Among a raft of product announcements and digital-first initiatives, there was one figure that was underlined by Adobe during last week’s Summit – eCommerce spend is set to jump from $US844 this year to over $US 1 trillion in 2022.
The expected trillion-dollar year for eCommerce has been delivered on the back of a global digital transformation that would not have been possible without the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve moved to this digital-first world, and there really is actually no going back,” said Adobe managing director, Australia and New Zealand Suzanne Steele.
“Digital has become the way that people connect, the way that people work, the way that they learn and the way that they are entertained.
“Digital is the primary way for businesses to connect and make that connection with their customers. The Digital economy runs on customer connections.”
For businesses, continued digitisation means that responsibility is now being shared equally among different departments.
“CIOs and CMOS are now working in lockstep and partnering. And CIOs must partner with the CMO to bridge those organisational and technology silos to deliver exceptional experiences,” Steele added.
“It’s not just the role of the CMO, the role of the whole organisation to deliver those exceptional experiences.
“And enterprises must really have one place for connecting and managing work across their entire marketing lifecycle and be more agile than ever to really rapidly iterate between making sense of the market and executing on marketing decisions.”
Adobe’s local response to COVID-19
Within the broader theme of digital transformation, Adobe detailed its work with local partners to assist with projects that came up as a result of the pandemic.
Headlining Adobe’s local efforts was Skill Finder, a skills marketplace offering hundreds of free online courses focused on digital skills.
Skill Finder came as a collaboration between Adobe, AWS, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Twitter.
Steele revealed that the program has so far had over 10,000 enrollments.
She added that Adobe’s basic design course had so far been one of the most popular courses on the platform.
“All of this time that people have been at home, they have been learning new skills. That’s something that we feel extremely passionate about,” she said.
Also during the initial COVID lockdown, Adobe worked with the Department of Education to provision 3 million student licenses free of charge, within three weeks.
