Independent Analysis: AI, SaaS, and Revenue Growth Strategy

The Agentic Shift: Who Wins (and Loses) in Adobe’s New AI Strategy An announcement from Adobe this month (January2026) highlight a fundamental shift in digital experience architecture: the rise of the "Agentic Web." According to Loni Stark, VP of Strategy and Product at Adobe, the company is introducing a suite of AI agents within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) designed to bridge the gap between human consumption and AI-driven discovery. This is not merely a feature update; it is a restructuring of how brands must publish to the web to remain visible to the AI agents that increasingly mediate the internet. ❖ The Leadership The strategic direction for this initiative is being spearheaded by Loni Stark , Vice President of Strategy and Product, who has positioned AEM as a central nervous system for these new AI workflows. The broader organization is led by CEO Shantanu Narayen , who continues to pivot the company toward a "models-to-delivery" infrastructu...

The architecture of the web is undergoing its most significant shift since the introduction of SSL. For the past two years, the relationship between Content Creators (Publishers) and Content Consumers (AI Models) has been adversarial. It has been a game of "cat and mouse"—bots scrape, admins block. This adversarial model is inefficient. It wastes bandwidth, carries legal risk, and results in sub-par data for AI models. On January 15, 2026, Cloudflare acquired Human Native , and in doing so, they signaled the arrival of the solution: The Data Supply Chain. ❖ The "Enrichment" Layer To a technologist, the "Open Web" is unstructured chaos. It is full of HTML boilerplate, messy scripts, and noise. LLMs do not want chaos; they want signal. Human Native is not merely a marketplace; it is a transformation engine. It acts as the "middleware" that sits between the raw web and the AI model, performing critical ETL ...

Digital analytics platform Amplitude has acquired InfiniGrow, an AI-powered revenue attribution and scenario planning tool. This move signals Amplitude's intent to expand beyond product analytics into the domain of marketing performance, directly linking acquisition budgets to user behavior. ❖ The Leadership InfiniGrow was founded in Tel Aviv by Daniel Meler (CEO) and Dor Lahav . Meler, a former marketing executive, built the platform to solve the "black box" problem of budget allocation. The company raised approximately $7 million in Seed funding (May 2023), led by StageOne Ventures , with participation from Vertex Ventures Israel and Oryzn Capital . The Technology: Predictive "What-If" vs. Static Attribution While most attribution tools look backward to assign credit, InfiniGrow differentiates itself with forward-looking AI Scenario Planning . The platform allows marketers to run "what-if" simulations—predicting how revenue would sh...

How many of you used AI to do your shopping or travel planning this season? Adobe Analytics data from January 2026 highlights a massive statistical shift: a 693% year-over-year explosion in retail traffic referred by generative AI platforms. ❖ The Leadership: Source Credibility This insight comes directly from Adobe Digital Insights , utilizing data from over 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites. Unlike survey-based sentiment, Adobe provides a deterministic view of actual user behavior. Their findings are further contextually supported by recent infrastructure announcements from Google regarding the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) . The Technology: The Answer Engine The core differentiator is the shift from "Search" to "Synthesis." Traditional search requires the user to compare options across multiple tabs. Generative AI (The "Disruptor") performs this synthesis on behalf of the user. Operational Scale The adoption cur...

From Watcher to Fixer: Why Dynatrace’s Acquisition of DevCycle Matters to the C-Suite From Watcher to Fixer: Why Dynatrace’s Acquisition of DevCycle Matters to the C-Suite On January 13, 2026, Dynatrace acquired DevCycle . To a technologist, this is about "feature flags." To a business leader, this is about Digital Resilience —moving from a system that simply tells you when you’re losing money to one that automatically stops the bleeding. The Bottom Line: Most companies spend millions on "Observability" (watching for problems). But watching isn't fixing. This deal allows Dynatrace to not just spot a digital failure, but to instantly "turn off" the specific broken feature before it impacts your entire customer base or quarterly revenue. Who is Affected? (The Customer Impact) If you are a customer of a global bank, a major retailer, or a travel platform, you’ve experienced "The Glitch"—where a new app update breaks the c...

The industry is reaching a tipping point where the traditional title of "Chief Marketing Officer" no longer captures the complexity of the role. We are moving beyond the era of managing traffic and optimizing funnels. The new reality demands a Chief Conversational Orchestrationist . In a recent discussion on AR Chat , we explored why this shift is not just a change in title, but a fundamental change in architectural philosophy. ❖ The Leadership: A Shared Perspective This dialogue brought together distinct viewpoints from across the ecosystem. Joining Crystal Golightly , Steven Dickens (HyperFRAME), and Nathan Herrman (Ericsson), we dissected the growing friction between legacy marketing tactics and the emerging AI reality. The consensus was clear: the gap between "marketing as usual" and "market reality" is widening. The Core Argument: Optimizing for the Agent We are heading toward a websiteless world . The group identified that a sig...