Whether you’re an Adobe user or not, it’s worth taking some time at the Summit site to see what companies are doing these days and where we’re heading.
Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, began the summit with a glimpse at how quickly trends have altered in the last month. He stated that “digital is revolutionizing how we interact with each other.” Not necessarily a new idea, but when you take a minute and reflect on how much things have changed over the last few weeks due to the Coronavirus, you realize what it implies.
He described it this way:
- CX before COVID-19: it was about creating “delightful, personal, meaningful experiences in real-time.”
- CX now: it is all about “supporting essential needs in an exclusively digital environment.”
Another point Narayen raised is that this is the “decade of CMO+CIO.” He said that businesses who create a close relationship between these two functions should be able to produce compelling consumer experiences at scale.
This is an interesting argument given how much the position of the CMO seems to be in uncertainty these days.
Anil Chakravarthy, EVP, and GM of Adobe’s Digital Business segment gave an outline of Adobe Experience Cloud vision, including the launch of several new features. We have already covered this in detail. You may want to read it here.
Our takeaway from this was the services that Adobe offers at the top of its core framework, divided into Application Services and Intelligent Services.
These systems are based on an API-first architectural design that allows them to function in various ways across all Adobe applications.
He stated that the only certainty today is that trends are continuously shifting and that consumers, corporations and policymakers all need a way to grasp how they are progressing so that they can respond appropriately.
The DEI is based on Adobe Analytics and Adobe Sensei, monitoring trillions of transactions, hundreds of millions of products and thousands of retailers around the globe using Adobe’s technologies.
The new DEI is for the U.S. only for now, but the aim is to create an index that covers the entire globe, offering insights into:
- Help consumers discover when it is the best time to buy goods
- Help retailers identify local and regional patterns and predict emerging developments that affect when and how people buy goods
- Allow the government and other officials recognize what is really going on in the world economy so that they can prepare effectively.
Anil Chakravarthy, a newly appointed TEU and GM of Adobe’s Digital Experience Sector, stated that Adobe’s innovation roadmap is evolving around the Experience Cloud.
Chakravarthy, in his virtual keynote, which was equally important to attend, mentioned that “As we look at the full picture of the Adobe Experience Cloud, we have the application layer, which has the Marketing Cloud, the Analytics Cloud, the Advertising Cloud, and the Commerce Cloud. This brings together all the capabilities you need to deliver exceptional experiences.”
Application Services include:
- Real-time Customer Data Platform – Adobe’s CDP integrates all known and unknown data collected to create a complete user profile.
- Customer Journey Analytics – Conceptualize the entire user journey through networks and touchpoints.
- Journey Orchestration – Graphically display the path related to the user profile. Journey orchestration works in a unique way, but it’s still extensible.
There were around a hundred sessions at the Adobe Summit, all following opposite directions.
However, one area that intrigues me significantly is Journey orchestration, because consumers do not live in a single channel, and the path to purchase is not a straight line.
How do you recognize and build pathways that function with each customer? Maybe it’s a debate for some other day.
