Adobe Summit 2024 Opening Keynote Highlights
The initial segment of the Adobe Summit 2024 Opening Keynote set the stage for a journey into AI-powered experiences, as CEO Shantanu Narayen discussed Adobe Firefly, a family of GenAI models aimed as revolutionizing content creation and production. With over 6.5 million generations achieved since its launch last year, Firefly has already made a significant impact on enterprise workflows and integrations within the creative process. Narayen emphasized the importance of enabling enterprise customers to seamlessly integrate Firefly into their marketing and production workflows through Firefly Services (more on this later!), empowering users to tailor models to their specific needs and embed them into various media, social, and web creation processes.
He introduced an AI Assistant for Acrobat and Reader, which combines GenAI with a unique understanding of PDF formats. This assistant enables users to interact with and extract value from PDF documents through a conversational interface, answering questions and providing valuable insights.
The opening segment underscored key themes such as customer experience management in the AI era, highlighting the essential elements of content, data, and journeys for effective customer engagement. Adobe would demonstrate its dedication to AI innovation by integrating with apps and workflows, building foundational models, and responsibly harnessing data. As the keynote transitioned to Anil Chakravarthy, President of Digital Experience, the spotlight shifted towards exploring personalization at scale and the intricacies of the content supply chain.
Chakravarthy opened with a little background on the product portfolio before eventually diving into some of the new innovations.
Product Portfolio & Background
Adobe’s products are organized into three categories:
- Content, Commerce, and Workflows – This category encompasses solutions aimed at managing content, facilitating commerce, and optimizing workflows. Products include Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Commerce, and Adobe Workfront.
- Data Insights & Audiences – This category focuses on providing insights derived from data and understanding audience behavior. Key offerings including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RTCDP).
- Customer Journeys – This category revolves around orchestrating personalized customer journeys across various touchpoints. Products in this category include Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign.
Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) was launched five years ago with the aim of creating a unified customer profile. Within AEP, there are three native apps: RTCDP, Journey Analytics, and Journey Optimizer, which collectively deliver a response rate of less than 100 ms.
The platform as been designed to be open and trusted, with over 500 partner integrations to date, reflecting Adobe’s commitment to providing a comprehensive and adaptable solution for customer experience management.
Personalization at Scale
To achieve personalization at scale, organizations must address three main requirements.
- Content – Organizations are facing increasing demands for content at a pace that exceeds their ability to deliver.
- Data – Data siloes are pervasive, making it challenging to access high-quality data while respecting client privacy.
- Journeys – Customer journeys need to evolve in real-time, taking into account the context of both the customer and the brand’s objectives.
Content Supply Chain & Product Innovations
Content Supply Chain
- Creation and Production – This includes the processes involved in generating content, including image, vector, and full design generation. Adobe Firefly, introduced last year, supports these processes and is integrated into tools like Adobe Photoshop.
- Workflow and Planning – Automating content workflows and accelerating approval processes are essential for efficiency. Adobe Workfront, with its Workfront Planning feature, serves as a system of record for marketing activities.
- Asset Management – Managing assets effectively is crucial for streamlining content creation and delivery processes.
- Delivery and Activation – Efficiency delivery mechanisms are necessary to ensure content reaches the intended audience.
- Reporting and Insights – Access to analytics and insights helps organizations understand the performance of their content and make data-driven decisions.
Adobe’s solution offers an integrated set of products that address these building blocks of the content supply chain. Each component was delved into, leading into some additional announcements of innovations and new features across their products.
Creation and Production
An important announcement from Adobe is the introduction of Adobe Firefly Custom Models and Adobe Firefly Services. These offerings aim to bring GenAI from experimentation to production, with the following key features:
- Custom Models – Organizations can create their own models, ensuring that their content remains their intellectual property.
- Firefly Services – These services enable organizations to leverage GenAI to automate content generation processes effectively.
Adobe’s focus on empowering organizations to create and manage content efficiently while maintaining control over their data underscores its commitment to enabling personalization at scale.
Coca Cola, one of their customers, has been evaluating Firefly Custom Models and Services early, and we got a demo of these features in action. They leveraged Custom Models to transform their content creation process, enabling the generation of fresh, on-brand content that scales with personalization and improves content velocity. These custom models are accessible in Adobe Express and Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing creative teams to swiftly go from idea to campaign execution.
The introduction of Firefly Services could be a significant advancement in content production for enterprises. These services provide automation APIs for generating and editing content, streamlining the process of generating, processing, and assembling thousands of assets in minutes rather than months.
Wes Hopkins, a Tech Evangelist at Adobe, demonstrated examples of leveraging APIs to streamline the content creation process. Through the “Ideation at Scale” workflow, users can input prompts to custom models to generate images that align with brand aesthetics. This process enabled the creation of hundreds of on-brand assets in seconds and streamlines the assembly of ads and campaigns.
Custom Firefly Models and New Features
Custom models, such as Firefly Image 2 Model and Firefly Vector Model, empower users to train their own models, creating more personalized content than ever before. These models are accessible in Creative Cloud Enterprise and Adobe Express, as well as through Firefly Services APIs.
Two new features in the Firefly Image 2 Model include Style Reference and Structure Reference, enhancing content generation capabilities. Users can upload images for style and structure, allowing Firefly to generate images that match the desired composition and style.
Other custom models included the Design Model, Audio Model, Video Model, and 3D Model – enabling content to be generated in these formats. It’ll be interesting to see this in action when released.
Asset Management
Adobe announced Content Hub, a new feature in AEM Assets designed to organize all assets for campaigns efficiently. AI is used to automatically create metadata to improve discoverability. This is a feature I’ve seen across a few enterprise DAM solutions that’s pretty impressive.
