- Adobe launches AI and Digital Trends Report
- A survey of 3000 managers and 4000 consumers reveals attitudes towards agent AI
- Consumers want the human touch, but are companies even ready?
Adobe has released its 2026 AI and Digital Trends Reportsurveyed 3,000 executives and 4,000 consumers to reveal both enterprise and consumer attitudes toward agent AI, business readiness, and the overall experience and expectations.
The report has some interesting findings – for one, fewer than half of consumers (43%) said they would interact with a brand’s AI agent given the chance. Still, 46% said they had no problem if a brand uses AI – with one big caveat that companies need to seriously consider: they don’t care about using agentic AI – as long as their needs are met.
I would expect these numbers to grow – up to a point. Because already now, a clear trend is developing.
Report results
Elsewhere, according to Adobe’s report, 37% said they would cut off engagements with a brand if they expected a human touch and got an AI, and 70% thought those AI interactions should feel human. So people don’t want robots – they crave the human touch.
But what really stood out to me is the massive disconnect between how consumers and businesses measure AI success.
As you would expect from businesses, the core measures of success are cost metrics and efficiency gains.
That’s simply not what consumers are interested in. According to Adobe, users judge AI experiences on “trust, transparency and whether their needs are met.”
To me, it feels like some brands risk putting the cart before the horse. Without meeting users where they are and meeting their expectations, all the efficiencies and savings in the world won’t stop consumers from finding a company that can meet their requirements.
But to do so, companies will need to overcome the widespread difficulties in properly scaling their AI.
The report highlights how readiness to deploy enterprise AI faces extreme pressure, with the biggest barriers to scaling up being data integration and data quality (75%). Less than half of the managers surveyed (43%) believe that their data quality and availability are sufficient enough for the use of artificial intelligence. And without them, any AI is effectively doomed to failure.
This may well explain why so few of these companies have rolled out agent AI across the organization for customer support (only 16%) and discovery and search purposes (small 13%).
But it’s not all bad news for brands.
Aside from agent AI, the vast majority of respondents (76%) claimed that generative AI (think Firefly or Google’s Nano Banana) has improved the volume and speed of ideas and content production. Meanwhile, 70% said it has helped enabled non-creative teams to produce content.
Commenting on the findings, Rachel Thornton, CMO, Adobe Enterprise said, “Many organizations are still caught in the difficult middle ground between expectation and execution. As customer expectations change, brands must evolve to orchestrate agentic, AI-powered experiences that can act and respond across all touchpoints.” […] to deliver meaningful experiences on a global scale.”
