Adobe Summit 2021: Driving Business Growth in the Digital Economy

Adobe launched its annual Adobe Summit yesterday with a handful of announcements about its services. During the opening keynote, the company emphasized the importance of digital transformation for businesses. Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, said, “We have gone from a world with digital to a digital-first world, and there is no going back, because today, every business has to be a digital business.”

In addition, Adobe presented some stunning figures illustrating the latest achievements of commerce. In the first quarter of 2021 commerce has achieved a record $876 billion alone – this is expected to rise to $4.2 trillion by the end of the year. Due to the Corona pandemic, the e-commerce sector experienced a 20% YoY growth, accounting for $844 billion from March 2020 to February 2021. Adobe predicts 2022 to be the first trillion-dollar year in e-commerce.

The heart of commerce in the digital age is customer experience. The digital economy drives on personal connections. That makes Adobe focus on optimizing its Experience Cloud in the upcoming months. Adobe announced that the Adobe Experience Cloud will now be supported by the Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics as well as its real-time customer data platform, a Marketing System if Record through Workfront integration, and brand-new Adobe Experience Platform capabilities.

Adobe’s EVP and GM of Digital Experience Business, Anil Chakravarthy, said, “The pandemic has shown that brands that put a laser focus on customer experience management are coming out in front. Customer experience done right drives business growth.”

“Adobe Experience Cloud with its new innovations released today is bringing businesses closer to their customers—enabling them to deliver the best digital experiences at speed and scale.”

 

Here are the most important announcements from the opening keynote:

1. Adobe Journey Optimizer

This enterprise application for marketers optimizes the customer journey across inbound and outbound customer touchpoints. It is built natively on AEP and enables managing the customer journey end-to-end in one application.

2. Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP): B2B Edition

The beta availability of the feature was announced. The CDP will allow companies to unite individual and account profiles for complete intelligence. It will be possible to view and act on unified account details, attributes, people, opportunities, etc. in a way that is consistent with user permissions.

3. Customer Journey Analytics

This enables brands to integrate and standardize both online and offline customer data for analysis. Adobe has enhanced CJA significantly, including new intelligent alerts capability that ensures smooth less access to insights in real-time.

4. Marketing System of Record

It is a single source of truth for connecting, optimizing, and managing work across the entire lifecycle. It aims to be a central unifying solution to share ideas, manage content creation, automate complex marketing processes, and allocate resources to drive marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

5. Adobe Experience Manager provides new capabilities

Headless content management (CMS) will be supported which is immersive content with API for delivery, including support for GraphQL. It is integrated with Adobe Sensei and supports rich content automation. Moreover, AEM Assets Essentials will be the default asset management experience integrated with all Adobe apps starting with Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Workfront later this year.

6. Adobe Commerce provides new capabilities

These capabilities include intelligent visual product recommendations for customers, as well as Live Search for relevant results on a merchant’s website. Adobe Commerce will be more and more supported by Adobe Sensei to make full use of AI automation. Moreover, Adobe Sign will be integrated with Adobe Commerce. That allows to include e-signatures directly in all commerce transactions.

7. AEP Collection Enterprise

Simplified data collection provides more flexible data routing, and faster websites and apps. Adobe is leveraging its globally distributed network to collect and deliver data to Adobe applications.

8. Segment Match

This feature of AEP allows multiple companies to create strategic partnerships to enrich matching first-party profiles in line with customer preferences. It is meant to help businesses manage the changing third-party cookie availability and usage and promises to develop better customer understanding while respecting their privacy.