2018 Adobe Experience Business Awards: Excellence in AI-powered Personalization

Excellence in AI-Powered Personalization

If you’re like those of us on the Adobe Target team, you love to hear success stories — especially when real customers tell them. That’s why two years ago, we started an annual contest that encourages Adobe Target customers to submit a story that describes what they feel is their best Adobe Target activity. Each year, we select finalists from the many entries submitted, and the finalists present their stories onstage in a dedicated Adobe Summit session.

This past spring, I had the good fortune of facilitating this session, which was packed with attendees excited to hear about what their peers were doing in personalization and optimization. The breadth and depth of the activities were impressive — one company optimized its online self-service process to cut call center costs, another tested geolocation accuracy of GPS vendors, and still another leveraged the accelerometer in smartphones to boost conversion rates.

In this blog post, I want to introduce you to the expanded version of this annual awards contest — the 2018 Adobe Experience Business Awards. In particular, I want to describe a specific award category: Excellence in AI-Powered Personalization.

What makes the Adobe Experience Business Awards different?

This year, we on the Adobe Target team joined forces with the teams from the two other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions — Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Campaign — to launch the Adobe Experience Business Awards. We wanted to capture stories of customers developing and delivering phenomenal experiences with both the individual Experience Cloud solutions, but also by combining them.

If you want to learn more about the entire awards program, my counterpart, Jeremy Finch on the Adobe Campaign team wrote a great blog post about it. But here are the basics: The Adobe Experience Business Awards include awards in 10 different categories that tie one or more Adobe Experience Cloud Solutions to excellence in a specific aspect of an experience business. We’ve designed two categories specifically for Adobe Target customers — Excellence in AI-Powered Personalization, the topic of this post, and Excellence in Business Impact Through Optimization, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post.

What is AI-Powered Personalization?

Adobe Target includes four personalization features powered by Adobe Sensei, the unified artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform from Adobe — Auto-Target, Auto-Allocate, Automated Personalization, and Recommendations. These features leverage machine learning algorithms to deliver the right experience to the right person at the right time. While rules-based personalization can be highly effective, AI-driven personalization tends to work better and enables you to personalize at scale. We have so much data to consider that there’s no way to manually determine what types of data are most predictive of what customers want. AI can speed up our decision-making, discover those predictive factors, and almost always make significantly better decisions than we humans can.

One of the biggest barriers to using AI has been that there’s traditionally been little visibility to what the algorithm deems as important in its decision making. Specific to personalization, marketers can’t see which audiences the algorithm learns are important and which characteristics of the data it determines are predictive. Adobe Target has been working hard to help overcome that barrier with the soon-to-be-available actionable AI insights reports. These reports supply that type of critical information and will appear as new tables added to Adobe Target reports for your Auto-Target and Automated Personalization activities.

What types of entries can you submit?

So back to the contest. What makes a submission eligible for the Excellence in AI-Powered Personalization award? That’s pretty simple — if your activity uses any of the four AI features in Adobe Target, you can submit it. To enter, you just need to describe the business problem you solved and the content, offers, or experiences you developed for the AI-driven activity. You also need to share the incredible results that your activity generated. Incredible results don’t always mean big increases in revenue or conversion. They can also mean cost savings or important lessons learned about what not to do. Beyond the activity that you submit, we’d love to hear more about what you’re doing in personalization in general — with and without AI — and what you’ve learned along the way.

Share with us and many others.

Are you ready to share your incredible story with us? Check out the event website, and submit it today! If you have more than one, you can even submit multiple stories. Any questions? No problem—we’re here for you. Please email me at nwu@adobe.com. I am more than happy to help.