While you may know Adobe for its Creative Cloud, the hope of CEO Shantanu Narayen is that you will soon know Adobe as an artificial intelligence powerhouse.
The company unveiled Adobe Sensei, an AI and machine learning framework that powers intelligent features across all Adobe products, back in 2016. Since that initial announcement, more AI initiatives have spiraled out of the company, and the technology is integrated in everything they do.
Finding The Magic in AI
While some companies are hesitant to adopt artificial intelligence (much to their demise), Adobe embraces the technology with open arms, even comparing it to magic.
Adobe views AI as the intelligent “assistant” to the creative human. Not a replacement, but a helping hand that allows human creativity to flourish as more repetitive, time-consuming tasks are intelligently automated.
Narayen truly believes in the power of human in hand with machine, claiming that “machine learning is going to change every single aspect of technology, but no machine will be able to mimic the creative ability of the human mind.”
Adobe keeps their customer at the heart of their AI offerings, pledging to only implement tools that help discover what is hidden, accelerate what is slow or decide what matters. In essence, creating the magic wands that allow creators and marketers to work their magic.
What’s on the Horizon for Adobe
Adobe already has a strong portfolio of AI capabilities thanks to Sensei. Sensei is built into all Adobe products, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud, and Adobe Experience Cloud. At its current stage, the technology has the ability to find and reuse existing assets, automate image manipulation and image creation, and produce and personalize content at scale.
New product sneak peeks within the last year show that more AI solutions are on the horizon. Most importantly for marketers: Master Plan. Master Plan is an AI-assisted marketing planner that automates the traditional process of planning and implementing marketing campaigns.
If this sounds boring, take that as good news, because it’s one less boring task you as a marketer have to take on.
Master Plan offers a slew of capabilities valuable to marketers, such as:
- Analyzing historical performance data and mapping it to KPIs and success metrics
- Suggesting relevant assets to the right marketing mix
- Adjusting automatically as the environment alters
Adobe also announced an experimental project called Project New View that aims to combine VR and AI to make combing through your data as easy as simply asking for insights. The goal is for marketers to view data interactively and socially so they can actionably use the data they collect.
Additionally, the Adobe prototype called Perfect Path aims to use massive amounts of data and machine learning to analyze consumer behavior. This is another play into the digital marketing space in a grander push to diversify the Adobe portfolio.
Major Investments in AI
Adobe is pushing to be a leader in the $27 billion digital-marketing industry, which they estimate will reach $53.1 billion in 2020, and they’re doing so with AI.
Recent acquisitions show they are ready to be a big name in machine learning. Adobe is scooping up companies in the SaaS, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing space.
Within the last two months, Adobe acquired Magento Commerce, Uru, and Sayspring. With a $1.68 billion price tag, the recent acquisition of Magento is arguably the largest and most significant acquisition. This is a very public display of Adobe’s mission to be a data and digital leader.
Want to experience AI and Adobe for yourself? Give Adobe Create a test run.
Welcome the the future of marketer + machine.
Sammie Fisher
Sammie Fisher was formerly an associate consultant at Ready North. She joined the agency in January 2018 with a background in PR, marketing and business analytics. Sammie graduated from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2018 with a degree in strategic communication and a marketing minor.