been promising,” she said. Adobe has seen a 9% increase in return on advertising spend globally, a 57% uplift in email click-through rates through testing at scale, and a dramatic reduction in content refresh cycles — from three weeks to just three days.

Leading AI change: organization, skills, and data foundations

Beyond these promising results, this experience also gave Rao a practical blueprint: AI isn't about replacing marketers, but augmenting them.

She noted that AI adoption is as much about people and processes as it is about technology. “Change management is critical,” she said. “It requires building comfort with new technologies, new processes, and new ways of working.”

Marketing teams must now combine traditional skills with AI proficiency, while organizations rethink operating models and invest in strong data foundations.

Looking ahead, Rao expected marketers to be increasingly measured by their ability to drive business outcomes, align with enterprise strategy, and translate customer data into growth.

“The opportunity for marketers to embrace AI, upskill, and prepare for what’s coming will make them invaluable to their organizations,” Rao concluded. “This is a journey — and it’s one we must continue.”

Discover More: Adobe’s AI Journey in Action

To explore these ideas in greater depth, Adobe will host an executive luncheon on May 14 in Hong Kong, showcasing how the company has applied its AI-powered platforms to transform marketing at scale. 

The session will offer a behind-the-scenes look at Adobe’s playbook to modernize marketing operations — AI as a strategic layer across data, content and activation — and practical lessons for CMOs to apply in their own organizations as they navigate the AI era. Find out more HERE

Image credit: iStockphoto/tadamichi