Adobe has continued its head-long pursuit of AI-based solutions for marketers, making a slew of announcements overnight at its tent pole conference Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.
Opening the conference, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in the era of AI, Adobe was even more focused on enabling its customers to truly unify creativity, marketing and generative AI so they could deliver those personalised conversational experiences at a global scale.
“It starts with a customer data platform that helps you create and manage your audiences through a unified customer profile, that we can hydrate with content created through GenStudio. The Adobe real time CDP, which is built on the Adobe Experience Platform, helps you curate audiences for what we are now calling ‘intelligent orchestration’, so you can deliver the right content at the right customer at the right time.
“Our mission to change the world, through personalised digital experiences, is more critical than ever before. We’re focused on unleashing creativity across every facet of digital experience, starting with the ideation around the concept, to the creation and development of all content, to personalisation and orchestration across every channel, while understanding its impact and reach.”
As part of the two-hour keynote marathon, Narayen interviewed Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey, whom he introduced as the individual responsible for having driven transformation for Coca-Cola, expanding beyond classic beverages to meet the demands of the changing world, and with a career spanning multiple continents and cultures, he brings a global perspective on leadership, innovation and reinvention.
Quincey told the story of neither wearing a suit nor drinking a Coke in his first employee meeting as CEO of Coca-Cola. He explained that the organisation was very formal and was facing the strategic challenge of moving away from being ‘Coke first’. Quincey explained that the reason he did these two things was because of previous Coca Cola CMO, Sergio Zyman’s famous quote: everything communicates.
“It’s not what the CEO actually says, it’s what he does. And the thing they can remember is that I was wearing jeans and I wasn’t drinking a Coke on that day and that was a very good amount of communication.’
Quincey went on to describe himself as the chief agitator for innovation. “Innovation, firstly, comes in many different shapes and sizes for us. It can be a niche thing like putting something out there to get attention’ such as ‘putting out a Coke Oreo flavour, which is never going to last forever, but it brings attention back to Coke brand,” he said.
He said that whilst having the role of chief agitator, he also has the role of chief zombie killer “because whilst we have 200 brands now, five years ago, we had 400”, which Quincey strategically reduced during COVID.
From a brand perspective, Quincey spoke of the internal struggle of keeping the brand relevant in a range of markets. “Sharing a Coke and a meal is a universal idea. The meal and the location of the meal, whether it is a couple or a whole family is much more local. What that looks like in every country is very different.”
This is where, of course, Adobe’s new Firefly service, announced today in Las Vegas will benefit Coca-Cola’s need for personalisation at scale. During the keynote, it was announced that teams can now instantly translate spoken dialogue into different languages in video, while maintaining the sound of the original voice.
Here’s a summary of the main announcements.
From Managing To Orchestrating
Adobe unveiled a suite of product innovations that drive Customer Experience Orchestration (CXO) in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). CXO is the evolution of Customer Experience Management, fulfilling the promise of personalisation at scale by combining the creation and development of seamless and connected customer experiences across all touch points and channels, with advancements in generative and agentic AI.
Adobe’s innovations are powered by Adobe’s AI Platform, which unites AI agents and models across Adobe. This includes AI agents from third-party ecosystems, commercially safe Firefly models and secure third-party models, and first-party data insights—infused into Adobe applications. This comes to life in Adobe Experience Platform, which brings together customer experience data, CX language models and AI Agent orchestration. Adobe is unifying marketing and creativity through its AI platform to deliver personalised experiences at scale.
Adobe enterprise applications bring together data, content and customer journey workflows with powerful capabilities from Adobe’s AI platform, ensuring every interaction with a customer is unique and relevant. This includes Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Agent Orchestrator, a new capability that provides the foundation for businesses to orchestrate purpose-built AI agents that engage directly with customers and support the daily work across Adobe applications and third-party ecosystems. Adobe is expanding its generative AI platform, integrating foundational models—including commercially safe AI through Adobe Firefly—across best-in-class applications to scale content production that powers CXO. New capabilities in Adobe GenStudio, Firefly Services and Custom Models optimise the content supply chain for businesses, removing bottlenecks across content management, content production and more.
“Adobe is uniquely positioned to guide companies to a dynamic era of Customer Experience Orchestration, where creativity and marketing come together with AI to deliver true one-to-one personalisation at scale,” said Anil Chakravarthy, president, Digital Experience Business at Adobe. “We are delivering numerous innovations built on Adobe’s AI platform to boost the capacity of teams and help them drive the most impactful customer experiences, empowering businesses across industries to capture this massive opportunity.”
Adobe Experience Cloud, a cloud-based suite of analytics, targeting, journey orchestration and content management services, will power CXO in the era of AI. This includes Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), the marketing platform-of-choice to bring an organisation’s data together to enable personalisation at scale, powering over one trillion experiences a year. AEP and the applications it powers—Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Journey Optimiser, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Mix Modeler—have seen revenue grow 50 per cent year-over-year (YoY) in FY2024, with 30 per cent YoY growth in new customers. With the rapid rise in AI-powered experiences, Adobe is delivering capabilities based on a deep understanding of CXO workflows and processes, with purpose-built solutions that are reliable and safe for commercial use.
Leading brands rely on Experience Cloud to power digital business and deliver exceptional customer experiences, including The Coca-Cola Company, Coles, Delta Air Lines, Eli Lily & Company, General Motors, HDFC Bank, Henkel, The Home Depot, Major League Baseball, Marriott International, NVIDIA, PGA TOUR, Sony PlayStation, TSB Bank, Ultra Beauty, U.S. Bank, Qualcomm and many others.
