Adobe Summit Announcements – Las Vegas, March 2024
My top 3 "Below the Radar" announcements from Adobe Summit
Summit was very different this year, for two reasons. Firstly, the content. Generative AI was the main topic this year, having been only an emerging one this time last year. This took all of the headlines and major announcements, particularly in relation to Adobe Firefly and Adobe GenStudio – both of which were not products a few years ago.
Secondly, the logistics – there is only one Adobe Summit this year, in Las Vegas; for the first time, there will be no European one. This has always meant there are certain topics or announcements which are held back, particularly to a European audience for a few weeks. Now, there is so such “purdah”, although it also means that many Adobe customers in Europe will not be aware of the latest developments. So, in this article, I’m digging into some of the announcements that perhaps didn’t make the main headlines, particularly in relation to analytics and insight.
Federated Audience Composition – great feature, rubbish name
For me, and I think for many insight practitioners, the most interesting announcement was Federated Audience Composition. Despite the name being a dreadful one that doesn’t really help describe what it does, this is potentially a highly valuable and useful feature. This allows users in Adobe Experience Platform to access and query data in other data warehouses (like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure or AWS Redshift), without having to transfer or extract the data from its original location.
This has several advantages and benefits. Firstly, it answers one of the main challenges that several of our clients currently have – having copies of the same data in different systems increases risks around data quality, but it also increases costs, because storing data in different SaaS systems costs extra money. It also enables better governance around sensitive data, because it means these data sets don’t need to move, and so can be governed in a single location.
I know this already answers some of the objections about moving to AEP for some customers, who already have data sitting in some of the other cloud platforms. Of course, it will depend slightly on how the feature is priced as to whether it really addresses the primary cost issue, but we will be investigating that in the coming weeks.
Adobe Content Analytics – Answering An Old-School Question
This is interesting because it is not new. In fact, we were using Adobe Analytics and content query parameters to answer questions about content engagement at least 10 years ago. So, for any analyst worth their salt, this is a standard question, which can be answered in different ways with existing tools. So, what’s different?
What’s primarily different is the explosion around Gen AI, meaning that our “old school” techniques of cunning query parameters to analyse content assets won’t work at scale. And, let’s be honest, it also comes down to how well tagged your assets are, so this also requires coordination with content creation teams.
But it also brings this up to date. In truth, our old-school techniques were designed for a digital-only world; we could track content within our own ecosystem, not really beyond it. Customer Journey Analytics is really designed for a multichannel world, which involves offline channels, call centres and digital estates. If your outcomes are offline, as much as online, then tracking the impact of your digital campaigns offline requires such an integrated approach.
So, this is really for market leaders using content in multichannel environments; as much as “old-school” analysts might say they can do this, this feature answers a multichannel question which is much harder to analyse.
AI Assistant for AEP – the end of Support Tickets?
Perhaps the least “secret” of any of the announcements, this has been trailed and mentioned on several occasions before Summit. So, it seems a bit of a surprise that it’s only being formally announced now. It’s a conversational interface that can answer technical questions and speed up time to insight. This will help to democratise the data, so more people will be able to take action on the back of the data more easily. This may require additional training and management of who exactly is accessing and making decisions on the data, but it should reduce some of the simpler tasks needed, which will be highly valuable.
However, perhaps the most useful opportunity for the vast majority of practitioners was somewhat hidden in the announcement. It will help save time on “troubleshooting and support tickets”. If the AI Assistant either reduces the need for support tickets, or provides a more immediate way of being able to resolve them, and reduce response times from weeks to perhaps even hours, I’m sure many existing Adobe customers will be queuing up to sign up!
These are my top 3 “below the radar” announcements from the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. If you would like to find out more about any of these features, or on any of the other announcements, please get in touch.