By Pierre Charchaflian, Vice President, Senior Partner - IBM Consulting
Global Leader- Adobe Practice and Marketing Transformation Offering

New IBM Institute for Business Value research reveals a growing gap between insight and action

ARMONK, N.Y., April 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Customer expectations are evolving faster than many organizations can respond. New global research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted in partnership with Adobe, shows that companies lose an average of $29 million annually because they can't react quickly enough to customer demands. Three-quarters of surveyed executives say their companies are too slow to respond to changing customer needs.

Marketing leaders understand the shift, but the challenge is operationalizing it. Today, the real differentiator is orchestration: connecting data, decision-making and delivery so organizations can act in the moment. 88% of executives we surveyed say customers expect brands to anticipate their needs before they're expressed, and tolerance for disjointed experiences is shrinking.

A Deeper Collaboration to Close the Gap with Adobe and IBM: Orchestrating the Moments That Matter

This is where IBM Consulting and Adobe are deepening our collaboration. Together, we're pairing Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration capabilities, like Adobe Real-Time CDP, with IBM's agentic AI expertise, orchestration tools like Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator and IBM watsonx Orchestrate, and responsible governance to help companies identify customer intent quickly and act before the moment passes.

The research shows the impact for companies that get it right:

• Organizations that successfully decode intent report 13% lower customer acquisition costs, a 4-point advantage in customer satisfaction scores, and 6% higher retention rates.
• Those that pair AI fueled‑ responsiveness with clear governance report 12% higher marketing ROI and a 38% lift in customer lifetime value.
• The IBV analysis found that organizations that spend more time to detect and act on customer signals saw their marketing ROI drop by 30-40 percentage points, while excessive delay drives an annual average of $29 million in operating waste.

When organizations unify data, automate decisions, and set responsible AI guardrails, orchestration delivers the connective tissue that aligns every touchpoint. The findings are clear: loyalty isn't won by AI alone, but by the experiences AI makes possible.

Real World Impact Across Industries

Across industries, the challenge isn't delivering individual interactions - it's ensuring every interaction works together. Orchestration bridges operational silos, aligns teams and systems, and creates a consistent experience that reflects real-time customer context.

IBM is introducing new industry specific consulting strategies in collaboration with Adobe - starting with airlines and healthcare - powered by AI-driven experience orchestration. These strategies help organizations understand and act on customer intent with greater speed, precision and consistency.

IBM's work with Riyadh Air offered early proving ground for AI‑guided customer support, showing how an agentic concierge built on watsonx can assist staff in real time. Those learnings, combined with IBM and Adobe's broader experience in AI-driven experience design, helped shape these new industry solutions.

Adobe and IBM help airlines bring together traveler context, anticipate needs with predictive personalization, and build AI ‑ driven commerce ecosystems that work across digital, physical and operational touchpoints. This creates a more responsive, connected travel experience.

In healthcare, interactions are often slowed by administrative hurdles: repetition, paperwork and delays that frustrate patients and add cost. The healthcare consulting paradigm from Adobe and IBM helps organizations act more intentionally, connect identity and context across channels, and streamline workflows so members stop running into the same barriers.

In industries like healthcare, customers still encounter friction. As Eric Martinez, Chief Business Marketing Officer at The Cigna Group, explains: "Patients deserve a connected experience. Whether they're engaging with an insurer, a doctor, or a neighborhood clinic, their information should move with them, so they're supported by the system, not forced to be the only thread tying it together."

In travel, the gap is just as visible. Marvin James Burton, Director of Digital Experiences at Riyadh Air, explains: "There is a massive delta between what customers can do and expect in their day-to-day life, and what aviation and travel companies are able to deliver. Either they can't, or their mindset holds them back."

These examples reflect a broader issue: in the above mentioned study, only 34% of the customer data organizations collect today is used to inform customer experience decisions. The problem is not a lack of data, it's the absence of real-time orchestration. Without it, moments pass, responses lag, and the journey breaks down. Many organizations respond by adding more technology, but more tools don't solve a disconnected system. Agentic AI is beginning to close that gap. By orchestrating signals and decisions in real time, AI can help companies act on intent quickly.

A New Foundation for Customer Experience

Adobe and IBM Consulting are helping organizations build that capability by unifying data, strengthening orchestration, and applying governance that ensures trust at scale. The brands that will lead are those that can consistently translate intent into action, connecting insight to outcome seamlessly and in real time.

About IBM

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to effect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

Media Contact:
Kristen Shah
KRISTEN.SHAH@ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM