Microsoft · Adobe Summit 2026
Everyone in the hall already knew who Microsoft was. The booth had to answer why Microsoft was there.
Adobe Summit 2026 was the show where the Adobe Marketing Agent became generally available inside Microsoft 365 Copilot — a year on from being announced as a private preview. Pure Exhibits built Microsoft a 20 × 20 exhibit at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center designed around that single fact, with an AI readiness assessment at the front rather than a product showcase behind a counter.
Being the best-known company in a room that belongs to someone else
Most exhibitors at Adobe Summit are working on awareness or credibility. Microsoft has neither problem, and that turns out to be its own kind of difficulty. When a brand is universally recognised, recognition stops doing any work: nobody stops at a booth because they have heard of the company. They stop because something on the floor answers a question they arrived with. And the question a marketer brings to Adobe Summit is not what Microsoft does. It is what Microsoft has to do with the campaign they are running next quarter.
There was a precise answer available, and it was newly true. Adobe announced at Summit that the Adobe Marketing Agent had reached general availability inside Microsoft 365 Copilot — the same agent that had been announced as a private preview at the previous year’s Summit, now shipped, alongside beta availability across a wider set of enterprise assistants. That is a genuinely material change for a marketing team already living in Teams, Word and PowerPoint. The exhibit’s task was to carry that one message rather than the forty other things Microsoft could legitimately have talked about, and to hand visitors something to do with it before they walked away.
“From experimentation to embedded, enterprise-ready execution.”Microsoft, on the Adobe partnership
Designing a guest presence inside someone else’s conference
A Diagnostic, Not a Demo
The AI readiness assessment was the organising idea, and it inverts how most technology booths work. A demo shows the visitor what the vendor can do; an assessment tells the visitor something about themselves. That difference matters enormously on a floor where every exhibit is demonstrating something. It converts a vague intention — most marketing leaders arrive knowing they should be doing more with AI and not much more than that — into a specific, personal result, which is a far better starting point for a conversation than a feature tour.
One Integration, Not a Catalogue
Microsoft could have filled 400 square feet with Azure, Dynamics, Fabric, Security and Copilot Studio and every one of them would have been defensible. The discipline was in refusing. The exhibit committed to the marketing agent story and let the rest go, because a booth that says one thing at an event with 200-plus competing sessions is remembered, and a booth that says eight things is a lobby display.
Speaking Marketer, Not IT
Microsoft’s usual trade show audience is technical: architects, admins, security leads. Adobe Summit is a marketing conference, and its attendees measure things in campaigns and creative cycles rather than deployments and licence tiers. Every graphic surface was written and laid out for that reader, which sounds obvious and is routinely got wrong by enterprise vendors who reuse the deck that worked at their own conference.
Co-Branding as a Guest
A partner exhibit inside a vendor’s own conference sits in a narrow band. Push the host’s branding too hard and the booth reads as an Adobe annexe with no independent proposition; push your own too hard and you look like a competitor who wandered into the wrong hall. The resolution was to let the integration itself be the headline rather than either logo — the story on the wall was what the two products do together, which is the only claim that belongs to both companies equally.
Restraint at 20 × 20
A 400 square foot footprint from a company that could have taken four times the space is a message in itself, and a useful constraint. It forced the layout to earn every station, ruled out the lounge furniture that quietly consumes half of most large enterprise booths, and kept the exhibit legible from the aisle. Small footprints fail when they try to behave like large ones; this one was scoped to do a single job properly.
Designing for the Handoff
An assessment has a natural ending, and that ending is the most valuable thirty seconds of the interaction. The floor plan treated it as a designed moment rather than an accident: enough stations that nobody queued to start, and enough adjacent standing room that a specialist could step in when a result came up on screen. The scored output gives the conversation an opening line, which is worth more than any amount of scripted approach.
The booth in detail
Experience the booth
A walkthrough of the Microsoft 20 × 20 at Adobe Summit 2026 — through the aisle-facing graphics and into the AI readiness assessment area that gave the exhibit its structure.
The build at a glance
A guest presence, scoped to one message
The strategic logic of the exhibit rested on timing. Adobe used Summit 2026 to announce a broad expansion of its agentic ecosystem, and the Marketing Agent reaching general availability in Microsoft 365 Copilot was one of the more concrete pieces of that announcement — concrete because it lands inside software that marketing teams already have open all day. A booth built around a capability that shipped the same week is doing something a product showcase cannot: it is answering a question the keynote has just planted in the visitor’s head, at the moment they are still holding it.
The readiness assessment is what turns that from a message into a mechanism. It gives the visitor a reason to stop that is about them rather than about Microsoft, produces a result specific enough to justify a follow-up, and does both inside the ten minutes a Summit attendee actually has between sessions. Pure Exhibits built for two other Adobe Platinum partners at the same show — see Globant at Adobe Summit 2026, a 20 × 30 island organised around AI pods, and Comwrap Reply at Adobe Summit 2026, a magenta LED exhibit built around interactive stations.
Explore our tech portfolio
A 20 × 30 green island at the same show, organised around AI pods instead of a reception counter and lounge.
View Case Study → Adobe Summit 2026 Comwrap ReplyA 20 × 20 magenta LED exhibit for an Adobe Platinum partner, built around interactive stations and a social activation point.
View Case Study → RSA 2026 AppdomeA 20 × 30 island with a large overhead hanging sign, engineered for maximum visibility in a crowded security market.
View Case Study → RSA 2025 TeramindA 30 × 60 Diamond Sponsor island — one of the largest custom installations at the conference.
View Case Study →One message, built properly
The best exhibits we build are usually the ones where the client was willing to leave something out. Pure Exhibits designs and fabricates custom booths from 10 × 10 inlines to 30 × 60 islands for enterprise technology brands, platform partners and systems integrators at Adobe Summit, RSA, NAB Show and CES — with fixed, transparent pricing and a floor plan built around what you actually need visitors to do.