Ten thousand creatives and designers, have descended on San Diego for the annual pilgrimage that is Adobe Max, showcasing the 2017 updates to its all-powerful Creative Cloud suite of software.

Principal among its announcements was Adobe Sensei, the company’s latest foray into artificial intelligence that will work across all three of its clouds – Document, Marketing and Creative.

According to Adobe, Sensei (the Japanese word for teacher) is a new framework and set of intelligent services for dramatically improving the design and delivery of digital experiences. Adobe Sensei’s intelligent services tackle today’s complex experience challenges – including image matching across millions of images, understanding the meaning and sentiment of documents and finely targeting important audience segments – leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning capabilities.

This announcement builds upon the machine learning capabilities unveiled in Adobe Marketing Cloud at Adobe Summit in March. Adobe Sensei harnesses the company’s massive volume of content and data assets –from high-resolution images to customer clicks – providing an unparalleled ability to design, deliver and manage digital experiences. Adobe Sensei includes a unified AI/machine learning framework and a set of intelligent services that power Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud. Dozens of these intelligent services have been deployed in Adobe products to date.

The company is significantly increasing its investment in Adobe Sensei and intends to make it available to its ecosystem of partners, ISVs and developers who will extend Adobe’s industry leading cloud products and build custom solutions on top of them.

“Adobe Sensei is uniquely focused on solving today’s complex experience challenges in the design, document and marketing fields, where only Adobe has decades of expertise and market leadership,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe.

“Leveraging our machine learning and AI capabilities, as well as trillions of content and data assets, Adobe Sensei will be one of our biggest strategic investments. We’re excited to open it up to our broader ecosystem of partners, ISVs and developers to enable even more innovation.”

Adobe Sensei is built into the company’s cloud offerings, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, to automate mundane tasks, drive predictive and personalisation capabilities, and boost productivity.

Examples of Adobe Sensei intelligent services across Adobe’s cloud offerings include:

• Content Intelligence: Uses deep learning to search and tag images automatically and makes intelligent recommendations when a user searches for images.
• Face Aware Editing: Finds faces in an image and uses “landmarks” such as eyebrows, lips and eyes to understand their position and change the facial expression without ruining the image.
• Semantic Segmentation: Shows each image region labelled with its type; for example, whether it is a building or the sky. Such labelled regions allow easy selection and manipulation of objects, using simple commands (such as, “change the sky”).
• Intelligent Audience Segmentation: Gives marketers and analysts new visibility into which segments are most important to their businesses and allows them to target overlapping or adjacent segments, making it possible to acquire customers much more efficiently.
• Attribution: Algorithmically determines the impact of different marketing touch points on consumers’ decisions to engage with a brand, determines the effectiveness of different campaigns and makes optimised marketing investment recommendations.
• Natural Language Processing: Provides text understanding, topic modelling and sentiment analysis of digital documents.

Other announcements

A new Mac release of Adobe Experience Design CC (XD), the first all-in-one tool for designing, prototyping and sharing user experiences for website and mobile apps, is now available with two highly anticipated features – Layers and Symbols support.

First made popular in Adobe’s flagship design tools Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC, XD reimagines Layers and Symbols to address the specific needs of user experience (UX) designers. Designers using XD can now easily share prototypes and get feedback in real time.

Adobe also gave Max attendees a sneak peek at new capabilities enabling real-time collaboration including co-editing of documents, visual versioning and Creative Cloud Libraries enhancements. This innovation helps individuals and enterprises keep pace with the surging demand for high quality content.

Project Felix is an industry-first design tool that enables graphic designers to easily create high quality, photo-realistic images by combining 2D and 3D assets for projects such as product shot comps, scene visualisation and abstract design. Users have in-app access to 3D models, materials and lights from Adobe Stock as well as the ability to customise specific properties like materials, perfect lighting and adjust camera angles. Real-time rendering allows users to preview work while editing and before exporting to Photoshop to complete their design.

For filmmakers, advancements in virtual reality, character animation and 3D across Adobe’s video tools set the stage for the future of video. The next release of Adobe Premiere Pro CC includes auto-aware virtual reality (VR) that seamlessly detects and applies the correct setting to stereoscopic and monoscopic media. First introduced at IBC, updates to Premiere Pro, After Effects CC and Prelude CC will also include a Beta of Team Projects that allows teams and enterprise customers to co-edit and collaborate on Creative Cloud projects.

Adobe is also releasing a new Cinema 4D renderer in After Effects that will speed up efficiency and quality of 3D content generation. In addition, a new Social Publishing Panel (Beta) in Premiere Pro is powered by Adobe Marketing Cloud technology and enables quick exporting of videos to social channels, as well as data analysis of video content.

You can watch the entire keynote presentation for free here.