Protestors Storm Stage At Adobe Summit

Adobe’s centrepiece marketing event, Adobe Summit, was disrupted momentarily today when protestors took to the stage while Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen were having a cosy fireside chat with Eli Lilly’s CEO Dave Ricks.

The three protestors were holding placards above their head and shouting slogans derogatory towards Eli Lilly and marched around while Narayen tried to escort them off stage.

“David Ricks: Ban the Mouse Torture” was written on the placards referencing the legislatively and regulatory mandated process of animal testing the US-based pharmaceutical giant must carry out.

A visibly embarrassed and shaken Narayen apologised to Ricks who for his part appeared completely relaxed and at ease before saying “It’s a part of doing business in this industry unfortunately.”

Apart from being CEO of Eli Lilly, Ricks also sits on the Adobe board.

Security guards manhandled the protestors off stage who continued to shout loudly from behind the stage before presumably being removed from the area altogether.

It was the only blemish in an otherwise polished keynote presentation that ran for two hours and made some of the most significant product announcements about its Experience Cloud most notably its release of a beta version of a Generative AI set of products Firefly.

Despite the interruption, the market seemed to like the news with the Adobe share price boosting just over three per cent today off the back of a 15 per cent increase in the past week.

Here are the announcements:

Adobe Summit 2023: Driving Experience-Led Growth

• Adobe unveils numerous innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud focused on new generative AI services, personalization, content management and product analytics, as well as the industry’s first Content Supply Chain solution
• Adobe Experience Cloud is now used by 87% of Fortune 100 companies, including leading B2B brands, and is rapidly expanding its footprint across numerous sectors including healthcare and financial services
• Summit returns in-person with industry leaders and luminaries including AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, Eli Lilly Chair and CEO Dave Ricks, T-Mobile EVP and CDO Marcus East, Prudential Financial CMO Susan Somersille Johnson, screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin, comedian and actress Tig Notaro, and NFL stars Peyton Manning and Damar Hamlin

Adobe kicked off Adobe Summit 2023 – the world’s largest Digital Experience Conference – by unveiling a wide range of product innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud, the world’s leading customer experience management solution, and Adobe Creative Cloud, the world’s leading platform for creating compelling content, together empowering brands to drive experience-led growth.

As content becomes the critical foundation of next-generation digital experiences, new Adobe innovations are connecting Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud to optimize content creation, delivery and measurement. At Adobe Summit, Adobe debuted new Adobe Sensei GenAI services, including Adobe Firefly – a new family of creative generative AI models, first focused on image generation and text effects – as well as new generative AI innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud to power end-to-end marketing workflows. The company also announced new Adobe Product Analytics and a reimagined content management solution enabling marketers to self-serve website and mobile app edits.

To accelerate and democratize creative development at enterprise scale, Adobe unveiled Adobe Express for Enterprise, empowering anyone within an organization to rapidly create and iterate content, regardless of their creative skill level. Adobe also announced the world’s first comprehensive Content Supply Chain solution, made possible through Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud innovations that connect popular tools for planning, creating, reviewing and distributing creative collateral so teams can come together to meet growing content demands in less time.

“As the digital economy continues to expand, profitable growth will come from connecting the complete customer experience – from acquisition to engagement and retention,” said Anil Chakravarthy, president, Digital Experience Business at Adobe. “Our latest Adobe Experience Cloud innovations uniquely connect customer experience creation and management, empowering brands to efficiently scale, unify and personalize digital experiences across surfaces, and achieve sustained, experience-led growth.”

Industry Momentum

Adobe Experience Cloud is the industry’s leading platform for delivering, measuring and personalizing customer experiences, now relied upon by over 12,000 customers – including 87% of Fortune 100 companies and 74% of Fortune 500 companies – with support from 4,000 global ecosystem members and 450 Adobe Experience Platform partner integrations. Adobe Experience Cloud has continued to gain traction across multiple verticals by introducing solutions to alleviate industry-specific pain points.

In the healthcare space, CVS Health, Elevance Health and UnitedHealth Group are the latest companies that have adopted Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare, enabling secure delivery of engaging consumer experiences and empowering patients to actively participate in their healthcare decisions.

Adobe is also increasingly addressing business-to-business (B2B) use cases, empowering highly personalized marketing for B2B industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Splunk.

Within the financial services industry, businesses are increasingly adopting Adobe Experience Cloud to support highly personalized experiences. Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP) helps businesses including Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo ensure their customers can manage their financial goals by receiving information and offers that are relevant, timely and consistent.

AI and Generative AI Innovations

New Adobe Sensei GenAI services in Adobe Experience Cloud will redefine how businesses deliver customer experiences. The services will be integrated natively in Adobe Experience Cloud as a co-pilot for marketers, improving productivity and efficiency while providing full creative control and trusted governance capabilities. Sensei GenAI will leverage multiple large language models (LLMs) including Microsoft Azure OpenAI and FLAN-T5 within Adobe Experience Platform, depending on unique business needs.

Adobe also unveiled Adobe Firefly—a new family of creative generative AI models, first focused on image generation and text effects—which will be integrated into Adobe Experience Cloud for businesses to generate content designed to be safe for commercial use. Adobe’s first Firefly model is trained primarily on hundreds of millions of professional-grade Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired. Firefly-generated output will have real business value in commercial settings, as it doesn’t generate content based on other people’s or brands’ IP.

Sensei GenAI services and Firefly will act as co-pilots for creative and marketing departments, enabling them to generate new content-driven experiences at the speed of their imaginations with more precision, power and ease – directly within Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud applications and workflows.

Additional Product Innovations Announced at Summit

New Adobe Product Analytics in Adobe Experience Cloud redefines the product analytics category by unifying customer journey insights across marketing and product. For the first time teams focused on customer experiences can benefit from a unified view of the customer and collaborate seamlessly across an organization.

Adobe’s revolutionary new release of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) redefines the Content Management System category, enabling teams to easily update company websites and mobile apps using popular word processing or spreadsheet tools. By lowering technical barriers, next-generation AEM will democratize and accelerate enterprise content management. The new AEM also uses Adobe Sensei AI to analyze how various attributes of content impact performance among different audiences and recommend changes that will resonate more strongly with viewers.

Adobe unveiled the industry’s first comprehensive Content Supply Chain solution, empowering teams to develop more effective content in less time. By connecting planning, production, delivery and analysis, Adobe’s integrated Content Supply Chain solution drives efficiencies and major cost savings, while delivering experience success.

The solution brings together applications, services and integrations across Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud and is already delivering value to top brands including Xfinity Creative.
New Adobe Express for Enterprise brings one of Creative Cloud’s most innovative and accessible tools into a universal creative solution for marketers and enterprise leaders, empowering anyone at any creative skill level to easily create, collaborate on and share branded content. New integrations between Adobe Express and Adobe Experience Manager Assets streamline end-to-end content workflows, facilitating more unified content development and marketing processes.