Adobe Inc. is building on the launch of its first set of artificial intelligence agents with a new set of agentic offerings aimed squarely at marketers in the business-to-business industry.

The new agents come almost one month to the day after the company debuted its first set of AI agents in the Adobe Experience Platform, which is a suite of tools designed to support customer experience management. It provides a centralized portal for companies to store their customer data, which can then be leveraged to create more personalized experiences for individual customers.

Adobe’s first AI agents were aimed at consumer marketing, but it acknowledged that B2B marketing is a whole different ballgame. In business environments, buying decisions are often discussed by various people sitting on a committee, and each one may have a different perspective. Moreover, each organization’s internal buying process tends to be unique, and that causes headaches for marketers trying to sell to them.

One of the main challenges is trying to identify the specific decision makers within an organization that need to sign off on any large purchases, be it hardware or software. They also need to influence those individuals, engage with them throughout the buying journey, and convince them to agree to the deal. Selling to businesses is a tough business, but Adobe believes that AI agents can be just as helpful in this area as they are in consumer sales, but only if they have a very different set of capabilities.

To that end, Adobe has announced a suite of highly specialized, B2B agents that aim to reimagine both marketing and customer experience for business buyers. Available from today, they’re powered by the company’s Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, which handles the intelligence and reasoning capabilities of the new agents, and can be accessed within Adobe Experience’s suite of applications.

Automating B2B sales processes

For instance, the new Audience Agent in Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is designed to analyze a wide range of customer data, including both structured and unstructured information, from sources such as customer relationship management platforms, web content and marketing activity. Its goal is to surface insights that can help B2B marketers to identify the right audience – namely those key decision makers that sit on buying committees.

In addition to identifying these individuals, the Audience Agent also tries to surface “buying group personas” and generate insights on the highest-value buying groups for specific products and services, so they can be targeted to create more demand.

Once the buyers have been identified, the Journey Agent in Adobe’s Journey Optimizer B2B Edition can take over. It’s designed to create and orchestrate customer journeys and marketing campaigns based on predefined goals, and run them across multiple channels, including email, mobile and web, the company said.

There’s also a new Data Insights Agent, which lives in the Customer Journey Analytics B2B Edition app. As the name suggests, it’s all about generating insights from the different communication channels used to interact with buying groups and accounts. The insights it collects are delivered to marketing teams in a conversational way, and can be used to create visualizations, forecast demand or remediate customer experience problems.

Adobe says its new B2B agents have a natural advantage, because the Adobe Experience platform sits on a ton of valuable customer data that they can harvest to perform various marketing tasks autonomously. They’re designed to work with human marketers and sales professionals in a collaborative way, helping them to target buyers and close deals faster and increase customer satisfaction.

Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that B2B selling is far more complex than dealing with consumers, because it’s rarely just one voice that’s communicating a company’s buying needs. “B2B is truly a cacophony of noise, and it can be incredibly hard to decipher what it is companies actually need,” she said.

However, this complexity makes B2B sales an ideal proving ground for AI and agentic processes to show their worth, as they have the unique capacity to cut through the mountains of account data, signals and noise that marketers and sellers have to deal with, she said.  “What these agents represent is Adobe leveraging its deep understanding of customers, content, journeys and engagement to deliver highly focused, purpose-built agents that start with a distinctly B2B outcome in mind,” Miller explained. “This is in line with Adobe’s highly opinionated approach to AI that centers on quality of work and quality of life of its users.”

Cisco Systems Inc. Vice President of Demand Marketing Brett Rafuse attested to the effectiveness of Adobe’s B2B agents, saying they help his team to personalize customer experiences and drive more sales for the company. “By shortening the time it takes to identify key decision makers and orchestrate compelling cross-channel journeys, we can boost account engagement and accelerate deal closure,” he said.

More B2B agents to come

The new agents are just a taste of what’s to come, for Adobe has plans to infuse agentic automation in every step of the B2B sales journey. In the coming weeks, it’s planning to launch a new Account Qualification Agent in Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition that’s targeted at business development professionals looking to identify new sales prospects.

Its task is to evaluate each prospect’s needs, budget, timeline considerations and level of authority, so it can determine how valuable the sales opportunity really is. Then, humans can quickly look at the summary it generates and decide if the lead is worth following up.

The company also has a new Brand Concierge in the pipeline, which is aimed at casual customers who are browsing a company’s products and services for the first time. The idea is that by having a dedicated concierge, companies can quickly engage with these prospects in a personalized, conversational way, with a chatbot that’s able to hone in on their needs and make appropriate recommendations.

The Brand Concierge will be backed up by a specialized Product Advisor Agent that has extensive knowledge of each product and service, so it can provide the insights and answers each prospect needs to make a decision. In addition, the concierge will also invite casual prospects to book a meeting and discuss their needs further – a key step toward landing B2B deals.

Miller said that if Adobe’s Brand Concierge lives up to expectations, it has the potential to “transform how business customers search, discover and engage during their product search experiences.”

Images: Adobe