Adobe Summit | “CX, Cloud, and ML Oh my!”

Like the iconic trio from “Wizard of Oz”, Customer Experience (CX), Cloud and Machine Learning (ML) were all prominently featured at Adobe Summit 2018. These topics are a natural progression and culmination of the past few Adobe Summits we’ve attended. Adobe’s CX offering has always been strong, but this year they have doubled down on their Experience Cloud concept and added an even smarter layer to help create headless experiences across many devices while utilizing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Cloud was featured in a number of ways and primarily focused on how Adobe’s Cloud Platform, “Adobe IO Runtime”, could be used to create a semantic data collection and overall “Experience System of Record.” ML is embedded in virtually everything Adobe has been doing by leveraging their Sensei engine. Sensei was announced last year but seems to have matured and been fully realized at Summit through demos like creating a poster on the fly from a sketch or deciding what rendition of a marketing piece would perform best for a particular segment, down to a specific customer.

While this blog is a review of Adobe Summit in a way, it also is meant to display UDig’s investment into these same areas as we stay up to speed on the latest and greatest technologies and methodologies in this digital world.

Customer Experience

Adobe’s historically strong CX capability has been further improved by the introduction of a few new tools and concepts. The aforementioned “Experience System of Record” Adobe debuted this year combines semantic customer data with targeted customer experiences. This demonstration does a great job of explaining how powerful it is.

Experience Fragments, although announced last year as a part of Adobe Experience Manager 6.3, have become much more useful this year due to their headless nature. An Experience Fragment is a reusable set of content that forms an experience that should make sense on its own. Experience Fragments help create a fluid AEM experience across many devices and allows these devices to consume the experience data in a native way.

We have also recognized the importance and value of CX at UDig and have invested into broadening our CX capabilities. We can help you assess cost of inaction, develop your strategy to address the customer experience revolution and implement the latest technologies that are disrupting today’s customer experiences.

Cloud

Summit focused heavily this year on Adobe’s I/O cloud platform, a cloud-based API, SDK and repository for all of Adobe’s cloud products, such as the marketing cloud and experience cloud.  Adobe I/O functions as a developer’s playground to be able to build, create and extend Adobe’s apps. They introduced Adobe I/O Runtime, a serverless platform that is able to spin up and tear down resources on the fly to serve a one-off request, right from within the cloud. This is extremely powerful because it allows developers to write functions and apps that aren’t contingent on having tons of infrastructure in place to serve requests.

Although we have not worked within Adobe I/O Runtime yet (though we have eagerly applied for the beta) we are doing similar things around serverless technologies like running our Alexa proof of concepts through lambda. Our consultants are experts at serverless computing and developing functions as a service and can help you assess how to best utilize cloud infrastructure.

Machine Learning

Summit’s focus on ML and Natural Language Processing (NLP) was mind-blowing. Adobe has invested heavily in the models that drive its Sensei ML engine. Sensei can now recognize common objects across digital imagery, suggest similar images based on what it recognizes, and even create entire pieces of creative with minimal guidelines. Sensei is embedded within everything that Adobe does, especially given the creation of Adobe I/O Runtime.
Check out the keynotes from Summit to gain insight into how Sensei utilizes ML.

For UDig, ML is definitely something that is top of mind for us as we plan out our next strategic projects. Our intent with ML and NLP is to be able to utilize it for our customers in a way that seems organic and natural in its implementation and usage; it should not feel like a disjointed offering. It should be an integrated part of a solution, much like Adobe’s Sensei is to its own products. We’ve been tracking these advances and can help you leverage natural language processing and machine learning in your organization.

I’ve touched on some of the things that we took back from Adobe Summit this year and how we are leveraging these concepts at UDig.  I encourage you to watch the keynotes from Summit for a more in-depth recap, and to see hands-on applications.