Adobe driving innovation through Generative AI and the content supply chain

PAC recently had the opportunity to attend the 2023 Adobe Summit EMEA held in London. The event covered a wide range of announcements and innovations across the Adobe ecosystem of software solutions and services. PAC was encouraged to hear that the company's leadership team continues to understand the velocity, volume, and complexity of modern creative and marketing pipelines within organisations. This is a topic often discussed with PAC as organisations look to reduce process friction, enhance collaboration, and operate at a greater scale with less complexity across creative and marketing functions.

The leadership message at the EMEA summit was clear: Adobe believes that growth in this space can continue to be achieved by being experience-led to drive personalised engagements with customers/clients/citizens at scale. Two things at the event stood out for PAC as innovations to address this. The first is how Adobe is incorporating generative AI (GenAI) into its ecosystem, and the second is the importance for an organisation to recognise and optimise the needs of its content supply chain.

It is often said that the world of technology evolves and innovates at a high velocity. However, with the release of ChatGPT 3.0 at the end of November 2022 PAC feels comfortable saying that another technology inflection point has occurred. In this instance, it was the global and common awareness of what a generative AI is due to the media attention the public beta release of ChatGPT provided. A generative AI (GenAI) is a category of artificial intelligence designed to generate new content, such as text, images, music, or even videos. These AI models are trained on vast amounts of written, visual, and auditory data to learn patterns and structures within the data to create new, original content. Currently, the most common interface with a GenAI is a natural language text interface where a person describes what they want to be generated.

In the short few months since its release PAC has witnessed a technological “arms race” by software companies to address how they incorporate GenAI into their suite of products due to the mass public awareness of the technology. Most companies are approaching this from different perspectives based on the focus of their business. Still, PAC has seen many technology companies approach this innovation as “The answer is GenAI; now what is the question?”. Whilst this exuberance within the technology industry is nothing new, the sheer velocity of software companies incorporating GenAI into their existing software and services has been unprecedented.

Of the many software companies PAC engages with, Adobe had a clear message around GenAI for an organisation’s creative and marketing teams. The company announced at the EMEA summit the release of Adobe Firefly for Enterprise and a series of new Adobe Sensei GenAI services to enhance productivity and creativity at scale for creative and marketing workflows through a natural language text-driven interface embedded into their relevant products underpinned by their Adobe Stock service, which is an extensive library of high-quality curated and royalty-free photos. Given that the realistic value of GenAI is driven by the data it has access to, the combination of these Adobe services for creative teams is, in PACs opinion, compelling.

At their EMEA summit, Adobe provided a range of examples showing how simple and natural editing creative content with the support of GenAI can be. PAC found its seamless integration and apparent ease of use to be key differentiators that can increase an individual's creativity whilst compressing timescales, process friction, and reducing time to delivery. PAC looks forward to seeing examples of this being used in less optimal situations because many organisations are limited by the data they have access to as part of their creative and marketing pipelines, which can hinder the capabilities of a GenAI if not identified and addressed upfront.

The second area that Adobe focused on at their EMEA summit, which PAC found to be highly important, is the role of a content supply chain within organisations. The organisations that PAC speaks with regarding this have experienced years of content pipeline friction and complexity. Organisations operating creative pipelines across countries and channels continue to face demands where all forms of marketing are expected to move at the pace of social channels with ever more sophisticated forms of personalisation. This exerts pressure on an organisation's content supply chain, involving a wide range of stakeholders and content creators. It leads to situations where too much content exists, is not used, or is fragmented across the organisation, so it is not easy to find, update, and release.

Adobe positioned the content supply chain as having four key phases: planning, production, delivery, and analysis. From PAC’s perspective, Adobe already has compelling products for the planning and delivery segments that it continues to improve and innovate upon. However, the use of Adobe Workfront as an end-to-end work management production tool across all Adobe creative products is a potential differentiator in managing the ongoing complexities of disconnected workflows and disparate teams organisations face in this regard. As presented at the event, the Adobe Content Supply Chain Solution is an integrated amalgamation of a range of Adobe products, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Enterprise, Adobe Workfront, and Adobe Experience Manager. These are being augmented with GenAI capabilities from both Firefly and Adobe Sensei.

PAC considers these two announcements as strong value propositions for Adobe’s European clients that focus on a range of practical use cases for which GenAI can support creative and marketing teams. Overall, for PAC, the benefit of adopting Adobe Workfront to orchestrate creative workflows across the functional complexities of organisations is the differentiator that European organisations should investigate and address now.