Adobe Summit 2023. The first one in-person since 2019 did not disappoint. From a packed Community Pavilion, sparkling keynote speakers, electrifying Sneaks, and a bombastic concert, Summit in Vegas felt firmly firing on all cylinders. And Adobe did not hold back in terms of new releases. With AI at the forefront of many innovations, Adobe also balanced its forward-pushing features with a call for responsibility and ethics when operating their products with the guardrails they’ve built in to protect original content and creators. Adobe also acknowledged the current atmosphere in tech – with massive layoffs fresh in our minds and uncertainty looming, they focused their messaging on increasing productivity and doing more with less. The core message shared, through words and products, was a desire to change the world through digital experiences.
Next Generation: Sensei GenAI
Adobe unveiled Sensei at Summit 2017 (which I covered with measured awe here) and has continued to iterate on it, this year incorporating generative AI into its functionality, natively integrating into the existing Adobe suite. Sensei aims to provide better optimization, content creation, advanced personalization, and free up creatives and professionals from monotonous tasks to dive deeper into creative work. Adobe wants Sensei to be a trusted co-pilot, creating speed and increasing quality for those who use it. From use across Experience Cloud, Creative cloud, and in the new release Adobe Firefly, generative AI is here to stay.
For example, In Adobe Real-Time CDP, natural language tools can identify new audiences, create playbooks, and refine segments to meet marketing goals and improve outcomes. In Adobe Journey Optimizer, AI can adjust offers for engagement, generate copy, and provide OOTB templates to fit your industry. Sensei GenAI goes to work in Customer Journey Analytics surfacing trends with helpful visualizations and unseen engagement opportunities.
With AI achieving such a foothold, Adobe also took care to talk deeply about responsibility and the ethics surrounding it. From developing an AI ethics review board to respecting creators’ rights with ‘Do Not Train’ tags available, Adobe is listening to their users and exercising care.
Adobe’s Product Analytics
Adobe is connecting product teams to the customer journey in new ways, helping to uncover hidden insights and deliver personalized experiences. By offering more self-serve analysis and guided workflows, Adobe is empowering product owners, marketers, and analysts to explore the impact of every step along the customer journey, enabling them as ‘citizen data scientists’, as mentioned in the Keynote address. By enabling teams across business groups, Adobe becomes a trusted copilot from beginning to end. Furthermore, a data solution that allows collaborative analysis, data consistency, and standard metrics across business groups will propel businesses forward, harvesting strategic insights that will quicken critical decisions backed by data.
Being able to work with Product Owners to see what’s actually happening in the data and where we can target improvements, without the need to involve analysts (at least for those first couple of questions), is really exciting and will hopefully become an important tool in our conversion rate optimization efforts.
– James Miner, Tech Lead at TMG
By increasing the out-of-the-box functionality of Adobe Product Analytics, Adobe raises the floor for data and for many companies, will push off the need for other intensive data tools, and expands Adobe’s platform reach and the Adobe ecosystem. Of course, pairing Product Analytics with Adobe Journey Optimizer will only deepen the opportunity for optimization and personalization with real-time signals. For customers looking to decrease churn, grow subscription revenue, or increase cart conversion, data insights and this tandem combination would be incredibly beneficial. Adobe presented an incredibly smart, integrated platform that continues to use data analytics to identify personalized marketing opportunities, with generative AI-fueled content creation and the recommended customer journey.
A Headless Future
One area that spoke strongly to TMG was the push for Adobe’s headless Content Management System (CMS). By maintaining your content in Adobe’s cloud, customers can quickly build and deploy consistent customer experiences across channels and devices. Many of the new features announced by Adobe are only available in the cloud version of the platform, providing customers with additional incentive to make the move to cloud. With comprehensive APIs, speed, and extensibility – for those who have yet to move to the cloud – this is an incredibly compelling package.
Onstage, PGA Tour showcased their transformation from their legacy traditional AEM Sites implementation, which suffered from performance issues. Both the content authoring stages and end-user traffic within the site struggled due to the complexity of the information they aggregate on each page for live scoring and news. They completely reworked the platform from scratch, writing a very clean and intuitive solution which leverages Adobe Experience Manager as a Headless CMS, NextJS as their front-end web application framework. By moving to headless CMS, they have sped up content authoring and improved site performance dramatically for end users.
Adobe’s new feature, Universal Editor, enables the creation of content fragments, further allowing teams to think of content as building blocks across platforms. Converting to a Headless CMS paradigm has a learning curve, but the long term benefits are well worth the effort for the productivity and performance gains within AEM.
Final Thoughts
Overall, there is a lot to be excited for coming out of Summit ‘23. TMG sees tremendous opportunity and value for our clients who are considering a move to a cloud-based, headless CMS, or optimizing Adobe tools already in their stack. Our development teams are eager to leverage these new features to drive automation, integration, and optimization for the companies we work with.
AI continues to be a productivity engine across marketing, analytics, development, and strategy. With the way Adobe has woven AI features across its platform, it would be hard to find anyone unconvinced of the role AI will play in digital transformation from now on. TMG is keen to assimilate these tools into our projects to realize their power for digital transformation.
It’s hard not to be invigorated after such a dynamic event – we certainly left with new ideas, use cases, and better ways to work moving forward. Want to discuss Adobe tools and strategy in greater detail? Email us to set up a call or fill out our form.
