Asia is answering in real time. Ask marketers across Asia Pacific, and the honest answer is: it depends on what you built before you switched it on.
Whether AI is a boon or bane in martech, Shashank Sharma, Senior Director of Digital Experience, Southeast Asia and Korea, Adobe, and Duncan Egan, VP, Enterprise Marketing, APAC and Japan, Adobe, have seen both sides up close, and the stories from the field are more instructive than any vendor roadmap.
The boon is real but unevenly distributed
In retail and consumer banking, generative AI is already in production, not pilot, but infrastructure, according to Sharma. “Companies are putting generative AI to create content at scale into production. The cost reduction is actually significant.”
Standard Chartered, which presented at Adobe Summit in 2025, spoke about how it leveraged Adobe’s platform to create content at scale, one example of a trend Sharma says is now mainstream in retail and consumer banking.
But content creation is only the first wave. Downstream, campaign execution, real-time personalisation and customer journey orchestration, the potential is larger and the gaps are more visible.
“There’s nothing significant or groundbreaking yet, but people do see the value,” said Sharma of AI-powered campaign delivery.
The bane risk: getting the foundations wrong
The most common failure mode is not a technology problem. It is a change management problem dressed up as one. “Take people and process changes as seriously as technology change,” said Sharma. “Don’t make it a technology project, make it a transformation project.”
Data fragmentation remains a structural barrier. According to the Adobe 2025 AI and Digital Trends Asia Snapshot, 88% of Asia practitioners responded that fragmented data prevents effective personalisation. However, Sharma cautioned against treating data as the only variable. Regulatory constraints, organisational mindset and the fear of not knowing what you don’t know are equally responsible.
Egan added a consumer dimension that is easy to underestimate. From the Adobe 2026 AI and Digital Trends Report, more than a third of customers said they would disengage upon discovering they were interacting with AI. “You lose brand credibility. That person is never coming back.”
His counsel is to think carefully about where AI is visible and build content strategies that serve both humans and the large language models mediating discovery.
Egan cited the telling example of ChatGPT, which draws a share of its content from Reddit, a platform that has never been part of the enterprise marketing playbook, but increasingly needs to be.
Asia’s leapfrog moment
One of Sharma’s more counterintuitive points is that the markets best positioned to benefit may not be Singapore or Korea, the region’s most digitally mature economies, but the markets beyond them.
“There is low tech debt in countries outside of Singapore and Korea. There is an opportunity for a number of these traditional companies to leapfrog,” he said.
Organisations without legacy infrastructure are taking complete platform refreshes, moving directly into AI-native architectures rather than layering new capability onto fragile foundations. For some, the pressure goes beyond competitive advantage. It is existential.
Sharma noted telcos, retailers without a loyal brand following, and banks whose customer bases are being eroded by digital-first competitors, simply have no choice but to act.
From content to intelligence to agency
Twenty years ago, Adobe defined digital marketing. A decade ago, customer experience management brought content and data together to drive personalised journeys. Now the category is being redefined again, with an AI intelligence layer that meets customers wherever they are, including inside large language models and conversational interfaces that may replace the brand website entirely.
“The current generation is growing up in that interface. They would probably not even recall, five or ten years from now, what a website looks like,” said Sharma.
Egan framed the same shift operationally. Marketers who thrive would not be those who automate tasks but those who elevate their thinking, from executing campaigns to shaping strategy, segmentation and the end-to-end customer experience.
“The person that built an email and pushed go is not that important. What I need is people thinking about why we are doing it, what is the impact, and how to make sure that is the most relevant piece of content to that audience,” he said.
The decisions that will define the outcome
The boon or bane question is not one AI answers for you. Brands that resolve data fragmentation and invest in talent alongside technology will find AI compounding the right outcomes. Those that treat it as a technology project alone will find it compounding the wrong ones.
For CMOs navigating that pressure, Egan is practical. Get hands-on with the tools, think across the entire content supply chain, and look inward before looking outward.
“There will be people on everyone’s team that are super adopters. I have learned so much by spending time with those people,” he said.
For Sharma, democratising creativity does not displace it. If anything, creativity becomes more valuable and humans remain central to the process.
The next frontier is brands building for large language models (LLMs) and agentic interfaces as primary channels. Search engine optimisation is giving way to LLM optimisation. The brand website is giving way to conversational experience.
For Asia’s marketers, low legacy baggage is a structural advantage, one that, with the right leadership, could position the region not as a fast follower, but as the place where AI-native marketing gets defined.
