From Hype to Impact - Advancing AI Technologies Unite with Fundamental Experience Strategies to Propel the Industry Forward

If there was ever an obvious theme to spotlight for Adobe Summit this year, it would be artificial intelligence (AI). And while Adobe reinforced its graduation of AI into a more valuable proposition to its customers, it wasn’t at all the focus of the most interesting sessions throughout the summit — rather, there were exemplar stories of upscaling enterprise infrastructure for better cohesiveness in data and systems, improving inter-agency and intra-organization processes, and maturing capabilities to provide better customer experience journeys.

Adobe’s Maturing AI Proposition:

Let’s start with Adobe, who kicked off the conference with a strong message about reinforcing its integrated ecosystem, and emphasizing a maturation of its content supply chain, moving generative AI from “playground to production”. Announcements to back this up included updates to Firefly (custom models and API services to build smarter genAI creative), as well as focusing on a key area we definitely want to see more of: branding compliance during asset management, QA, and deployment (via Adobe GenStudio). Both initiatives will improve teams’ abilities to build and distribute faster, better assets for retail-ready, commerce-ready destinations.

Upscaling Enterprise Infrastructure:

A number of sessions demonstrated the vigor and rigor needed to mobilize the complex moving pieces of transforming or upgrading digital experiences and technology infrastructure. The thematic challenge tended to be the need for teams to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver change to become better in their vertical. A great example of this was the work Publicis Sapient and an auto finance unit accomplished, which targeted benefits like the ability to personalize experiences, enable autonomy for business users, modularize architecture within a tech stack ecosystem, and drive brand consistency and reusability across the processes.

Crafting Truly Personalized Experiences:

We talk endlessly about personalizing the customer experience journey, but we’re finally seeing the pieces come together at scale for this. Technologies and partnerships, such as those between Adobe and Meta, are evolving, facilitating seamless signal transmission from media campaigns to enhance commerce personalization efforts within onsite and in-app experiences. This streamlined process aims to reduce the cost per result and boost conversions. Getting the right data in and out is half the battle, and we saw a lot of conversation about unifying customer profiles into an integrated platform — really, the bare minimum to do personalization right — but how hard it is to orchestrate across such a wide chasms of sources. And so sometimes the truly personalized experiences happen in selective, simpler ways, like how a global pharmaceutical company revamped their B2B, multi-market digital architecture to improve data usage that allowed them to share loyalty program progress with customers and pair with AI to recommend what was needed to make it to the next tier, driving double revenue growth.

In Summary:

Even in the era of maturing generative AI and streamlined production processes that Adobe and a number of vendors were spotlighting this year, the hardcore solutions in unifying teams, data, and experience systems were truly at the heart of this year’s Adobe Summit, signaling a year of perfecting the fundamental, refinement through testing and iteration of new technologies, and harvesting the benefits of adopting all the great efficiencies in the next 6-8 months.