Adobe Summit 2023 was one of the most anticipated conferences for those of us in the digital customer experience space. This year generative AI, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), and Adobe Journey Optimizer were the focus of the major keynotes presented by executives and product experts. However, the real value of the conference lay in the breakout sessions and conversations with industry experts and peers, which provided insights into how Adobe’s strategy and investments are evolving.
Jeremy Moran, our VP of Strategy, and Tim Munsell, a Senior Strategist on our team, were back in person at Adobe Summit, after its three-year COVID-19 hiatus. Here are their key takeaways from this year’s event.
1. Generative AI is the shiny new object, but how will it actually be deployed?
Adobe has long beaten the drum of personalized experiences based on individual user profiles––the whole “right message, right channel, and right time” concept. A major sticking point for such a deployment (not counting the cost of tools and the wicked smart people needed to run these tools) has been the requirement for assets that are personal. This year Adobe had an answer to that critique: the content supply chain. From the moment Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen took the stage for the opening keynote, Adobe touted a number of product features that incorporate the highly popularized generative AI, including ones already available in the Creative Cloud. But beyond Adobe Firefly, most other examples were shared in the keynotes and “Sneaks,” which always makes us wonder if, and when, they will move out of beta.
For the Adobe Experience Cloud, there were examples of how generative AI could be used to surface critical insights, define audiences, and build optimized journeys using conversational dialogue. The examples they shared have power, and admittedly, we got excited at the prospect of quicker time to insights. Adobe placed an emphasis on these features being fueled by an organization’s specific business context (an attempt to please data scientists who highlight the shortfalls and biases of generative AI).
Adobe emphasized the use of AI-assisted work instead of AI-generated work, which is a critical distinction. It wasn’t immediately clear to us how they would actually bring all that to life. The time savings, effort focused on generating value, and freedom to do more with less will still have resource requirements – even if that resource is just having enough data to begin with.
2. Goodbye, Adobe Analytics (and Audience Manager and Campaign)
With 250+ sessions this year, the advanced search tool became extremely useful. As we were filtering down for relevant solutions and signing up for sessions, we noticed 74 sessions were related to Adobe Analytics, and 60 were related to CJA. You would assume, then, that Adobe Analytics is still alive and well. And it is, for now at least. But when we looked at the session overviews themselves, we quickly noticed that few focused solely on Adobe Analytics. And that was consistent with our experience in the sessions we attended. Analytics was often an afterthought; most speakers alluded to the tools before quickly shifting focus to CJA or Adobe Journey Optimizer. Even one of the fan favorite sessions each year, Adobe Analytics Rockstars: Tips and Tricks, noted Adobe CJA as a “featured product” in its session overview.
Adobe has alluded to this eventual shift without committing to absolute terms or timelines. Furthermore, every product life cycle experiences evolutions and then eventual sunsets (e.g., Google Universal Analytics to GA4). The future is definitely CJA, and this certainly explains why Adobe hasn’t put any effort into Adobe Analytics-specific features, functions, or admin setting (when was the last time you wrestled with the processing rules interface?). But based on what we learned from Partner Day and other conversations; Adobe Analytics will likely be around for at least a little while longer (look no further than how long it took to finally sunset Reports after Workspaces was released).
Still, it’s time to say goodbye to legacy solutions like Adobe Analytics and start looking at the various applications that sit on top of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). Rather than focusing on transporting data between systems as in the old days, AEP centralizes the data, from collection through management, right into governance, so the tools are all working with the same exact data. It was exciting and eye-opening to see the AEP vision Adobe cast so many years ago truly coming to life.
It is still early days, but Adobe has paved the way to replace the tenuous integrations between Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager, and Adobe Campaign. Most of the success stories we witnessed still featured the soon-to-be legacy products, but the background music was all about how the same capabilities are more easily, quickly, and seamlessly accomplished on AEP.
3. Strategy, meet engineering
Admittedly, our excitement at attending in person meant more meetups that sometimes overlapped with sessions we would have loved to attend. But what struck us this year in the sessions we did attend was the rigor behind strategy-led design and the emphasis on delivering value.
Whereas Adobe has been pushing its technological advances heavily in the past three years, this year it felt like it brought everything back to business value and use cases. In many ways, that makes sense. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is maturing, and those early, confusing days of the platform’s existence are mostly in our rear-view mirror—when sales teams sometimes forgot AEP product names because of how frequently they were added or changed. Now customers who have finished their lengthy procurements are starting to wonder how to really get value from these expensive investments.
One of the most interesting sessions we attended during the summit, Designing Platform Foundations for Omnichannel Experiences, shined an entertaining light on the dichotomy of letting the Real-Time Customer Data Platform essentially “run itself” versus focusing on business objectives to drive the value of the platform. Similar dichotomies of engineering minds and business minds meeting somewhere in the middle was also a theme of many of the other sessions we attended.
Likewise, an AEP product manager showed us “playbooks” Adobe had developed for Adobe Journey Optimizer. Through these playbooks, Adobe has tried to bridge the large gap between strategy and engineering. Paraphrasing Adobe’s words, make the solutions more marketer-friendly. In our words, “make these confusing as %@$& solutions less confusing for the business users who want to actually use this data.”
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A lot more came out of Adobe Summit 2023, like the unease within the industry about the current state of the economy and what that means for businesses. But in the end, the less conspicuous moments from the conference were what piqued our interest the most. They gave us context into what the future holds, not only for Adobe as a leader in the space but also for other technology providers that will follow in its footsteps.
All in all, it was great to be back in person connecting with peers, clients, partners, and thought leaders.
