I spent 2 weeks at Adobe Headquarters, and here's what I want you to know

Adobe just put two weeks into bringing a number of AEM professionals up to speed at Adobe HQ in three different events - and one or more of us was there at all three! The festivities started with the Adobe Champions forum, rapidly followed by an Edge Delivery Services Masterclass, and then concluding with the Adobe Developers Live event.

Our latest podcast dives into all three!

Also available on Apple Podcasts and as an audio or video podcast on Spotify.

The 2025 Adobe Champions Forum

The Adobe Champions program was created to recognize some of the top practitioners on (now) 6 different digital experience tools: Adobe Analytics, Adobe Commerce, Adobe Experience Platform, Workfront, and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).

Each year, Adobe hosts the Champions at a Champions Forum at Adobe HQ in San Jose, CA, offering amazing networking opportunities with the other Champions, but also a unique opportunity to meet with Adobe product management to get an inside peek on what's coming next.

I said it before in the podcast that I got to do with Pranay Rajput (recorded as we biked around SF), that the energy that these Adobe Champs have is absolutely infectious. Usually at Adobe Summit, you get a mix of folks who are techy, sales, introvert, extrovert, recruiters, etc. At the Adobe Champs Forum, by contrast, nearly everyone is WAY out there, great communicators, technically-savvy and very fun to be around.

But more than just the networking (and getting brought together for an evening of Line Dancing instruction!!), was a full day of amazing forward-looking sessions with Adobe product management on the future of AEM.

In these sessions, Adobe outline the core of where they see the experience management business going in the coming years, and much of it centers around what they call the "dual-engagement imperative". I'm not at liberty to talk about ALL of the cool things they discussed with regards the future, but I can give you a bit on what to expect this coming Adobe Summit, and also where the rest of the industry is likely headed.

The Big CMS Trends Adobe is Tracking

There are a number of big over-arching trends that are very much NOT just Adobe-specific, that even if you're a Sitecore/Optimizely/Wordpress/Drupal shop, VERY much apply to this next year of massive change.

• The “Dual-engagement imperative” - where the CMS in general and the tech that goes into modern brand sites is designed for both human and AI (agent) consumption. This is no longer just a theory, and there's been a MASSIVE uptick already in the number of agentic interactions web properties are already experiencing.
• Agentic Web Transformation: content strategies around agentic AI consumption & interaction. Whereas before, your strategy always assumed that if there was a valuable bot interacting with your site, it was only to spider it and index it for actual human users, but the only real user that would matter would be people in a live browser session, working on your site. But now, there are so many (SO MANY!) valid and highly-remunerative interactions that agents will do on your site, and the structure of your content and its loadout have to be arranged with that in mind.
• Consistent experience to ensure accurate representation for agents and humans: think about this: what flows and experiences do you want to make sure that agents DEFINITELY GET RIGHT on your site? Are there ways that your content and is freshness is being misinterpreted? Are there flows that a human will (or could) likely deploy an agent to execute, like signing up for a white-paper, getting a free trial or registering for an event?
• Agentic flows & AI-driven automation to reduce deployment time: What are ways that agents and automation can be leveraged to take the drudgery and toil out of deploying a site or a CMS or an upgrade?

Additionally, to top it all off, we all ended up getting a free shot at an Adobe Certification exam. I had no time to prep, so I ended up getting my Adobe Experience Manager Business Practitioner Expert exam passed & out of the way, at least for the next two years.

After the conclusion of 4 amazing days at Adobe HQ for the Champs Forum, it was on to the next big event - an Adobe Experience Manager / Edge Delivery Services Masterclass put on by Adobe Consulting!

Edge Delivery Services Masterclass

In case you hadn't realized yet, Edge Delivery Services is now very-definitely the preferred delivery stack for developing solutions on Adobe Experience Manager. Given that fact, and also the fact that there presently is no official certification for AEM Edge Delivery Services (it may change in the coming months...but not yet), Adobe is exploring what really needs to be taught to get experienced CMS professionals up to speed on making a project on Edge Delivery Services.

The Masterclass was a full-day affair with roughly 40 fairly-seasoned AEM experts attending, and a teaching staff comprising some of the most experienced EDS experts at Adobe Consulting.

