Adobe and Accenture Interactive Operations Fuel Dynamic, AI-Powered Experiences at Scale

Today, Adobe announced a collaboration with Accenture Interactive Operations, the marketing managed services business of leading global professional services company Accenture, to co-develop best-in-class solutions for designing personalized digital experiences at scale. Together, we will create new industry best practices for streamlining workflows between creative and marketing teams, pioneer new experience design use cases, and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to scale content production more effectively.

Our collaboration is centered around the need to design powerful and personalized customer experiences at scale for global brands — where design is a key element in their digital transformation. Accenture will help re-imagine its customers’ design process by embracing Adobe XD CC as its preferred platform for UX/UI design. With Adobe XD, Accenture Interactive Operations will rapidly design experiences, create interactive prototypes, share with reviewers, iterate, and collaborate—all with one solution.

“We are no longer designing individual elements. We are designing end-to-end experiences, and Adobe XD is a pivotal design system for the new way we need to work,” explains Narciso Tauler, Global Activation Network Managing Director, Accenture Interactive Operations. “We can concept and iterate using real design elements and content libraries right out of the gate, leading to faster UX design and production. It will also help our globally distributed teams collaborate more effectively as designers can share a common visual understanding with their non-design stakeholders. Ultimately, we expect Adobe XD to help us reduce end-to-end design times by 30 to 40 percent.”

For example, Accenture Interactive Operations used Adobe XD to redesign new digital experiences for Avianca Airlines. Accenture was able to develop the experiences in a more modular way that easily integrates with Adobe Experience Cloud, saving time on review cycles.

Fjord, a global design consultancy within Accenture Interactive, used Adobe XD to design and prototype a new mobile app for Good Return, a non-profit in Australia that strives to eradicate poverty in Asia and the Pacific through access to responsible finance. The new app will help women in Cambodia who own small businesses track and manage their personal and business finances to improve their lives.

Accenture Interactive Operations is also using Adobe XD for internal projects. Recently it designed a new chatbot for lead generation on its website. This project would normally take 4-to-6 months to complete, but Adobe XD enabled the team to cut the design timeframe in half. Adobe XD gives Accenture’s designers the power to do their most compelling work, at warp speed, on any scale.

Intelligent Asset Management at Scale

Accenture’s content production teams also support global and enterprise-level brands with digital asset management and content creation. By leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning technology, in Adobe Experience Manager, including auto-tagging and intelligent asset cropping, Accenture can scale its content production immediately. Adobe Sensei understands digital assets at a deep level—such as the sentiment of documents, the aesthetic qualities of images, or the unique objects contained in a photo—making it possible to ingest, manage and retrieve assets in record time.

Accenture indicated there are customers in the telecom industry that rely on Accenture Interactive Operations to manage their digital, print and retail asset creation across media channels, involving more than 1,500 unique assets per month. It’s a vast number of images to manage on a global basis, and they need to be high-quality and brand-compliant with the correct coloring, margins, aesthetic qualities, usage rights and more.

“With Adobe Sensei, we’re seeing a 40 to 50 percent reduction in the pure production part of our content production chain by automating tasks like checks for brand compliance, coloring, removing backgrounds and tagging assets. By reducing the time our staff spends on these types of repetitive tasks, we free up time for designers to work on more strategic and critical client work and increase the asset variety we can provide for ad affiliate and social channels,” says Cristian Vega, Senior Manager Asset Creation and Personalization Lead at Accenture Interactive Operations.

Design Center of Excellence

As part of our collaboration, we are also announcing plans to establish a Design Center of Excellence (CoE), where we will implement custom design systems for enterprise-level brands and document industry best practices for experience design at a global scale.

Industry best practices and design workflows are changing rapidly as design tools evolve and AI and other immersive technologies are added to the marketing mix. The Design CoE will provide the resources necessary to implement and deliver solutions at scale, across multiple channels—from strategy, to content development, to execution, to analytics and insight recovery.

“Our continued work with Adobe, combined with innovative projects like the Design Center of Excellence, will enable us to leverage data, creativity and content for premium experiences that reach customers with the right message at the right time,” says Nikki Mendonça, Global President, Accenture Interactive Operations. “Creative Cloud for enterprise and Adobe XD help our teams quickly go from prototype to deliverable. Combine that with Adobe Sensei and we can deliver smarter, more efficient digital customer experiences on behalf of our clients.”

We look forward to expanding the digital transformation frontier in our continued collaboration with Accenture Interactive Operations.