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On Adobe's own agentic AI page, “Journey creation” — generate multistep journeys from a marketing brief — is labelled coming soon, as is program creation. That is the right idea. We would just rather you had it this quarter than on a roadmap.
Every claim about Marketo below is quoted from Adobe's own agentic AI page and sync documentation, checked on 6 October 2026. Where something is marked coming soon, that is Adobe's label, not our characterisation — and it will presumably ship, because Adobe is a serious company pointed in a sensible direction.
The question is not whether this is where marketing automation ends up. Adobe has told you it is. The question is what your team does in the meantime, while being asked to produce several times what it produced two years ago.
Marketo's column is quoted from Adobe's published pages, including their own coming-soon labels.
| ThinkingStreams | Adobe Marketo Engage | |
|---|---|---|
| A campaign from a brief | Ships today. Describe the goal and the audience; get a plan with drafted emails, SMS and pages. | “Journey creation (coming soon). Generate multistep journeys from a marketing brief, text, image, or voice prompt.” |
| Building the programme itself | Part of the same plan — the sends, the timing and the segments come back together. | “Program creation (coming soon). Automate the creation of programs and smart campaigns.” |
| What the AI does today | Plans campaigns, drafts every asset, runs recurring work, answers reporting questions. | Lead-import cleanup, automated program QA, generative email authoring, image-to-HTML, brand compliance. |
| Keeping to brand | Business DNA holds positioning, voice, audiences and tone, and grounds every agent in them. | “Brand compliance. Ensure every asset aligns with your brand guidelines... logos, colors, and styles.” |
| Dynamics 365: records | Two-way sync with Dynamics 365 for Sales; your CRM stays the system of record. | “The sync between Marketo and Dynamics is bidirectional for leads and contacts.” |
| Dynamics 365: everything else | Two-way where it matters, and engagement pushed back into your environment. | “All other fields, such as accounts and opportunities, are synced one way only, from Dynamics to Marketo.” |
| Dynamics 365: marketing engagement | Emails, SMS and form submissions written into Dynamics as Standard, Virtual or Elastic tables, on the Contact and Lead records. | Not described in Adobe's Dynamics sync documentation as of 6 October 2026. |
| MCP | MCP tools, so your own agents can work against ThinkingStreams. | “MCP server: Connect your favorite AI tools and agents to your Marketo instance.” |
| Published price | From $650 USD/month on an annual commitment. We sell the intelligence, not seats or contacts. | Not published — there is no pricing page on their site as of 6 October 2026. |
Marketing teams are now asked for several times the output they produced two years ago — more campaigns, more channels, more personalisation, measured harder — with the same headcount.
Adobe clearly sees it. Their agentic page is a list of exactly the right ambitions. But a capability marked coming soon does not help the campaign you have to ship in three weeks, and the AI that is live in Marketo today is mostly marketing operations — importing leads, deduplicating records, QA-ing programmes. Those are real time savings. They are not the campaign.
You tell ThinkingStreams the goal, the audience and the offer, in the words you would use to brief a colleague. It comes back with a plan — the sends, the timing, the segments — and drafted emails, SMS and pages against it.
Then you do the part only you can do: judge it. Change what is wrong, throw away what misses, approve the rest. The hours move out of assembly and into decisions. That is the whole product in two sentences, and it is available now rather than soon.
Adobe's brand compliance feature is about visual consistency — their page describes applying “logos, colors, and styles.” That is genuinely useful, and it is not the hard part of producing at volume. The hard part is that the tenth email of the week has to sound like your company, make your argument, and talk to the right audience.
Business DNA holds your positioning, voice, audiences and tone, and every agent is grounded in it. Agent memory keeps what it learns about your business and about you, so a correction you made last month does not have to be made again.
Adobe's own documentation is clear about the shape of their Dynamics sync: bidirectional for leads and contacts, and “all other fields, such as accounts and opportunities, are synced one way only, from Dynamics to Marketo.” Writing marketing engagement back into Dynamics is not described there as of 6 October 2026.
That matters because of who needs the data. Your sales team does not open Marketo. They open a Contact record. Data push writes emails, SMS and form submissions into your Dynamics environment, attached to the Contact and Lead records they already use — as Standard tables, as Elastic for very high volume, or as Virtual, where nothing is stored in Dataverse at all. It installs as a managed solution alongside what you have; no existing table is changed.
Marketo Engage is one of the most capable marketing automation platforms ever built. If you have an operations team that knows it well, there is very little you cannot make it do — the depth in segmentation, scoring and programme logic is real, and an ecosystem of certified specialists exists because that depth is worth hiring for.
Adobe is also doing the right things on AI. They shipped an MCP server, which is a genuinely forward-looking move and something we also offer. If your constraint is sophistication rather than throughput, and you have the people to operate it, Marketo is not a mistake.
The reason Marketo has a certification industry around it is that the power is real and the surface area is large. For a team with a dedicated marketing-ops function, that is a fair trade.
For a team without one, it is the trade that quietly caps output: every campaign queues behind the one person who knows how to build it. An AI-native platform changes who can produce a campaign, which is a different kind of fix from making the builder better.
Your existing email templates come with you, and you move them yourself. Template import is a feature in the product, not a professional-services engagement you book and wait for.
The import does the fiddly part. Merge fields written in another tool's conventions — *|FNAME|*, %%first_name%% — are converted to this platform's form. Your old unsubscribe link stops working the day you leave, so the import repoints it at your unsubscribe URL while keeping the footer design you already have. Scripts, forms and tracking widgets are stripped, because mail clients block them anyway; your layout, styles, images and Outlook-specific markup are kept exactly as they were. Anything it cannot map becomes a flagged placeholder, and it tells you precisely what it changed — nothing is silently filled in for you.
After that an imported template behaves like any other: it lands in the Library, you can @-mention it in a session, clone it into a campaign, or ask the assistant to change it.
If you are on Dynamics, your leads and contacts are not a migration problem either. They stay where they are.
We think quoting their own labels is the fairest thing available. Adobe's agentic AI page marks journey creation and program creation as coming soon, checked 6 October 2026. We have not guessed at dates or claimed they will not ship. We have said what we ship today and let you weigh the gap.
Yes, and we list it in their own words: lead-import cleanup, automated program QA, generative email authoring, image-to-HTML conversion and brand compliance. Our argument is about where the AI sits. Theirs is strongest on marketing operations and per-asset authoring; ours starts the campaign itself.
Adobe's documentation describes a sync that is bidirectional for leads and contacts, with all other objects flowing one way into Marketo, and does not describe writing marketing engagement back into Dynamics as of 6 October 2026. We push emails, SMS and form submissions into your Dynamics environment on the Contact and Lead records, as Standard, Virtual or Elastic tables.
We cannot give you a like-for-like comparison, because Adobe does not publish Marketo Engage pricing — there is no pricing page on their site as of 6 October 2026. Ours is public: from $650 USD a month on an annual commitment, selling the intelligence rather than seats or contacts.
Then you are the case where staying is defensible, and we would rather say so. The teams who gain most from moving are the ones whose output is capped by how many people can operate the platform.
Give us a campaign you actually have to ship this quarter, and compare what comes back against what it would take to build it in Marketo.
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