Jennifer
Burke

Selling the AI era to Hollywood

That announcement - the one she made when she left Catalina for Microsoft around 2019 - drew 194 reactions and 139 comments. For an enterprise sales executive announcing a lateral move, that's an unusually warm reception. It tells you something about how she builds professional relationships: people notice when she leaves, and they celebrate when she arrives.

Three companies, three pivots, one through-line

The through-line in Jennifer Burke's career is customer data and what you do with it. At Catalina USA, that meant loyalty analytics and brand development at the intersection of retail and CPG. At Microsoft, it meant bringing cloud solutions to the grocery and consumer goods industry. At Adobe, it means convincing media companies to build their entire customer experience stack on one platform - and then helping them actually do it.

She graduated from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in 1990 with a B.S. in Marketing. The Kelley School has a reputation for producing operators, not theorists - people who know how to move product, manage accounts, and close deals. Burke has spent 35 years proving the school's reputation warranted.

Her tenure at Catalina ran from 2012 to 2018. She rose from Senior Vice President of Brand Development to President of CPG Strategic Brands - a clean ascent through one of data-driven retail marketing's most operationally complex companies. Catalina's business depends on understanding purchase patterns at massive scale; running that brand development arm means you're selling data's value to skeptical CMOs who have seen too many analytics promises fall flat.

The Microsoft chapter (2019-2021) looked like a bet on the cloud moment in CPG and retail. As a Senior Industry Executive for CPG and Retail, she was in the room for exactly the kind of digital transformation conversations that would accelerate after 2020. Then Adobe called.

Where media meets the machine

Adobe's Digital Experience division is the company's enterprise engine - the part of the business that competes with Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle for the attention (and budget) of global CMOs. It includes the Experience Platform, Adobe Analytics, Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and a growing cluster of agentic AI capabilities that the company has been assembling aggressively since 2024.

Burke's vertical, Media & Entertainment, is where that toolkit gets tested against some of the most demanding audience relationships in the world. A streaming service that needs to personalize content discovery for 200 million subscribers. A major broadcaster rebuilding its digital ad stack. A music label trying to connect artist data to fan engagement at scale. These are her customers.

Adobe's push into agentic AI - autonomous agents that can orchestrate customer journeys across channels without constant human intervention - is the current chapter of that story. The Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, announced at Summit 2025, represents exactly the kind of product she's been selling: not a feature, but a new operating model for how brands engage audiences.

Selling agentic AI to a media executive requires a very specific kind of credibility. You need to understand their content pipelines, their audience fragmentation problems, their metadata nightmares, and their attribution gaps. Burke's background - three decades of watching how data flows from purchase point to campaign outcome - gives her a vocabulary that pure-play tech executives often lack. She can speak to the analogue-era friction that still persists in digital workflows, because she lived it before the cloud existed.

Adobe's technology stack that Burke sells includes Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, Adobe Firefly (generative AI for creative workflows), and the Experience Platform that underlies all of it. Convincing a media company to consolidate around that platform is a multi-year enterprise deal. It requires staying power, executive relationships, and the ability to speak both technical architecture and business outcomes in the same conversation.

She's built a reputation as the kind of leader who develops her team alongside her accounts - which matters in enterprise sales, where turnover erodes institutional knowledge and account relationships simultaneously. The 194-person response to her Microsoft announcement wasn't just professional courtesy. It was the evidence of a network built on actual relationships, not LinkedIn connection farming.

The anatomy of an enterprise exec

The enterprise technology sales track rewards a specific combination of traits: patience for long sales cycles, fluency in both technical and business language, the ability to build trust with executives who have been burned by vendor promises before, and the stamina to navigate complex organizational buying committees without losing the thread of the original value proposition.

Burke's career suggests she's assembled all of those. Her passage from retail marketing analytics (Catalina) through cloud infrastructure for CPG (Microsoft) to AI-powered experience orchestration (Adobe) isn't random. Each move deepened her understanding of how data-driven customer engagement works at scale - and added a layer of technological sophistication to what began as a classic marketing career.

What she brings to Adobe's media and entertainment accounts specifically is a kind of operational empathy that's hard to fake. The media industry is not a clean, greenfield digital environment. It's a patchwork of legacy systems, rights management complexity, acquisition-driven tech debt, and audience data that gets siloed by business unit, platform, and geography. Someone who spent years at Catalina - a company whose entire value proposition was making sense of fragmented retail data - understands that problem at a cellular level.

The agentic AI push at Adobe, which reached a new intensity at Summit 2025 and continued through 2026, puts her at the edge of where enterprise software is going. Autonomous agents that can read audience signals, orchestrate multi-channel campaigns, and adjust content delivery in real time without human intervention - that's not a feature rollout. It's a fundamental change in how marketing organizations operate. Selling that change to a skeptical media executive, on a timeline that works for both parties, is the specific challenge that defines her role right now.

Career chronology