Delivery and Activation
With a new release of AEM Sites, users can now create content and images through GenAI, enhancing SEO rankings and traffic with Adobe’s performance tools
Reporting & Insights
Adobe Content Analytics, built natively on AEP, was launched. It provides insights into the performance of any content, including AI-generated content, across various channels, campaigns, and audiences.
Adobe GenStudio
Adobe introduced a new end-to-end app, Adobe GenStudio, which enables marketing teams to accelerate on-brand content creation and activation processes. This app integrates Creation, Content Hub, Campaigns, Activation, and Insights in one platform, empowering marketers to create and scale the enterprise-ready content rapidly. GenStudio, powered by Firefly and integrated into other Adobe products like Workfront and AEM Assets, enhances content creation efficiency. I thought this was pretty impressive, in particular the single UI for selecting between Adobe platforms like AEM Sites and Workfront.
An example from Coca-Cola was demonstrated related to a a campaign, demonstrating how marketers can efficiently find, reuse, and customize assets using Adobe’s tools. The focus is on performance metrics at different levels, including the full experience level, asset level insights, and attribute level insights to target specific customer preferences.
Firefly Service Automation streamlines the process of managing assets in the Content Hub and enables quick adaption to different channels. Users can easily find find, create, store, and measure assets, enhancing the overall efficiency of content delivery and activation processes.
AEP Innovations
Anjul Bhambhri, SVP of Experience Cloud Engineering, discussed the challenge of implementing 1:1 personalization at scale due to fragmented customer profiles and increasing privacy concerns. To address this, Adobe had previously launched AEP, which includes Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, RTCDP, and Adobe Journey Optimizer. These tools work seamlessly together, leveraging unified profiles to enhance web personalization, marketing automation, and omnichannel experiences while ensuring governance, trust, and security.
With AEP innovation, brands can aim to reach more customers with greater precision, scale audience journeys and channels, and increase workforce efficiencies.
AEP AI Assistant
The new AEP AI Assistant was introduced, capable of answering questions, automating tasks like data engineering pipelines, simulating outcomes, and generating audiences and journeys with natural language prompts. This tool democratizes access, enhances productivity, and generates new ideas.
An example in the hospitality business demonstrated how the AI Assistant streamlines campaign management tasks, such as identifying segments with the high propensity to book. The AI Assistant leverages Adobe’s Generative Experience Model, powered by Decision Services, Base Model, Custom Model, Adobe Data, and Customer Data, to provide actionable insights and recommendations based on enterprise data and journey metrics. I thought this was particularly impressive, factoring in how a single person could rapidly create a new campaign without involving a number of other colleagues in different roles for support.
RTCDP – Federated Audience Composition; Collaboration
Amit Ahuja, SVP of Experience Cloud Platform and Products, Digital Experience, discussed additional innovations aimed at expanding capabilities and leveraging existing platforms more effectively. Two key innovations highlighted are Federated Audience Composition and Collaboration within Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RTCDP).
Federated Audience Composition allows enterprises to query data directly from their existing data warehouses without the need for costly data migration. This enables seamless access to data stored in various locations while maintain privacy and security.
Collaboration within RTCDP facilitates the sharing of first-party data between advertisers and publishers, enabling safe activation and measurement of campaigns across various channels. This collaboration ensures privacy is maintained while allowing for effective targeting and engagement.
A demo featuring Major League Baseball (MLB) showcased how these innovations work in practice, showing how fan data stored in a data warehouse could directly be accessed from AEP. This example showed how the MLB can reach fans with personalized content while minimizing data duplication and ensuring privacy compliance.
Additionally, RTCDP Collaboration enables advertisers to share data with publishers on retail media networks and connected TV platforms without relying on third-party cookies, fostering privacy-conscious partnerships for effective audience targeting.
Adobe Journey Optimizer – New Features
Adobe Journey Optimizer introduces two new innovations aimed at enhancing inbound and outbound services within the same platform:
- B2B Edition – Introduced Buying Group Journeys, focusing on the dynamics of buying groups and accounts within B2B context.
- Customer & Brand-Initiated Journeys with Expanded Channels – Offers both Customer-Initiated and Brand-Initiated Journeys, expanding channels within the same application of Journey Optimizer.
Adobe and Microsoft – Connecting AEP Workflows/Insights to Co-Pilot
Adobe and Microsoft are collaborating to connect AEP workflows and insights to Microsoft Co-Pilot in Microsoft 365. This integration aims to enhance marketing efficiency by providing insightful data directly within Microsoft 365 applications, streamlining content creation and internal reporting processes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Adobe Summit 2024 opening keynote showcased a number of groundbreaking advancements and innovations across the Adobe ecosystem, particularly focusing on the integration of AI into content creation and customer experience management.
The introduction of Adobe Firefly Custom Models and Services marked a significant leap forward in enabling organizations to create personalized content efficiently while maintaining control over their data. The emphasis of personalization at scale, underscored by examples from Coca-Cola, and the introduction of tools like the GenStudio, highlighted Adobe’s commitment to empowering marketers with AI-driven tools. The discussion on AEP and the AI Assistant demonstrated Adobe’s dedication to providing comprehensive solutions to customer experience management. With innovations spanning content creation, asset management, data insights, and customer journeys, Adobe reaffirmed its position as a leader in the digital experience landscape, setting the stage for a future driven by AI-powered experiences and customer-centric solutions.
Ready to unlock the full potential of the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem for your business? Schedule a free consultation today and take the next step towards transforming your digital customer experiences.