Held in Las Vegas, this year’s Adobe summit was packed full of insights from innovators and leaders, as they shared new groundbreaking solutions and innovations around the future of digital marketing in this new era of generative AI. From content creation tools to technology innovation, the announcements demonstrated a fast evolution of Adobe products and capabilities within the past 12 months.
AI content approval is on the horizon
Adobe’s view on Generative AI (GenAI) is that it’s time to move away from toys and tools. GenAI content creation went mainstream last year, . in support of which Adobe offers GenStudio. This platform gives marketers the ability to create marketing touchpoints with the full support of AI, using Adobe’s Firefly product. Adobe’s AI can also be trained on brand guidelines and can give feedback to the user where content deviates from these. This is a great development, because where AI enables the production of almost limitless content, the ability to approve content becomes a major bottleneck to address.
Technology will co-pilot the content process flow
As we move into a world which promises an end-to-end AI fuelled Content Supply Chain transformation, it’s clear that technology will act as a co-pilot across the whole process flow. Insights will be key to driving what should and shouldn’t be created, right through to providing the right kinds of experiences to customers. Adobe already has Creative Cloud, Workfront, DAM, and now Firefly. However, the key will be in achieving simplicity. An effective and efficient Content Supply Chain will not come from adding more links into the chain. Instead, it will come through shared GenAI and workflow services across all steps and tools which take content from inception to customers. To this point, Workfront activities will now be available directly within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) - promising greater governance and simplicity around activating site experience changes.
Edge Delivery Services: the next generation
Adobe Experience Manager Edge Delivery Services (EDS) is another proposition that has moved forward significantly in the past few months. Historically, EDS was positioned with the following benefits:
- Site performance: EDS offers significant benefits with respect to how pages are rendered and optimised for speed. This is increasingly important for success.
- Document-based authoring: The ability to author content for websites within documents, such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
- Engineering simplification: Greater developer flexibility with respect to support for common web application development frameworks and simpler code deployment options.
Document-based authoring is typically not the best option for all scenarios. It’s ideal for simple, copy-rich pages where the layout doesn’t need much alteration. However, AEM arguably has the best interface for authoring web pages in the industry. It’s versatile, visual and intuitive – some of which is lost in the document authoring model.
One of the latest updates that Adobe has released is the launch of a new authoring interface, AEM Universal Editor. Alongside bringing UI improvements, this new platform will offer consistent management for all forms of AEM content. It will also allow developers to utilise virtually any framework or site architecture of their choice – meaning full authoring support for sites built for Edge Deliver Services. Through Universal Editor and Edge Delivery Services, Adobe is bringing next-generation services to business users and end customers alike.
Greater innovation in the Adobe Experience Manager tech stack
The second innovation looks at the general direction of travel from Adobe. The way EDS renders pages for speed aligns with industry innovations in rendering, caching and edge side processing. Adobe has hinted at greater innovation and simplification into the underlying AEM technology stack. Focusing on modernisation and with a lighter-weight application for engineers to manage. EDS is leading this transformation across the AEM eco-system. Further, EDS is also being used as an integrated front-end for Commerce and Forms. Following the principles of composability – modularity, autonomy, discoverability and reusability - businesses can take an agile and flexible approach to their processes, services and resources to build custom solutions tailored to their unique customer demands. EDS should provide flexibility for engineers to innovate and build well-performing experiences using both data and content services from across the Adobe ecosystem, as well as third-party systems, data sources and APIs.
If you’d like to hear more about how we use Adobe products to transform customer experience, please get in touch.