Adobe Summit: Major Gen AI Developments, Data Concessions & Partnerships

B&T is on the ground in Las Vegas to cover the Adobe Summit. Here’s all the action from the first morning where the tech giant put some real meat on the bones of its promised generative AI model Firefly’s capabilities.

It’s 12 months since Adobe announced its generative AI product, Adobe Firefly, and if that presentation was all about hype and potential, today was the meat in a sandwich. During a marathon keynote presentation of nearly two-and-a-half hours, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen, with a host of helpers including General Motors chair and CEO Mary Barra, Pfizer’s chief digital and technology officer Lidia Fonseca, showcased a slew of new products, many of which are still in beta.

With a heavy focus on the commercial safety of its products, Narayen was at pains to point out Adobe’s large language model AI product was trained on licensed content only and was therefore safe to use without fear of a lawsuit from an original content provider. Not something many gen AI products can boast about.

Among the highlights was the promise to empower brands to deliver one-to-one personalisation at scale through generative AI and real-time insights. What was markedly clear in today’s presentation was the merging of their creative cloud and experience (marketing automation) cloud. This correspondent has been reporting on Adobe Summits for more than 10 years and this was a significant change.

For the first time, products like Adobe Express and indeed the now ubiquitous Firefly (Adobe’s gen AI product) are drawing on Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud products. What this means for in housing creative departments or deeper collaboration with agency partners at least remains to be seen, but you’d imagine more and more organisations will be eyeing a change of model particularly for transactional assets.

When I first started covering Summit, then VP of the then Marketing Cloud Brad Rencher relied heavily on fear to motivate marketers telling them the market leaders adopting this technology were not only getting ahead of the competition, they were getting ahead faster.

Today, Adobe is using a far more carrot-based approach, promising a roadmap to help brands activate AI to deliver customer value and capture the massive opportunity in driving personalisation at scale. It also demonstrated a far more collaborative approach to partnerships and data custody. Where it once wanted all of its customer data to be poured into its platforms, Adobe today announced it would allow companies to keep their data where they like (such as Snowflake, Azure and AWS) and simply access it safely.

AI Assistant

Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant provides a simple conversational interface that can answer technical questions and will automate tasks, simulate outcomes and generate audiences and journeys within applications such as Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

Adobe GenStudio

Adobe GenStudio is a new generative AI-first offering that will allow marketing teams to quickly plan, create, manage, activate, and measure on-brand content. Adobe also unveiled Journey Optimizer capabilities to enable both B2C and B2B brands to enhance journey orchestration with timely, personalised experiences. A new capability in Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models for safe commercial use, called Structure Reference brings users a new level of creative control.

Federated Audience Composition

Federated Audience Composition provides data management flexibility and efficiency by allowing teams to federate audiences and data directly from enterprise data warehouses and data platforms (Amazon Web Services Redshift, Azure Synapse, Databricks, BigQuery and Snowflake) to augment real-time and cross-channel use cases in Adobe Experience Platform. This enables teams to minimise data copy, govern the use of sensitive data and get the most out of their existing IT investments for powering customer experience workflows such as profile enrichment, audience segmentation and personalised communications.

CDP Collaboration

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) Collaboration is a new clean room application for brands and publishers to collaborate in a privacy-safe way to discover, reach and measure their high-value audiences in a world without third-party cookies. Real-Time CDP Collaboration is expanding and evolving the value of a CDP to include data collaboration as a critical and necessary component of customer data management in a cookie-less world.

New Content Innovations

Adobe provides an integrated set of products that enable brands to accelerate their content supply chain, the end-to-end business process that every company needs to deliver content required for marketing campaigns and personalised customer experiences. It is composed of five key building blocks: Workflow and Planning, Creation and Production, Asset Management, Delivery and Activation, and Insights and Reporting. With Adobe GenStudio, Adobe will be releasing a generative AI-first offering for marketers to quickly plan, create, manage, activate and measure on-brand content, with native integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud.

Workflow and Planning: Adobe Workfront Planning will provide every user a unified view into all activities across the marketing lifecycle, to ensure organisations plan strategically and accelerate delivery.

Creation and Production: Adobe Firefly Services and Custom Models unlock personalisation at scale for enterprise content creation and production, eliminating manual tasks while ensuring generated outputs remain on-brand.

Asset Management: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets content hub allows teams to easily distribute brand-governed assets across their organisation and external partners. Content hub forms a seamless connection point between GenStudio and AEM Assets, where any user can search for an asset and create personalized variations with Firefly in Adobe Express, the all-in-one content creation application.

Delivery and Activation: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites variant generation, powered by generative AI, enables brands to create personalised variations of marketing assets with copy that is audience-centric and on-brand. With Edge Delivery Services, brands can deliver the fastest possible page load times. Document-based authoring in AEM Sites also allows the broader team to author webpages in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Insights & Reporting: Adobe Content Analytics will create an essential feedback loop for brands to understand which assets (including AI-generated assets) and campaigns are performing best, down to the attribute level. These insights help build a more complete view of the overall customer experience, building on top of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics which measures web, streaming, in-product and more.

New Customer Journey Innovations

For both B2C and B2B brands, the ability to enhance customer engagement through journey orchestration hinges on a unified and real-time view of the customer. This ensures that as brands interact with consumers on channels such as the web, social media and mobile, any real-time changes in user behaviour or preferences are captured, triggering new experiences. Adobe is uniquely positioned to help teams harmonize both brand-initiated and customer-initiated moments, with new offerings to orchestrate personalized journeys that drive impact.

Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Journey Optimizer unified experimentation uses enhanced statistical models to help marketers, product managers and developers leverage experimentation and decisioning capabilities within journeys, driving reuse of offers across communication channels or optimising the ideal path a customer should take to maximise conversion.

Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) provides enhanced brand-initiated journey orchestration by helping brands connect their audience-centric campaigns with real-time customer signals, so that the right customers are engaged and mistimed marketing communications can be avoided.

AJO B2B Edition is a new application built on Adobe Experience Platform, with a unique focus on account specific buying-group journey orchestration that will reimagine sales and marketing collaboration throughout the B2B revenue lifecycle.

New Firefly Capabilities

Today, Adobe is shipping a major update to the Adobe Firefly web application (web and mobile) that will bring users a new level of creative control. Structure Reference enables users to easily apply the structure of an existing image to newly generated images. Using an existing image as a structural reference template, users can now generate multiple image variations with the same layout, eliminating the trial-and-error process of having to write the perfect prompt to get an output that matches your imagination. By combining Structure Reference with Adobe’s Style Reference – an existing Firefly capability that takes a style reference image and applies it to your prompt – users can reference both the structure and style of an image to quickly bring ideas to life, delivering a new level of creative control and state-of-the-art visual quality.

Partner and Customer Momentum

Adobe continues to expand its robust partner ecosystem and extend the value of Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe announced today an expanded partnership with Microsoft to deliver generative AI capabilities for marketers that bring powerful Adobe Experience Cloud customer experience insights and Firefly generative AI directly into Microsoft applications to reinvent workflows and ignite productivity. An expanded partnership with OneTrust integrates consent management into AI-powered customer journeys. Adobe is also working with agency partners including Havas, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP, and system integrators including Accenture, Deloitte, EY and IBM to accelerate generative AI investments, processes and workflows across creative production and digital marketing.

You can read all of the announcements in all their hyperbolic splendour here.

Or watch the whole show below. As usual, the opening video sting is impressive and the guest conversations with Pfizer and GM are worth a squizz.