As Enterprise Connect rumbles on, the 2024 Adobe Summit is also in full swing – and there’s lots of CX news.
That news goes beyond springboarding new betas, experiments, and concepts for generative AI (GenAI). Instead, Adobe is presenting what is possible now.
In doing so, the tech juggernaut released several announcements and showcases – which have inspired the following five top takeaways from the event (so far!).
1. Adobe Has Given Its AI Assistant Legs
The Adobe Experience Platform houses offerings such as the Adobe Customer Journey Analytics solution, Journey Optimizer tool, and Real-Time Customer Data Platform.
The Adobe AI Assistant sits inside each application, supporting users in completing various tasks.
Yet, the virtual assistant doesn’t stay in a single app. Instead, Adobe has given its legs to run across the solutions within the Experience Platform.
In doing so, the Adobe AI Assistant creates cross-application workflows to mechanize tasks. Meanwhile, it auto-generates audience segments, answers to customer questions, and more.
Commenting on this capability during a LinkedIn Live video, Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, stated:
AI is going across these solutions into the application layers to deliver new resources, assistance, and powers specific to improving our productivity.
Finally, the AI Assistant also promises to democratize in-app knowledge to extended teams and “unleash” new ideas via its conversational interface.
2. Bringing Data Into the Adobe Environment Just Got Easier
Adobe’s new Federated Audience Composition solution makes enterprise data – amassed in warehouses and specialist data stores – actionable, so it can augment real-time customer journeys while minimizing data copy.
In other words, Adobe is letting customers keep their data residing in a platform like AWS, Databricks, or Snowflake. But, at the same time, enabling them to tap into the intelligence and draft off it.
Essentially, that’s what the federated data layer does – and, according to Miller, this innovation proves that Adobe has listened to its customers.
“This is something customers have been asking for,” she said. “They’ve been saying: “Do I really have to take all my data into Adobe? I can’t do that!” This eliminates that barrier.”
But it’s also doing something wildly important for AI; it’s closing the gap between the models and data.
That last point is critical because it allows businesses to expose AI to more high-quality, secure data and improve AI outputs across the Experience Platform.
3. The New Adobe GenStudio Reimagines the Content Supply Chain
Creating and optimizing a customer content supply chain that crosses customer-facing functions is no small feat.
It can all become chaotic as CX teams deal with different suppliers, offshoots, and automated processes that depend on other automated processes.
That’s where the new Adobe GenStudio comes into play. It aims to reimagine the chain’s five “key building clocks” with a GenAI approach.
Those five steps are: workflow and planning, creation and production, asset management, delivery and activation, and insights and reporting.
By applying GenAI across these steps, Adobe aims to overcome some of the biggest bottlenecks, issues, and frictions from planning to review.
During the conference, Adobe shared examples of how organizations like IBM and Pfizer have already actioned this.
As Lidia Fonseca, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Pfizer, stated:
Through our partnership with Adobe, we are transforming our content supply chain, helping our teams create better, faster and more personalized information.
In doing so, Fonseca demonstrated how the purpose-built studio aims to boost productivity beyond marketing and deliver new capabilities to anyone who is driving experiences with content.
4. B2B Businesses May Now Benefit from Adobe Journey Optimizer
Adobe Journey Optimizer is a solution that helps B2C businesses establish a flywheel of engagement that is measurable, repeatable, expandable, flexible, and scalable.
Now, Adobe has taken this into the B2B market, equipping cross-functional teams with a unified view of buying groups in customer accounts – and much more. As Miller summarizes:
Adobe is thinking about the account-specific lifecycle, translating and orchestrating that as a journey. That’s very different to orchestrating campaigns.
Indeed, brands can see the bigger picture and utilize a new unified experimentation feature within Adobe Experience Platform and Journey Optimizer to embed strategic decisioning capabilities within customer journeys.
Those capabilities may enable businesses to achieve many targeted aims, such as maximizing conversions and driving the reuse of offers across channels.
5. The Bottom Line: This Is All About “Compression”
Each of the above announcements aims to do one of two things (or both):
- Bring users of Adobe’s tech closer to the experiences they want to deliver by removing the space between users in marketing and the people on the front line of engagement/ experience.
- Bring the customer closer to the experience by making the experience more relevant via rich personalization and contextualization.
After making this point, Miller concludes that the overarching focus for Adobe is “compression”, unifying customer experience teams to drive closer customer relationships.
She concludes: “When it comes to CX, there is still a universal truth: it’s the customer’s experience. That apostrophe is important. It’s not something that we force down someone’s throat.
“So, when talking about customer experience platforms and management… we cannot lose sight of the person in this process.
“As professionals in this space, we must stay as close to that experience as possible so we can execute and drive durable, profitable relationships.”
For more insights from Miller and other expert CX Today contributors, watch out for our next monthly Big News Update video, where we capture their thoughts on the latest and greatest customer experience news.
Catch up on last month’s edition here: The Latest on Oracle’s New Communications Platform, High-Profile Chatbot Fails, & HubSpot
