Adobe has published seven Marketo Engage release notes so far in 2026. Rather than link out to each one, this is a distilled rollup of what actually changed, what matters for marketing operations teams, and where to invest time first. Sources: the Adobe Experience League release notes archive for Jan–Jul 2026 and Adobe Summit 2026 session materials.
January 2026
- New Email Designer expanded — now available in Engagement, Default, and Event Programs (previously Email Program only).
- Picklist Management improvements — enhanced controls for cleaner picklist governance.
- Adobe IMS migration continued rolling out across new instances (unified Adobe login).
February 2026
- New Email Designer REST API officially supported (soft-released Sep 2025).
- Email Designer Brand Management — Public Beta of adaptive brand controls.
- Email Designer Brand Quality Checker — auto-check brand compliance before send.
- AEM asset repository access from inside the Email Designer (images only).
March 2026 — Adobe Summit release wave
- Marketo MCP Server — announced at Adobe Summit 2026 and entered Private Beta.
- Agentic User Experience — new UI with theme switcher and conversational 'Build with AI' layer entered Public Beta.
- Program & Asset Validation — Agent skill in Public Beta, tests against best practices, workspace rules, naming conventions.
- Lead List Import, Cleanse, Normalize — Agent skill in Public Beta.
April – May 2026
- Marketo MCP Server moved to Open Beta (May 2026 release notes).
- Callable Agents — Private Beta. Trigger AI agents inside Smart Campaign flow steps (data normalization, bot detection, routing enrichment).
- Program Planning Agent — Private Beta. Natural-language program planning.
- Program & Campaign Creation Agent — Private Beta. Auto-create programs with filters, triggers, and flow steps.
- Lead Investigation Agent — Private Beta. Deep lead analysis via natural language.
June – July 2026 — the deprecations
The July 2026 release notes formalized three deprecations that every integration team must plan for. These are not optional.
- REST API access_token as query parameter — unavailable after July 31, 2026. All integrations must move to the Authorization header.
- SOAP API — end of life on July 31, 2026. Any service still on SOAP must migrate to REST before that date.
- Merge Leads API — calls with more than 25 IDs return error 1080 and are skipped starting July 31, 2026. Batch your merges.
CRM Sync v2 and observability
Rolling out through 2026, CRM Sync v2 improves sync visibility, diagnostics, and troubleshooting between Marketo and Salesforce (and MS Dynamics). Observability dashboards and enhanced sync attributes are shipping incrementally. If your team relies on the sync error log, plan to move to the new dashboards over the year.
What we recommend prioritizing
There are only three items on this list that we would consider unignorable this quarter. The rest can wait for a planned upgrade window.
- Audit every integration for access_token query-parameter usage. Replace with Authorization header before July 31, 2026.
- Identify any remaining SOAP API dependencies. Rewrite as REST or retire.
- Batch-limit Merge Leads calls to 25 IDs or fewer.
Everything else — MCP, agent skills, new Email Designer expansion — is opportunity, not risk. Prioritize the risk items first, then plan the opportunity work with a real change-management runway.