Inside the Adobe AI Hackathon: What Happens When Marketing Ops Gets Hands-On with AI?

AI agents and MCP were some of the buzziest announcements at Adobe Summit this year, but plenty of those features are still in beta and don’t always work as advertised. So, what can AI actually do inside Adobe Marketo today? Roughly 30 marketers from across Texas, plus one enthusiastic guest from Seattle, spent a Saturday at the Amazon Web Services office in Austin finding out. 

Mod Op’s Lindsay Chu and Grace Han, who co-lead the Dallas Marketo User Group, joined the Texas-wide Adobe hackathon hosted in partnership with the Austin and San Antonio Marketo User Groups. The half-day event brought marketing operations professionals together to do something deceptively simple: solve real business problems using AI tools connected directly to Adobe’s Marketo. Here are a few of their takeaways from the day: 

How AI and MCP Can Streamline Marketing Operations in Adobe Marketo 

If you spend your days deep in Marketo, you know the pain points by heart: data that still doesn’t always sync seamlessly with Salesforce, hours lost pulling reports for email nurtures or event performance, and instances so overloaded with legacy programs and campaigns that finding what truly matters can feel like a challenge. 

This hackathon was built around a simple premise: what if AI could take on that grunt work? Teams of four to eight people, each equipped with an Adobe Marketo sandbox provided by the organizing Adobe Champions, access to tools built around Model Context Protocol (MCP).  

In plain terms, MCP is what lets AI assistants like Claude or ChatGPT connect directly into a platform like Marketo and pull real data using natural language, instead of someone manually digging through reports and dashboards. Sponsors, Gradial and Allgood, brought their own MCP integrations to the event, layering AI capability on top of the Marketo platform so teams could use prompts like “how many leads are in my instance” or “segment my audience by this criteria” and let the AI do the digging. 

Each team picked a common marketing operations headache and spent the day building a solution around it. Grace’s team built a dashboard that pulled live engagement metrics on demand. Lindsay’s team tackled something every Marketo admin will recognize: an instance audit, using AI to flag programs that should be archived or campaigns that need a closer look. 

AI Marketing Tools That Actually Deliver Real Results 

Marketing operations professionals tend to be a skeptical bunch when it comes to AI hype, and for good reason. As Lindsay put it, there’s been no shortage of exciting announcements about AI agents and MCP at events like Adobe Summit this year, but plenty of those features are still in beta and don’t always work as advertised. 

That’s what made this hackathon stand out. This was, in Lindsay’s words, one of the first times she saw “these tools working and working well.” She said she had “good expectations going into the event,” but it really surpassed her expectations. 

Grace had a similar reaction. After some initial hiccups connecting to Adobe’s own MCP, her team switched to Gradial’s integration with help from Gradial’s team on-site. “I was pleasantly surprised by how fast they pulled the information,” Grace shared, describing a tool that “generates real-time dashboards that let you slice and dice and that can refresh itself.”  

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Hackathons, by nature, involve troubleshooting, false starts, and pivots. “My team was laughing, but it was because our original plan didn’t work,” Lindsay recalled. “There’s a flexibility that you need to have when you are coming up with solutions like that.”  That adaptability proved as valuable as the tools themselves. 

The Human Side of AI in Marketing Operations. 

What stood out most wasn’t just the technology. It was the room. Half of Lindsay’s teammates already knew each other from past collaborations, and half were meeting for the first time. By the end of the day, they had bonded over the shared, unglamorous realities of working in marketing operations day-to-day. Grace even reconnected with a former colleague she hadn’t seen in a while, a reminder that these events are as much about community as they are about code. 

The day wrapped with each team presenting their build to the room, walking through the business problem they tackled and the solution they created. Attendees voted on their favorites. Fittingly, most teams used AI to help build their presentation slides too. One team took it a step further, using an AI-generated voice to narrate their pitch. The experiment drew some laughs and made a point on its own: the delivery wasn’t the same without a real presenter behind it. “Maybe some things still need the human aspect,” Lindsay said – a fitting reminder that even in an AI-forward room, there are still moments that call for a human touch. 

What AI-Powered Marketing Automation Means for Brands and CMOs 

Adobe Marketo remains one of the most widely used marketing automation platforms, and its recent push toward AI, from in-platform assistants to content generation to MCP-based integrations, signals a broader shift in how marketing operations teams will work going forward. For brands and CMOs, that shift means faster access to insights, cleaner instances, and teams that spend less time pulling reports and more time on strategy. Events like this hackathon give practitioners a rare chance to move past the hype and actually put these tools through their paces on real problems. 

Similar AI-in-marketing hackathons are popping up beyond Texas, including ones happening later this year in Toronto and Boston. If you work in lead or work on a marketing team and want to see what AI can actually do for your Marketo instance, rather than just hear about it, keep an eye out for a hackathon near you. A few hours of hands-on experimentation with the right people in the room can shift your whole perspective on what’s possible.