Adobe Experience Cloud Launches AI Services to Power Digital Business

By Amit Ahu­ja, Vice Pres­i­dent of Ecosys­tem Devel­op­ment, Adobe

A recent assess­ment from IDC con­cludes that even as tech­nol­o­gy bud­gets con­tract, spend­ing in the areas of AI are expect­ed to increase. Organ­i­sa­tions are look­ing for new ways to dri­ve growth while also main­tain­ing costs, and AI solu­tions have an abil­i­ty to sup­port both. When prop­er­ly imple­ment­ed, AI can uncov­er insights in data to help refine cus­tomer expe­ri­ences or opti­mise mar­ket­ing invest­ments. How­ev­er, as brands begin to embrace AI in earnest, many will have to con­tend with chal­lenges that have long plagued its adop­tion: lack of AI exper­tise, imple­men­ta­tion com­plex­i­ties and a height­ened reg­u­la­to­ry environment.

To address this, Adobe is unveil­ing Intel­li­gent Ser­vices today, pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei. It is built on Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form, allow­ing us to sup­port organ­i­sa­tions that lack IT resources to enable AI. This includes stitch­ing unstruc­tured data togeth­er under a com­mon lan­guage for AI to act on, thus short­en­ing the time-inten­sive task of data cleans­ing. Strict gov­er­nance fea­tures also ensure that brands adhere to poli­cies for con­sumer safe­guards. And a self-ser­vice inter­face deliv­ers flex­i­bil­i­ty, allow­ing any user to con­fig­ure the ser­vices for use cas­es spe­cif­ic to Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment (CXM).

NVIDIA has been one of the first to lever­age Intel­li­gent Ser­vices for their mar­ket­ing organ­i­sa­tion. Its team used the Attri­bu­tion AI ser­vice to under­stand the effec­tive­ness of mar­ket­ing pro­grams, with insights that drove 5 times more reg­is­tra­tions to event cam­paigns. NVIDIA also used the pre­dic­tive insights in Cus­tomer AI to bet­ter under­stand how con­sumers were engag­ing its gam­ing prod­ucts and dri­ve per­son­alised con­tent for users like­ly to leave the ser­vice. Last­ly, their team used Jour­ney AI to pre­dict opti­mal send times for emails and engage cus­tomers accord­ing to pref­er­ences. This test drove a 14% lift in email open rates and val­i­dat­ed that pre­dic­tive insights can help reduce email unsub­scribes. Read more about their ear­ly suc­cess here.

The full set of Intel­li­gent Ser­vices on Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form will include:

• Cus­tomer AI: Brands often do not have resources to dig deep into their data and under­stand the under­ly­ing rea­sons behind cus­tomer actions. Cus­tomer AI will help them analyse his­tor­i­cal and real-time data across the busi­ness to address this, cre­at­ing propen­si­ty scores for key events like churn or con­ver­sion. A sub­scrip­tion ser­vice for exam­ple, could receive a seg­ment of users like­ly to unsub­scribe due to price sen­si­tiv­i­ty and engage with a cus­tom promotion.
• Attri­bu­tion AI: Mar­keters have mul­ti­ple touch points with cus­tomers (e.g. web, email or social) that require resource and time invest­ment. Attri­bu­tion AI empow­ers teams to quan­ti­fy the incre­men­tal impact of each touch point, using an advanced approach to mea­sure true mar­ket­ing effec­tive­ness and inform bud­gets. It is unique from rules-based meth­ods, where often too much cred­it is giv­en to “first-touch” (e.g. web vis­it) and “last-touch” (pur­chase event), lead­ing to arti­fi­cial rules that skew decision-making.
• Jour­ney AI (Beta): Even loy­al cus­tomers have a patience thresh­old when it comes to mar­ket­ing. With more chan­nels than ever, know­ing when to engage and man­ag­ing fatigue has become a big­ger focus. Jour­ney AI will help brands pre­dict the best time, fre­quen­cy and chan­nel to mar­ket to cus­tomers. This includes a fatigue score, which can help tem­per engage­ment for those like­ly to be annoyed. A retail­er for exam­ple, can use this ahead of hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son to man­age promotions.
• Con­tent & Com­merce AI (in Beta): Brands have embraced the idea that cre­ative also needs to per­form well. Con­tent and Com­merce AI deliv­ers guid­ance on vari­ables that result in high per­for­mance, such as colours or sub­jects. It also takes on the task of auto­mat­i­cal­ly tag­ging assets, for bet­ter search­a­bil­i­ty in the pro­duc­tion stages. On the eCom­merce side, the AI will auto­mate prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions based on real-time sig­nals and cus­tomer preferences.
• Leads AI (Beta): B2B mar­keters have unique chal­lenges when it comes to engag­ing prospects and exist­ing cus­tomers. Long sales cycles make it dif­fi­cult to see the impact of ongo­ing mar­ket­ing and where prospects are in the pur­chase jour­ney. Leads AI uses real-time behav­iour­al sig­nals to help brands pre­dict leads that are like­ly to turn into tan­gi­ble oppor­tu­ni­ties. It can enable an enter­prise soft­ware ven­dor for instance, to dri­ve tar­get­ed cam­paigns with bet­ter personalisation.

Adobe has been lever­ag­ing the Intel­li­gent Ser­vices inter­nal­ly as well, and we have seen some great results. It pow­ers our data-dri­ven oper­at­ing mod­el (“DDOM”), a frame­work that drove our trans­for­ma­tion from box soft­ware to the cloud. Over 1.5 bil­lion propen­si­ty scores are pro­duced dai­ly, show­ing how like­ly cus­tomers are to take a par­tic­u­lar action (e.g. unsub­scribe) and gen­er­at­ing tar­get audi­ences that have been up to 5 times more valuable.