#AdobeMAX: the latest Creative Cloud innovations for enterprises

Insights from Alex Hayward, Creative Cloud for Enterprises EMEA Strategic Development Director

Experiences matter more than ever. Every interaction between an enterprise and its customers can shape its success or failure. With new touchpoints and new mediums for communication, there is increased pressure for brands to create high quality, compelling content, and a consistent user experience that engages and meets the needs of customers wherever or whenever they may be. In practice, this means bringing a broader range of people together to work more quickly, efficiently and collaboratively than ever before. This was a major theme at Adobe MAX 2018 in Los Angeles last month, where several new Adobe product announcements created a real buzz among businesses.

Here are some of my key takeaways from the event, and the challenges and opportunities for businesses that are looking to unleash their creativity in the next 12 months.

Creativity for all

The job of being a ‘Creative’ emerged due to demand for specialist artistic or technical skills to create a particular asset, like illustrations or video. We know that everyone has the ability to create but to fill the need for more and more content the barriers to creativity need to be lowered. Tools like Adobe Spark, powerful suite of storytelling tools, don’t take expert training to be able to create social graphics, web stories and animated videos for use in business communications. Adobe Premiere Rush CC, a new, mobile-first, intuitive tool launched at MAX, are designed to help Creatives work with others in a more collaborative and accelerated way. For example, a social media manager who might previously have delegated the creation of a video to a Premiere Pro expert can get more hands-on with the process and work in sync with a product developer, or the sales team towards a final edit.

Productivity on the move

The new ‘built-from-the-ground-up’ Photoshop on the iPad, due for release in 2019, went down a storm at MAX. The future of work is mobile so it is essential that this and other Creative Cloud tools are available on multi-surface devices. Creativity can happen anywhere and designers need to be unchained from the desktop, working from wherever they wish with access to the same sophisticated tools. Meanwhile, Adobe Sensei our artificial intelligence engine, is helping to boost business productivity on a granular level by streamlining many of the repetitive tasks that slow the creative process down, such as tagging photos, or searching for a particular type of Stock photo.

Voice and Augmented Reality: the next frontier

Voice-enabled and Augmented Reality technologies have been around for a long time but until now, the dilemma for businesses has been whether the necessary infrastructure is in place to integrate them into their wider experience design. One of the biggest announcements at MAX was voice design support for Adobe XD. This allows voice prototyping to be built into the design process so that digital experiences can be shared beyond the screen. The gradual lowering of price points for Voice-enabled devices, not to mention the huge Black Friday deals this year, mean that in the not too distant future most households will be able to order their groceries this way.

Although some way further off, the use of AR will also open up opportunities for brands who understand how to design for these new mediums.

Both Voice and AR will need creative context to truly live up to their potential and Project Aero, announced at MAX, is one of many new tools that will help with this mission. Using Project Aero designers can use the tools they already know, like Photoshop and Dimension, to design instant immersive customer experiences.

What’s next for 2019?

The role of creativity in businesses is not static; it changes constantly to meet the expectations of customers, how businesses communicate, and as technology advances. Adobe will continue to democratise the creative process using our tools so that more people can use them, we’ll also be working closer than ever with our creative customers to feed into our ongoing product development and updates, as we have already with products like XD. For us, this partnership with customers is about making sure we test, iterate, and measure the success of all our tools and constantly evolve them to enable our enterprise customers to take advantage of new mediums, and the experiences that they in turn can create for their customers.