Some of the points of insight that they brought up during a day of theory and practice on EDS projects:

• Author supercede developers: In traditional AEM/CMS development, it's quite common to start with features and then develop features & components, and then eventually bring those components to the authors who then need to create something with them. With EDS's document-centric view on content and VERY rapid UI creation reality, it's most-helpful to turn that on its head & instead start with content and draft your whole feature set from content. But most-importantly, try meet your authors where they are.

• Practice Content-Driven development: Start with a model of how the content is going to look, how will the content be authored, how will it be structured. Then, add functionality and styling onto the blocks you create in a document.
  Working in Edge Delivery Author (DA) is a great way to just start your content model.

• Remember the 4 basic block models: There are 4 primary block types when working with Edge Delivery Services:

  • The Standalone Block - this would be like a Hero or Blockquote block that would stand entirely on its own.
  • Collection: - repeating semi-structured content like cards & accordions
  • Configuration: like block listings, search results, section-metadata, etc.
  • Auto-blocked: This is where you infer patterns based on the content, and don't explicitly call out a block. This would be like adding a Youtube link on its own line, and then infer that you need to bust out an embed block to render the Youtube video.

• Some Guidelines & Tips:

  • David's Model: If you 're working on EDS projects ABSOLUTELY familiarize yourself with "David's Model", a (currently) 18-point treatise on best-practices with EDS. Note: this should be a course all in itself.
  • Limit yourself to a max of 4 cells/row: On blocks, this is mostly just a great idea for usability.
  • Lean into semantic formatting for meaning: A HUGE power of EDS is extremely flexible patterns for inferring meaning from the text. If you know you've got 2 styles of buttons, just say style #1 is "italic" and style #2 is "underline" and don't then make a user go through a whole button-configuration nonsense in the document, infer it from the text.
  • Use "Postel's Law": Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. [ref]
  • Use the AEM Sidekick: Right-click on the AEM sidekick and click "view document source" and it will show you how an existing EDS site is blocked. MAGIC.
  • Keep your PRs Small: Don't do huge, sweeping, mega-PRs with multi-sprint-spanning scopes. Keep each change small and testable and deployable.
  • Use the AEM CLI to further your AI-assistant led coding: Get your aem up command to print errors straight out so that your coding assistant can debug frontend code.

SUCH an amazing time, so many insights, and I only wrote about a third of my notes above. If Adobe ever offers another one (which they're looking to do) make sure to attend!

Adobe Developers Live - Bringing the Agentic Web into Focus

Rounding out the November agenda was the Adobe Developers Live event, something which typically has been very remote focused, but this time had plenty of folks at Adobe offices around the world, including the biggest one at HQ.

SO many good sessions, too many to attempt to recap in-detail here. But if I were to pick two sessions to watch above all others, I'd first of all make ABSOLUTE SURE to watch Cedric and Martin's session on the agentic evolution of AEM.

This session is a 100% must-watch baseline for everyone to understand the basics of how LLM search works, and why it is we need to change our approaches to website creation & architecture around what the new agentic web will be.

Please have a look at this playlist, which is the full-load of AEM Live 2025 sessions!

Podcast Key Moments

Key Points in the Adobe DevLive / EDS Masterclass / Champs Forum podcast, should you want to skip right there:

• 1:02 Overview of the Three Adobe Events at HQ
• 2:08 Adobe Champions Forum Highlights and Swag
• 3:29 Edge Delivery Masterclass Experience
• 5:47 Comparing These Events to Adobe Summit
• 7:21 15th Anniversary of AEM and Key Product Takeaways
• 8:37 The Shift to Dual Engagement (Humans + Agents)
• 10:05 AI Agents, SEO Changes, and Content Reformulation
• 13:22 Agents in Content Production and Delivery
• 17:43 LLM Interactions with Sites and Speed Requirements
• 20:47 Edge Delivery Demos and Commerce in ChatGPT
• 23:36 "What We Can Do in Two Weeks" with EDS
• 26:48 Rapid Development and Migrations in Edge Delivery
• 31:16 Optimizing Content for LLMs (Long Docs vs. SEO)
• 34:13 Adobe's LLM Optimizer and Citation Strategies
• 37:39 Agents for Governance, Discovery, and Optimization
• 41:47 AI Tooling in IDEs and Framework Simplicity
• 48:53 Involving Authors Early in the Development Cycle
• 54:53 Rethinking Approval Workflows and Trust
• 56:32 Hybrid Governance Approaches with Agents
• 1:03:21 The Fire Hose of Changes and Adobe Summit Tease

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