Adobe Summit 2024: Unveiling the future of customer experience management (CXM) in the age of generative AI

Today, at Adobe Summit, the world’s largest digital experience conference, we unveiled a suite of innovations for the enterprise across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud that empower brands to deliver one-to-one personalization at scale through natively integrated generative AI and real-time insights.

These major innovations will deliver business value from generative AI by driving insights based on unified customer data, scaling the production of personalized content, and boosting customer engagement through journey orchestration. This includes a new Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant that supercharges the productivity of experienced practitioners, democratizing access to extended teams through a natural language interface and enabling them to unleash new ideas. Adobe GenStudio is a new generative AI-first offering for marketing teams to quickly plan, create, manage, activate across apps and publishers, and measure on-brand content. New Adobe Journey Optimizer capabilities enable both B2C and B2B brands to enhance journey orchestration with timely, personalized experiences. A new capability in Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models for safe commercial use, called Structure Reference brings users a new level of creative control.

New data innovations

Announced on stage at Summit were a broad array of releases anchored in Adobe Experience Platform, to enable brands to activate customer data across various enterprise systems through an integrated set of applications, creating a foundation to activate insights and deliver true personalization at scale.

• Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant provides a simple conversational interface that can answer technical questions and will automate tasks, simulate outcomes, and generate audiences and journeys within applications such as Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

• Federated Audience Composition provides data management flexibility and efficiency by allowing teams to federate audiences and data directly from enterprise data warehouses (AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake) to augment real-time and cross-channel use cases in Adobe Experience Platform. This enables teams to minimize data copy, govern the use of sensitive data, and get the most out of their existing IT investments for powering customer experience workflows such as profile enrichment, audience segmentation, and personalized communications.

• Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) Collaboration is a new clean room application for brands and publishers to collaborate in a privacy-safe way to discover, reach, and measure their high-value audiences in a world without third-party cookies. Real-Time CDP Collaboration is expanding and evolving the value of a CDP to include data collaboration as a critical and necessary component of customer data management in a cookieless world.

New content innovations

The c ontent supply chain is an end-to-end business process that every company needs to deliver the content required for marketing campaigns and personalized customer experiences. It is composed of five key building blocks: Workflow and Planning, Creation and Production, Asset Management, Delivery and Activation, and Insights and Reporting. Adobe GenStudio, a new generative AI-first offering lets marketing teams quickly plan, create, manage, activate, and measure on-brand content to help companies automate and optimize their content supply chain.

• Workflow and Planning: Adobe Workfront Planning provides every user a unified view into all activities across the marketing lifecycle, to ensure organizations plan strategically and accelerate delivery.

• Creation and Production: Adobe Firefly Services and Custom Models unlock personalization at scale for enterprise content creation and production, eliminating manual tasks while ensuring generated outputs remain on-brand.

• Asset Management: Adobe Experience Manager Assets content hub allows teams to easily distribute brand-governed assets across their organization and external partners. Content Hub forms a seamless connection point between GenStudio and AEM Assets, where any user can search for an asset and create personalized variations with Firefly in Adobe Express, the all-in-one content creation application.

• Delivery and Activation: Adobe Experience Manager Sites variant generation, powered by generative AI, enables brands to create personalized variations of marketing assets, with copy that is audience-centric and on-brand. With Edge Delivery Services, brands can deliver the fastest possible page load times. Document-based authoring in AEM Sites also allows the broader team to author webpages in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

• Insights and Reporting: Adobe Content Analytics creates an essential feedback loop for brands to understand which generated assets and campaigns are performing best, down to the attribute level. These insights help build a more complete view of the overall customer experience, expanding Adobe Customer Journey Analytics beyond web, streaming, in-product, and more.

New customer journey innovations

For both B2C and B2B brands, the ability to enhance customer engagement through journey orchestration hinges on a unified and real-time view of the customer. This ensures that as brands interact with consumers on channels such as the web, social media and mobile, any real-time changes in user behavior or preferences are captured, triggering new experiences. The newest offerings announced at Summit are designed to orchestrate personalized journeys that drive impact to help teams harmonize both brand-initiated and customer-initiated moments.

• Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Journey Optimizer Unified Experimentation uses enhanced statistical models to help marketers, product managers, and developers leverage experimentation and decisioning capabilities within journeys — driving reuse of offers across communication channels or optimizing the ideal path a customer should take to maximize conversion.
• Adobe Journey Optimizer provides enhanced brand-initiated journey orchestration by helping brands connect their audience-centric campaigns with real-time customer signals, so that the right customers are engaged and mistimed marketing communications can be avoided.
• Adobe Journey Optimizer: B2B Edition is a new application built on Adobe Experience Platform, with an industry-first focus on account specific buying-group journey orchestration to reimagine sales and marketing collaboration throughout the B2B revenue lifecycle.

Customer and partner momentum

“Creating richer and more relevant experiences within a connected customer journey is fundamental to success in today’s marketing climate and Adobe Experience Cloud has been our partner of choice in customer experience management,” said Norm de Greve, chief marketing officer, General Motors. “Adobe’s enterprise applications allow our teams to deliver real-time, highly personalized touchpoints at scale for customers engaging with our brands.”

Adobe also announced today an expanded partnership with Microsoft to deliver generative AI capabilities for marketers that bring powerful Adobe Experience Cloud customer experience insights and Firefly generative AI directly into Microsoft applications to reinvent workflows and ignite productivity. An expanded partnership with OneTrust integrates consent management into AI-powered customer journeys. Adobe is also working with agency partners including Havas, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP, and system integrators including Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and EY to accelerate generative AI investments, processes, and workflows across creative production and digital marketing.

Adobe Summit 2024 is a hybrid event with both an in-person and online presentation powered by Adobe Experience Cloud. Luminary speakers and industry leaders presenting at Summit include General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Pfizer Chief Digital and Technology Officer Lidia Fonseca, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian, TSB Bank CMO Emma Springham, MLB Chief Operations and Strategy Officer Chris Marinak, founder and CEO of Zaia Ventures Ukonwa Ojo, author and entrepreneur Nina Schick, and Shaquille O’Neal, host of Adobe Sneaks where Adobe unveils the latest research and development innovations.

To watch the Adobe Summit keynotes online, as well as explore more than 200 sessions and hands-on labs across 12 tracks, network with peers or speak live with an Adobe expert, visit the Summit web experience.