Customer Experience Orchestration
19 Apr 2026 » Opinion
If you are going to Summit (unfortunately, this year I am not going) you will hear a lot about Customer Experience Orchestration (CXO). This term is not new, you can find a presentation from Summit 2025 where Anil talks about it. However, I wanted to talk more about it, as it is another mindshift that we have to take.
A Bit of History
I am fascinated by planes. I follow a few YouTube channels about them. To me, it is almost unbelievable that we went from
to
in just over 60 years.
If you have been in the Digital Marketing space for a decade or more, you will have noticed a similar evolution from the early days to today. However, instead of taking 60 years, it has only taken 20.
When Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009, very few understood the move. In the years since then there have been more acquisitions in the Digital Experience front: Day Software, Demdex, Neolane, Efficient Frontier, Workfront… Then, these purchases started to make more sense.
However, bringing all these different tools together and connecting them to the Adobe Experience Platform has not been easy: different technologies, different approaches, different perspectives had to be aligned. The very reason why the Multi-Solution Architect role was created was to bring all tools together.
This evolution has also been seen on the business side, although slower. Initially, people were only interested in their own tool. I remember with nostalgia the days when I was consulting on Adobe SiteCatalyst Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager. My customers were only interested in their own tool. Nobody working with Adobe Analytics cared about Adobe Campaign, and vice-versa, except perhaps for the Genesys integration.
Over the years, though, this siloed approach started to evolve into families: data, experience, and orchestration. People needed to use various tools to generate better marketing. For example, it was not enough for content creators to master Adobe Experience Manager, they also had to work with Adobe Target through the Experience Fragments integration. Experiences were served from both tools and they had to manage all experiences.
Customer Experience Orchestration
The last jump in this evolution has been to understand that all these tools work together to achieve business goals, and those business goals do not care about tools. Consequently, marketers need to be aware of all the technologies that are involved.
Let’s consider an example: sending an email. Something as simple as that requires, at least:
- Target audience
- Design
- Text
- Images
- Constraints (e.g. timezone, fatigue)
- Metrics
- Reports
Any other digital marketing example will have a similar set of components, which have to be done by people, using multiple tools. No longer can you just limit yourself to a single tool.
In other words, this is a factory, not a workshop, and a factory needs to run like clockwork. It is the same truth that Henry Ford realized more than a century ago. Everybody has a position, requires inputs from others, and their outputs subsequently become the inputs of the next stages. One direct consequence is that you have to understand the full ecosystem, not just your niche. This applies to both technical and business roles.
CXO is basically the consolidation of what I have just explained. It is just that we are giving it a name and formalizing it. Getting into the details, CXO is composed of:
- Customer Engagement: involves gathering all the data needed to personalize the customer experience.
- Content Supply Chain: guarantees that content goes from ideation to realization.
- Brand Visibility: ensures that your brand stays relevant in this changing world.
Moving forward, not only do we all need to know what our role in this factory is, but also what everybody else is doing in it. This is not a theory, my most advanced customers have already started this journey. They have structured their MarTech team with CXO in mind, even if they do not use this term.