If the AI world is starting to feel like the end of a mafia movie lately, it’s because agents are surrounding your workplace.
Adobe and Zoom are the latest enterprise players to debut generative AI systems that can perform day-to-day office tasks beyond simply summarizing or answering questions.
While Adobe has rolled out plenty of visual generation AI tools in the last couple of years, its new stable of 10 agents will supplement its digital marketing business, Adobe Experience Cloud. Their respective modi operandi include optimizing websites, building audiences, or managing data. The orchestrator tools coordinate and route jobs to the agents, and lets companies integrate third-party agents.
Meanwhile, Zoom is adding agentic functionality to its existing AI Companion, which can already summarize meetings and pull data from emails. With the new skills, AI Companion, “using reasoning and memory,” will soon be able to better manage calendars, draft meeting agendas, or detect action items from workplace communications, the company said in its announcement.
Adobe and Zoom join a growing gaggle of companies that are looking to these sorts of agentic tools as the next era of generative AI adoption in offices. Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle are among many others. But “agent” can be a slippery term; different companies might conceive of it in different ways, though most agree an agent must be able to perform tasks and interact with an outside environment.
Experience AI: Adobe’s agents are mostly centered on helping marketers craft messages, steer them toward the right people, and improve the various ways companies appear online. For instance, the site optimization agent might continuously scan a company’s website for broken backlinks, something that Adobe said its customers don’t often have the time to do.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.
Adobe also announced an application called Brand Concierge, built on the agent orchestrator tool, that will let companies create interactive AI experiences for their web visitors, personalized with customer data.
“Our whole platform is going agentic,” Anjul Bhambhri, SVP of Adobe Experience Cloud, said.
Bhambhri said one thing that sets Adobe’s agents apart from competitors is its “ecosystem approach,” which allows businesses to integrate agents from other enterprise providers, build agents with their own data, and mix and match the underlying models.
“Nobody’s locked into anything,” Bhambhri said. “Our applications are powered by these agents to solve for what we solve for, but we completely expect and we are designed for [them to] be used in conjunction with others.”
Zoom in: Zoom’s agentic approach is part of a broader effort to widen its role in the office from a video call interface to a hub for all things meetings. Its agentic tools will help participants settle on a time to meet, easily create clips, and assist in drafting documents.
“AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic, which signals a major leap forward in how AI can enhance productivity and collaboration at work,” Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim said in the announcement.
Like Adobe, Zoom is also touting its ability to integrate with third-party agents and custom agents for specific business purposes, like fielding IT or HR service requests, or sales RFPs, the announcement said.