eaching the right audience for your product, business, or personal brand is top of mind for nearly everyone, especially in the age of AI.

That is top of mind for Rachel Thornton, CMO of Adobe Enterprise, who is a marketing professional marketing to marketers. I sat down with her at Adobe Summit to learn more about how she is approaching marketing at a time when there are deep concerns about LLMs reshaping the way people get information.

The first thing marketers have to think about: how to actually show up as AI changes brand discovery.

“If you go back a couple of years, you probably would have gone to Google when you would search for something, and that's still valid, but increasingly, people are going to places like ChatGPT or Perplexity,” Thornton told The Deep View.

A Pew Research Center study from earlier this year showed that about 6 in 10 respondents visited a search result page with an AI-generated summary, and another study from the firm found that one in five Americans who have seen AI summaries in search results find them useful, and another 52% says it’s somewhat useful.

Adobe’s 2026 AI and Digital Trends consumer report study found a similar pattern: 25% of users said they use AI most often to search for information, make purchase decisions, or find recommendations, compared with 48% who use search engines.

Thornton’s advice on navigating this landscape: think of the agents.

“If you think about, for example, brand visibility and showing up in an LLM, that comes from not just having a great experience when customers come, but also [when] agents [come],” said Thornton. “So you almost have to think about it as, basically, you have, as a marketer, a new audience.”

A whole new area of specialty has emerged to address this concept, encompassing two related disciplines: generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO).

Just as search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on techniques to rank highly in traditional search results and drive website traffic, AEO focuses on structuring content so that AI assistants and agents can readily pull from it, while GEO focuses on optimizing content so that it surfaces naturally within generative answers.

The second bucket she encourages marketers to consider is how AI can help marketing teams move faster, including creating content, understanding customer data, and delivering more personalized experiences.

In particular, Thornton sees value in how AI can help marketers with their orchestration needs, ensuring campaigns work well across different channels, with agents acting as a supporting cast to help bring those customer journeys to life.

Thornton wishes she had Adobe GenStudio earlier in her career. She explained that, as a marketing manager, the old campaign workflow was lengthy, including writing a brief, developing creative concepts, and spending weeks or months building assets across all channels. By the time you launched it, sometimes the moment had already passed.

“As you put it out across your channels, you might think, ‘Oh, it isn't performing as well as I had hoped,’ but because you invested so much time, energy, blood, sweat and tears, you're like ‘I got to keep going with it,’” said Thornton. “But now with generative AI, because you can create that content so quickly, you can scale that content, scale those assets, then you really can do more experimentation.”

Faster production makes it easier to test different headlines and variations. As part of Adobe's customer-zero approach, Thornton and her team use the products internally before they reach customers.

Still, there is no getting around the fact that people are sensitive to and on the lookout for AI slop. Prime examples are McDonald's and Coca-Cola's holiday ads, which used AI in a way that seemed lazy and sloppy, prompting a ton of backlash.

Thornton acknowledged the risk but highlighted the need to continue focusing on a company’s brand and ethos, and to develop ways to bring them to life for customers, while avoiding brand drift that won’t resonate with audiences.

“I think having it's less about the tools [and] it's more about what's the judgment, what's the understanding of the offering, the customer, the market. That kind of critical [decision-making] and high fidelity judgment is really important. It's always been important,” said Thornton.

Not surprisingly, her advice to future marketers navigating AI is timeless: get to know your customer thoroughly.

“I think it's learning how to get deep on a customer problem. Understand what it is. You know [what] your customer is looking for. I always think if you start with your customer working backward, that's critical,” said Thornton.

Disclosure: Sabrina Ortiz's travel to Adobe Summit was paid by Adobe. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.