Adobe Summit 2023 Part II: Exciting Announcements

This is a two-part blog where in Part I, I shared my thoughts on what to expect at Adobe Summit this year. I shared that we would have a Softcrylic Kiosk, check! Look at this wonderful crew:

I expected great sessions and labs, check check! I expected a lot of hugs and laughs, triple check! I expected a super cool Bash and I have to say that Area15 didn’t disappoint. Finally, I predicted 3 announcements, and I absolutely nailed one of them. More on that later.

As amazing as it was to be back at Summit, it was clear that everyone was hungry for Adobe to announce something wild and jaw dropping. Adobe spoiled us over the years where Summit Announcements swept us off our feet and left us gasping for air. As great as the announcements were this year, we all walked away wanting more.

I have my own theory on this so hear me out. We will go over the big announcements in this blog but if you are one of the folks who expected more from this Summit, you need to look beyond the buzzwords and see what Adobe is truly doing. Adobe is doubling down on the experience platform (AEP) and its application services (RTCDP, AJO and CJA). These tools are still new in the market and have been evolving at record speed but still require a lot of product improvements and stability. There is a clear shift from Adobe Analytics into the concept of Customer Journey Analytics and similar shift to 1-to-1 journey orchestration with Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO). The announcements around these products might not be the sexiest buzzwords but for marketers and practitioners like us, this is exactly what we have been asking for and Adobe have listened and acted.

Let’s dive into the top four announcements that made this Summit special for me:

Generative AI and Co-pilots

I predicted that there would be an announcement around Chatgpt and I was right. Adobe biggest announcement was GenAI product called Firefly. If you watched the keynote, you would see how impressive this product is for creating AI generated images with few words.

I couldn’t help asking myself though, this is cool and all but how does this help me and my clients? Well, you need to look more into how Adobe is planning to plug GenAI into the AEP’s Application services as part of Adobe Sensei.

For RTCDP, Adobe is introducing GenAI Audiences to allow marketers to create audiences via conversational language. This is the dream!!

For AJO, Adobe is introducing GenAI Experiences to enable marketers to quickly turn ideas into journeys as well as speed up the email content creation.

For CJA, Adobe is introducing GenAI Insights where it will provide the insights and captions based on data loaded in the dashboard. This is probably the toughest thing to do as an analyst and this could be a complete game changer.

GenAI will also be plugged into Marketo Engage and AEM Assets and Sites. For more info click here.

Audiences

We often interchange the use of audiences and segments depending on what Adobe product you are using. Segments in RTCDP and Audience Manager but Audiences in Adobe Target. With endless possibilities to create segments and audiences in every Adobe product, you can see how this can get confusing. Well, Adobe is officially introducing a new offering in AEP that takes segmentation to the next level. I stole the following image from one of the sessions and I think this explains this new feature really well:

Adobe is adding an Audience Composer that promises look-a-like modeling capability (something we loved in AAM and missed in the RTCDP) as well as the support to waterfall-style breakdowns and the ability to slice and split audiences for testing/personalization purposes (reminds me of Audience Labs but on steroids) and finally the ability to use GenAI to build audiences. I am skeptical on that last one, but I hope there are some best practices that will be enforced to allow this feature to work well.

Use Case Playbooks

I must admit that this is by far my favorite announcement of Summit. I was fortunate to hear about this in the Customer Advisory Board and couldn’t be more excited.

The biggest challenge that I see my clients face today is transitioning from implementation to run and operate these products. Where to start? Who do we need to train on the product? Do we have enough documentation? All very logical questions that hinders clients to adopt these products and see value added post implementation. Well, Adobe came up with a great idea to solve for this and it is Playbooks. Think of Playbooks as common use cases across different verticals that allows you to ideate and then generate the templates you need to get this use case in motion. Everything from the assets to audiences and to journeys.

Product Analytics

I have to admit that I was initially confused by this announcement and thought this was only applicable for the CPG and commerce clients but boy was I wrong. Product Analytics will be part of Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) and it is meant for the Product centric analytics vs Customer centric analytics. There is a definite appetite for this offering as we have seen other product centric analytics tools such as Amplitude gain more momentum over the past few years. It would be interesting to see how this offering will be amplified with the Unified view of the customer and the GenAI Insights in CJA.

These are my favorite takeaways from Summit, and I am confident that these will keep us busy for a while. I am excited to get my hands on these tools and play around. We will make sure to circle back and share with you our initial feedback and tips.