Adobe and Jet2 announced a multi-year strategic partnership on 22 September, bringing Adobe's agentic AI tools into how Jet2 serves its 10 million myJet2 customers. The deal centres on Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker, which Adobe says will help Jet2 staff deliver personalised holiday inspiration, offers, messages and itinerary recommendations across channels.
Read that description on its own and it sounds like another vendor adding an AI layer to customer service, but it’s broader than that. The partnership links how Jet2 understands its customers, its content production, its decisioning systems, and a set of agentic workflows across different stages of the holiday journey. The more significant development is that AI is being connected to the systems that coordinate what a customer sees and is offered throughout that journey.
Built on existing foundations
Adobe isn't building Jet2's customer-data capability from nothing. Jet2's most recent annual report described continued investment in big data, cloud architecture and governed AI, alongside work to personalise marketing across web and app. Its investor materials cite more than 9 million myJet2 members and an 11.2 million-strong marketable customer database. Taken together, the investment suggests Jet2 had been preparing its customer data for this kind of AI deployment for some years, rather than starting with the Adobe deal.
Why the timing makes sense
Adobe research published last month gives some context for why a travel brand would prioritise this now. AI traffic to US travel sites rose 119% year on year in July, while conversion was just 1% lower than for non-AI traffic, a gap that has narrowed sharply over the past year. AI traffic also showed 21% higher engagement and 67% longer visits than non-AI traffic. Separately, 43% of the travellers Adobe surveyed said they use AI tools for travel research, and the same share cited getting inspiration for a trip.
That's US consumer data, not Jet2's own customers, so it can't be read as evidence of how Jet2's audience behaves. But it does help explain why a travel operator would want its content discoverable and usable by AI systems during the research stage, not just personalised once someone has landed on Jet2's own platforms. Adobe's announcement mentions helping Jet2 do exactly that.
The trust problem personalisation doesn't solve
More personalised recommendations aren't automatically better ones. A YouGov survey of 4,833 US and UK adults for ThoughtSpot, carried out in June, found only 13% of respondents trusted AI-powered product recommendations, while 47% actively distrusted them. Two-thirds said an AI system had previously misunderstood their needs or recommended the wrong thing.
That's retail research, not travel, so it isn't evidence about Jet2 customers specifically. But it raises a question worth asking about Jet2's plans: does more targeted content feel more useful to the person receiving it, or does it just feel more targeted? Jet2's results will depend on which side of that line its recommendations land.
The lab matters more than the software
The new Jet2 x Adobe Customer Experience Lab will see Adobe's forward-deployed engineers work directly with Jet2's digital, customer and technology teams to build and test new AI-powered services. Analyst firm Futurum has framed this as a way for Adobe to shorten the gap between deploying a capability and proving it works, which is its own interpretation of the deal rather than a settled fact.
It also raises a broader question for the industry: does agentic CX get delivered as software bought off the shelf, or does it need to be built into how a company's own teams and workflows operate? Jet2's approach points towards the second model.
An announced capability, not a demonstrated outcome
There's no published data yet showing what the deployment has achieved, whether in conversion, satisfaction, retention, service volumes, spend per customer or staff productivity. Despite this, Jet2’s chief customer officer, David Hills, said the goal is to make interactions "more personal, more relevant, more timely and always helpful".
Whether this makes the holiday experience measurably better for customers, and more valuable for Jet2, is something the results will have to show.