Why Adobe Says Marketing Org Charts Need Rebuilding for AI

Marketing teams are being asked to produce more, faster. Creatives now have to cover more languages and more geographies, and the refresh cycles for campaigns keep shrinking. Adobe's argument is that patching this with better software won't be enough. The bigger problem is the structure of the team itself, and that's a harder thing to fix.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen framed the pressure in a letter to shareholders, describing marketing professionals as facing "unprecedented pressure to create compelling content across channels, optimize campaigns, and deliver." That's a familiar complaint from any content operation. What's new is the claim that the fix sits in the org chart, not the tool stack.

The org chart is the bottleneck

Speaking with the press at Adobe Max, Creative VP Resh Sidhu said entire organizational structures may no longer fit the future of marketing. Her line was blunt: "You cannot change... or build the marketing organization of the future with the creative organization of the past."

Here's the thing: most creative organizations were built around handoffs. A brief moves from strategy to copy to design to localization to production, and each step has its own team, its own queue and its own review cycle. That model made sense when output was limited and every asset was expensive to make. When AI cuts the cost of producing a first draft, the handoffs become the slow part. Teams in this position often find that the process was designed for scarcity and now generates delay.

Sidhu's point was that companies need to rethink workflows, the skills employees need, and the whole approach to creative production. She tied this to the broader AI-driven change already underway, rather than treating it as a future scenario.

Measuring AI use is the wrong metric

The discussion started with a question about whether AI could split teams into people who are willing and able to use it and people who aren't. That's a real risk. Adobe's answer was that the usual way of tracking adoption misses the point.

Product Marketing VP Deepa Subramaniam and Sidhu both said AI is already changing how their own teams work. Sidhu described her group as "customer zero," the earliest internal adopter of new Adobe tools, and was blunt about metrics: "We're not counting tokens over here." Counting how often someone opens an AI tool tells you about activity, not about whether the work got better. Leaders who report usage numbers may be measuring the wrong thing entirely.

Adobe says it is folding AI fluency into employee upskilling and support programs. The emphasis there is on judgment and application, which is harder to measure but more likely to matter.

Agents as colleagues, not software

The more interesting shift in the conversation was conceptual. Subramaniam and Sidhu agreed that treating AI as just another piece of software undersells what's happening. Increasingly, agents are being thought of as digital colleagues, with the implications that carries for how tasks get divided and reviewed.

That framing matters because it changes the question. A tool is something you pick up for a task. A colleague changes who does what. If an agent can take a first pass at a concept, test variations or refine a campaign, the human role shifts toward setting direction and deciding what's good enough. Work that once sat deep inside one team can now begin earlier, in places that used to be upstream of marketing altogether.

The executives argued this improves output quality because more people can test their ideas, which brings more perspectives into the work. That's plausible, though it also introduces friction. If people outside marketing can now generate and experiment with creative ideas, someone has to decide who owns what, how feedback flows and where accountability sits. Those are organizational questions, not technical ones, and they're the reason Adobe keeps coming back to structure.

Choice for individuals, pressure for leaders

Sidhu and Subramaniam were clear that individual creators should keep the choice about when, why and whether to use AI. Leaders have a harder job. They have to decide how work gets shared across functions, which roles change, and how collaboration looks when more people can produce drafts.

And yet, the message was that the companies most likely to benefit, and least likely to fall behind, will be the ones willing to question what work looks like in the first place. Patching an old process with new tools tends to produce a faster version of the same bottlenecks. Redesigning the process is slower and more disruptive, but it's where the gains are likely to come from.

What to watch next is whether teams actually change reporting lines, review processes and skill requirements, or whether they keep the old structure and add AI on top. Adobe's leadership is betting on the first. For teams weighing their own approach, the question to ask is simple: if the work were starting from scratch today, would the team look like this?