Adobe’s Katrina Troughton: Soar To New Business Heights With Generative AI By Your Side

Katrina Troughton (lead image), vice president & managing director, Adobe, ANZ explains how businesses can integrate generative AI effectively.

In the current landscape, companies are under immense pressure to drive growth, regardless of headwinds. With increasing customer demands, fierce competition, and limited resources, businesses must embrace innovative approaches to achieve more with less. The principle of ephemeralisation becomes vital in this context, whereby companies leverage technological advancements to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Constructing your generative AI blueprint

The core of innovation lies in constantly challenging boundaries and exploring new things. This principle is now more crucial than ever as we push into the new frontiers of customer experience (CX). The landscape is rapidly evolving, rendering traditional approaches obsolete. Leading this transformative journey is generative AI, a fast-evolving technology that is capturing widespread enthusiasm, as revealed in the Adobe Future of Digital Experiences Report.

According to the report, most consumers are optimistic about the potential of generative AI to enhance the customer experience. Almost two thirds (63 per cent) of ANZ consumers believe that generative AI will positively impact CX. This overwhelming optimism reflects a growing awareness of generative AI’s ability to revolutionise how businesses interact with customers.

However, the report also found that consumers place a high premium on trust, it being the paramount factor influencing where they spend their money. As a business, being transparent, ethical, and accountable in your approach to generative AI can build and strengthen the trust of your customers, fostering long-term relationships and loyalty.

Navigating challenges and stakeholders

Before delving into the vast promise of generative AI, it’s important to understand the core challenges your current technologies might not fully address. Begin by assessing your business needs and pain points. Generative AI may not be suitable for creating a final product, but it can be highly effective in aiding the ideation process and exploring creative possibilities. By identifying a handful of key areas, you can purposefully navigate your generative AI journey, making incremental progress towards achieving meaningful transformations in your organisation.

Another key factor to decide along the journey is which stakeholders need to be involved. In the marketing realm, the CMO will likely sign off on the use of generative AI with support from the CIO or CTO. Beyond that, you should involve your legal teams in the process, as they can help develop guidelines around governance and ethics. It will also be helpful to onboard your IT and data science teams to help with implementation and performance analysis.

Outline which tools and processes you need to put in place

Once you have buy-in and the right people on board, it’s time to establish processes for integrating generative AI effectively. It’s essential always to review its output to align with your business goals and vision. In addition, a major guardrail you’ll want to invest in is building ethics and legal governance into your processes. One of the biggest challenges of generative AI is around copyright lawsuits. When you work with the right AI partners, your company can feel safe in the knowledge that you’re providing experiences your customers can trust.

Selecting your AI partner

Whatever tool your business ultimately decides on, it should meet these four criteria:

It’s designed to be safe for commercial use: Let the product you choose do the heavy lifting when it comes to staying in accordance with standards across enterprise security, privacy, data handling, and compliance.
It’s built for your brands standards: Any solution you end up using must help you keep the experiences your teams create up to par and on brand across the entire customer journey.

It helps you scale where and when it counts: A generative AI tool won’t be useful to you if it doesn’t empower your teams to deliver or improve the experiences that drive your business. The best tools will not require your teams to make drastic changes to the way they operate.

It optimises to your business objectives: Invest in tools that have your bottom line in mind. The right tool should continuously improve the experiences it generates based on the way they perform against your key metrics.

Guiding the way to empowering your team to embrace generative AI

The strength of generative AI’s technology lies in its ability to empower collaboration with humans, enhancing their capabilities and efficiency. To help cultivate a collaborative mindset within your teams, it’s important to educate your workforce about the capabilities of this technology. Familiarity breeds confidence and encourages people to envision how this tool can help amplify their own efforts.

More than just a tool, generative AI’s full potential is unlocked when it becomes an extension of human creativity, problem-solving, and innovation. It can streamline operations, democratise marketing, and ensure responsible experiences.  As humans embrace and guide its evolution, the boundaries of what’s achievable are pushed further, ultimately leading to transformative outcomes in various industries.