As the comments suggest, there don't seem to be any easily stated necessary and sufficient conditions for the adjoint representation to occur as a summand of the tensor product of two irreducibles (say with highest weights $\lambda$ and $\mu$).   Of course, one has to fix a simple system of roots to speak of "highest weight".  

However, there is a simple *necessary* condition.   Start with the classical fact that 0 is a weight of an irreducible representation precisely when the highest weight lies in the root lattice.  In particular, this applies to the adjoint representation, whose highest weight is the highest root; here the 0 weight space corresponds to a Cartan subalgebra.  In turn, classical results such as Brauer's early method for decomposing tensor products (later extended by Klimyk) show that the highest weights $\nu$ of all irreducible summands lie below the sum of the two given highest weights in the usual partial ordering of weights.   It follows immediately that the adjoint representation occurs as a summand of the tensor product *only if* $\lambda + \mu$ lies in the root lattice. 

In some Lie types such as $G_2$, the root lattice equals the weight lattice.   But here one sees readily that not all tensor products of two irreducibles have the 14-dimensional adjoint representation as a summand.    I don't know of an easily stated *sufficient* condition in general.