New agentic AI innovations and partnerships
Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator
Businesses will be able to manage and orchestrate AI agents—across Adobe and third parties—through a single interface, anchored in a CXO-oriented knowledge base and decision science, along with language models that enable dynamic and adaptive reasoning. Adobe introduced purpose-built AI agents to enhance the daily work within Adobe applications, creating capacity for experience maker teams to deliver personalisation at scale. Built on Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, the AI agents can help optimise websites, handle repetitive content production tasks such as resizing, drive high volume data management tasks such as data cleansing, refine target audiences, visualise data for internal stakeholders and more.
Expanding ecosystem partners
Adobe announced new and continued strategic partnerships with Acxiom, Amazon Web Services, Genesys, IBM, Microsoft, RainFocus, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday that enable AI agents to work together effectively. Additionally, expanded agency and system integrator partnerships with Accenture, Deloitte Digital, EY and IBM will drive customisation across industries and use cases. As businesses embrace agentic AI to augment daily work and enhance CXO, interoperability amongst AI agents is crucial. Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator provides tools for teams to drive multi-agent collaboration and avoid disruptions in the flow of work.
Adobe Brand Concierge: Businesses will be able to configure and manage AI agents that guide consumers from exploration to confident purchase decisions, using immersive and conversational experiences with Brand Concierge. This new application will drive a future where customer experiences are conversational and immersive, powered by Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator.
AI agents for enterprise B2B
Brand Concierge will support enterprise business-to-business (B2B) teams with account orchestration, moving beyond delivering generic product information to providing tailored content based on the account relationship and handling follow-up tasks. Additionally, AI agents in Adobe Journey Optimiser (AJO) B2B Edition will help teams identify key decision makers and personalise every interaction.
New offerings to power the content supply chain
Adobe GenStudio Foundation
GenStudio is Adobe’s end-to-end content supply chain solution that optimises the process of planning, creating, managing, activating and measuring content for marketing campaigns and personalised customer experiences. Now with GenStudio Foundation, marketers and creatives will have a unified interface to bring together data from Adobe’s full suite of content supply chain solutions. This provides a single place for visibility into campaign plans, projects, assets and insights, without requiring navigation between different Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud applications.
Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing
As the single, self-service application for marketers and creatives to create on-brand paid social ads, display ads, marketing emails and more with generative AI, GenStudio for Performance Marketing enables businesses to scale content production and meet the consumer demand for personalised experiences. Asset creation for display ads is now available for advertisements served through Microsoft Advertising Platform and Google Campaign Manager 360. Adobe also announced an expansion of its collaboration with LinkedIn Ads, for teams to quickly create campaign assets for B2B use cases. Additionally, Adobe’s extensibility framework enables businesses to connect with third-party solution providers, including IntelligenceBank, Acxiom, Lithero, PwC, Saifr and Stensul—extending functionality to regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.
Adobe Content Analytics: Generally available this month, Content Analytics will enable businesses to measure the performance of content (down to the attribute level) and make real-time adjustments to websites and applications that drive engagement and conversion goals. A hotel marketer, for instance, can optimise their web content based on which creative elements – mountains, green spaces or cityscapes – result in more bookings. These insights—combined with audience segments in AEP—enable businesses to deliver tailored and performant experiences.
Adobe Firefly Services APIs
New APIs will support video and 3D workflows by handling high-volume, time-consuming tasks. Translate and Lip Sync API and Reframe API will drive use cases from translating spoken dialogue into different languages to resising videos and combining visual elements (such as logos) into single images. The Substance 3D API enables teams to quickly create asset variations for existing product images—for use across channels such as e-commerce and digital marketing.
Firefly Creative Production: Powered by Firefly Services, Firefly Creative Production unlocks the power of Adobe APIs through a no-code, easy-to-use interface that can handle a variety of repetitive and time-consuming production tasks, such as intelligently cropping assets for different marketing channels, including social media and e-commerce.
New offerings to drive unified customer experiences
Adobe also announced new Adobe Experience Cloud AI-powered innovations that enable businesses to meet the promise of a unified customer experience, driving differentiated and personalised interactions across every touchpoint. This includes Adobe Journey Optimiser Experimentation Accelerator to scale experimentation across digital properties and pinpoint winning strategies, with AI agents that recommend new cross-channel experiments while summarising actionable insights.
Adobe Experience Manager Sites Optimiser enables teams to optimise their brand’s website, with AI agents that identify opportunities to improve the overall experience. Additionally, new offerings for enterprise B2B teams—across Adobe Journey Optimiser B2B Edition and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics—will provide a complete solution that brings together data, content and journey orchestration capabilities, driving compelling and results-oriented customer journeys.
Continued strategic partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft and Publicis
Adobe announced new offerings with Amazon Web Services and Amazon Ads, providing integrated solutions for marketers and creatives to deliver impactful customer experiences. Adobe and Microsoft continue their collaboration to bring generative AI—and now AI agents—directly into the flow of work to drive organisational productivity and efficiency. Adobe also unveiled an expanded partnership with Publicis Groupe, where Adobe Firefly and Firefly Services will be integrated across Publicis’ capabilities through CoreAI, its AI-powered intelligent system that unifies and activates the agency’s proprietary data.
