Over the past several years, Adobe and Workday have built a partnership focused on modernizing content creation and helping Workday deliver more seamless, personalized, and data-driven customer experiences.
Now, that effort is taking shape through an AI-powered marketing engine built on Adobe technology. The foundation is an Adobe Experience Platform application. Last year, Workday released the revamped Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, providing a unified data foundation built for larger, more relevant, AI-supported customer engagement. Adobe GenStudio solutions, including Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Workfront, Adobe Express, and Adobe Firefly, unify Workday’s creative and content operations. This connected system enables Workday teams to create, manage, and scale AI-powered content quickly and with brand consistency.
This partnership is rooted in co-innovation and is particularly meaningful from an engineering perspective, turning complex data, platform and AI efforts into real, measurable impact for global brands. Workday works closely with Adobe’s product and engineering teams to shape the direction of the product and bring functionality from data infrastructure to agent workflows into production, while bringing real-world B2B requirements directly into development.
Rani Johnson, Chief Information Officer at Workday, emphasized that this is not just a modernization effort, but a true business transformation. She noted that marketing, IT, and security teams need to work in tandem for a company to scale safely and confidently.
Create content faster and with brand protection.
As Workday expands globally, the demand for content across marketing, product, sales, and internal communications has skyrocketed. This means more assets needed for more audiences, formats, and channels than existing workflows can support. For Johnson and Chief Marketing Officer Emma Chalwin, the mission was clear from the start: empowering more creators while strictly protecting the integrity of the brand. This requires building governance, transparency, and security into every AI-driven workflow. What started as a bandwidth challenge evolved into a shared opportunity to modernize Workday’s entire content supply chain and create a connected, scalable, cross-functional model for the future.
Cross-functional leadership drives change.
Rather than tackling this challenge in silos, Chalwyn and Johnson modeled the cross-functional leadership needed to work together to scale AI responsibly. They co-sponsor the adoption of new technologies, co-manage the use of AI, and intentionally redesign how their teams adopt new tools and workflows.
“We are embedding AI throughout our business, and that requires a different kind of partnership,” Johnson says. “We are collaborating faster and deeper than ever before.”
This collaborative leadership has resulted in an integration program that integrates AI and Adobe tools directly into daily operations.
- Everyday AI — A company-wide effort to provide all employees with access to AI productivity tools and foster an AI-first mindset.
- AI pod — Implement Everyday AI by establishing a cross-functional team of business experts combined with UX and engineering teams to rapidly develop AI-powered workflows.
- shared governance framework − Ensure brand safety, transparency, and responsible use of AI in both marketing and IT.
A new pace of creative work.
The impact of this partnership is most evident in our daily creative work. Adobe Express has become Workday’s all-access creative tool and is licensed by over 90% of marketers. Today, teams use it to create everything from social assets and employee communications to field marketing materials and immediate product content.
Adobe Firefly generation AI helps accelerate early ideation, allowing teams to explore visual directions, generate variations, and refine compositions within brand guidelines. This process moves AI from experimentation to controlled, repeatable creative workflows.
Adobe Express and Firefly will help Chalwin’s team move faster with more confidence, she said. By removing friction, people can focus on the work that really matters: the strategic, human-centered work that only humans can do.
“Adobe Express and Firefly help teams move faster and with more confidence. They remove friction and allow employees to focus on what really matters: strategic, human-centered work.”
emma cherwin
Workday Chief Marketing Officer
Workday is reimagining how creatives work by extending Adobe Express. This technology moves AI from a transactional request model to an empowerment engine, allowing marketers to launch their own designs using a robust library of brand-curated templates. With this move, the creative team reclaimed critical bandwidth and reduced costs by at least 50%, allowing designers to focus on more effective, high-concept brand initiatives.
A connected backbone for coordinated marketing.
To meet the acceleration of content needs, Workday requires a connected operational backbone. It’s a backbone designed with the same rigor, observability, and governance you’d expect from an enterprise-grade system. Adobe Workfront structures ingestion, planning, production, and approval, giving marketing and IT shared visibility, and empowering teams to scale with confidence.
Workfront helps bring structure and governance to the creative flow, Johnson says, allowing teams to move quickly without compromising trust.
As Workday modernizes how content moves from idea to action, we’re also investing in the data and journey infrastructure needed to support the next stage of personalization. With its revamped customer data platform, Workday has established a unified marketing data foundation that enables audience activation across platforms such as Adobe Marketo Engage and LinkedIn. Automated controls for data retention and anomaly detection are used to keep data clean and compliant, reducing the need for manual data hygiene processes.
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition builds on a long-standing data foundation to extend personalization through AI-powered segmentation and optimize campaign workflows for measurable impact.
This combined foundation allows Workday to move from acceptance to interaction faster, delivering personalized experiences that feel purposeful, consistent, and customer-first.
Agent-enabled marketing engine.
Looking ahead, Workday is beginning to leverage generation and agent capabilities to move agent-driven workflows from proof of concept to production.
Workday is exploring agent AI capabilities in Adobe Agent Orchestrator, a technology introduced on the main stage at Summit 2025 in Las Vegas. We have created agent journeys to accelerate decision-making and deliver personalized customer engagement, while performing key tasks such as intent-based identification and prioritization, discovering key buying groups, and streamlining agent workflows. In general, from a product and engineering perspective, this is where the work gets particularly exciting. It’s about moving beyond dashboards and rules to systems that can understand, reason, prioritize, and act with intent while maintaining transparency and human control.
With the shared Adobe AI platform, shared governance, and shared visibility, Workday’s marketing and IT teams are building a future where creativity, data, and AI work together—a future where thoughtfully designed platforms empower people to do their best work.
As Senior Vice President of Adobe Experience Cloud, Anjul leads the Experience Cloud engineering organization focused on powering digital businesses across B2B and B2C.
With 30 years of experience in enterprise software development with a focus on data, databases, analytics, and SaaS, she has launched technology ventures within mature companies and grown ideas into global organizations with significant revenue streams.
Anjul joined Adobe in 2016 to lead product strategy and engineering for Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), the industry’s first purpose-built customer experience management platform, delivering personalized customer experiences in real-time at scale. This suite of innovations includes solutions such as Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP), Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics for B2B and B2C. Anjul will also lead other key parts of the Adobe Customer Experience product portfolio, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Marketo, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Target, enabling brands to deliver personalized experiences across the board.
She spent 14 years at IBM, most recently as Vice President of Engineering for Big Data and Analytics Platforms, where she led product strategy, engineering, and technology implementation.
Anjul holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Delhi University.
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