adobe systems
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Auto Added by WPeMatico
It’s been less than six months since Adobe acquired commerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion and today, at Magento’s annual conference, the company announced the first set of integrations that bring the analytics and personalization features of Adobe’s Experience Cloud to Magento’s Commerce Cloud.
In many ways, the acquisition of Magento helps Adobe close the loop in its marketing story by giving its customers a full spectrum of services that go from analytics, marketing and customer acquisition all the way to closing the transaction. It’s no surprise then that the Experience Cloud and Commerce Cloud are growing closer to, in Adobe’s words, “make every experience shoppable.”
“From the time that this company started to today, our focus has been pretty much exactly the same,” Adobe’s SVP of Strategic Marketing Aseem Chandra told me. “This is, how do we deliver better experiences across any channel in which our customers are interacting with a brand? If you think about the way that customers interact today, every experience is valuable and important. […] It’s no longer just about the product, it’s more about the experience that we deliver around that product that really counts.”
So with these new integrations, Magento Commerce Cloud users will get access to an integration with Adobe Target, for example, the company’s machine learning-based tool for personalizing shopping experiences. Similarly, they’ll get easy access to predictive analytics from Adobe Analytics to analyze their customers’ data and predict future churn and purchasing behavior, among other things.

These kinds of AI/ML capabilities were something Magento had long been thinking about, Magento’s former CEO and new Adobe SVP fo Commerce Mark Lavelle told me, but it took the acquisition by Adobe to really be able to push ahead with this. “Where the world’s going for Magento clients — and really for all of Adobe’s clients — is you can’t do this yourself,” he said. “you need to be associated with a platform that has not just technology and feature functionality, but actually has this living and breathing data environment that that learns and delivers intelligence back into the product so that your job is easier. That’s what Amazon and Google and all of the big companies that we’re all increasingly competing against or cooperating with have. They have that type of scale.” He also noted that at least part of this match-up of Adobe and Magento is to give their clients that kind of scale, even if they are small- or medium-sized merchants.
The other new Adobe-powered feature that’s now available is an integration with the Adobe Experience Manager. That’s Adobe’s content management tool that itself integrates many of these AI technologies for building personalized mobile and web content and shopping experiences.
“The goal here is really in unifying that profile, where we have a lot of behavioral information about our consumers,” said Aseem. “And what Magento allows us to do is bring in the transactional information and put those together so we get a much richer view of who the consumers are and how we personalize that experience with the next interaction that they have with a Magento-based commerce site.”
It’s worth noting that Magento is also launching a number of other new features to its Commerce Cloud that include a new drag-and-drop editing tool for site content, support for building Progressive Web Applications, a streamlined payment tool with improved risk management capabilities, as well as a new integration with the Amazon Sales Channel so Magento stores can sync their inventory with Amazon’s platform. Magneto is also announcing integrations with Google’s Merchant Center and Advertising Channels for Google Smart Shopping Campaigns.
Powered by WPeMatico
Adobe Analytics is a sophisticated product, so much so that users might focus on a set of known metrics at the cost of missing key insights. Adobe introduced an AI-fueled virtual assistant called Intelligent Alerts today to help users find deeper insights they might have otherwise missed.
John Bates, director of product management for Adobe Analytics says that in the past, the company has used artificial intelligence and machine learning under the hood of Analytics to help their users understand their customer’s behavior better. This marks the first time, Adobe will be using this technology to understand how the user works with Analytics to offer new data they might not have considered.
“Historically we’ve analyzed the data that we collect on behalf of our customers, on behalf of brands and help provide insights. Now we’re analyzing our users’ behavior within Adobe Analytics, and then mashing them up with those insights that are most relevant and personalized for that individual, based on the signals that we see and how they use our tool,” Bates explained.
Adobe Intelligent Alerts. Screenshot: Adobe
Bates says that this isn’t unlike Netflix recommendations, which recommends content based on other shows and movies you’ve watched before, but applying it to the enterprise user, especially someone who really knows their way around Adobe Analytics. That’s because these power users provide the artificial intelligence engine with the strongest signals.
The way it works is the analyst receives some alerts they can dig into to give them additional insights. If they don’t like what they’re seeing, they can tune the system and it should learn over time what the analyst needs in terms of data.
Intelligent Alert Settings. Screenshot: Adobe
They can configure how often they see the alerts and how many they want to see. This all falls within the realm of Adobe’s artificial intelligence platform they call Sensei. Adobe built Sensei with the idea of injecting intelligence across the Adobe product line.
“It’s really a vision and strategy around how do we take things that data scientists do, and how we inject that into our technology such that an everyday user of Adobe Analytics can leverage the power of these advanced algorithms to help them better understand their customers and better perform in their jobs,” he said.
Powered by WPeMatico
For years, marketers have been trying to optimize the online shopping experience to better understand their customers and deliver more customized interactions that ultimately drive more sales. Artificial intelligence was supposed to accelerate that, and today Adobe announced enhancements to Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager that attempt to deliver at least partly on that promise.
Adobe has been trying to lift the enterprise side of its business for some time, and even though they are well on their way to becoming a $10 billion company, the potential for even more revenue from the enterprise side of the business remains tantalizing. They are counting on AI to help push that along.
Adobe’s Loni Stark says companies are looking for more sophisticated solutions around customization and optimization. Part of that involves using Adobe’s intelligence layer, which they call Sensei, to help marketers as they tweak these programs to drive better experiences.
For starters, the company wants to help users choose the best algorithms for any given set of tasks. Adobe is bringing AI in to assist with a tool it released last year called Auto-Target. “One of the challenges marketers face has been which algorithms do you use, and how do you map them to your personalization strategy. We are enabling Adobe Sensei to choose the best algorithm for them.” She says giving them a smart assistant to help choose should make this task much less daunting for marketers.
Adobe is also bringing some smarts to layout design with a new tool called Smart Layouts, first introduced in March at Adobe Summit. The idea here is to deliver the right layout at any given time to allow marketing teams to scale personalization and increase the likelihood of action, which in marketing speak means buying something.
Once again the company is letting AI guide the process to generate different layouts automatically for different segments, depending on visitor behavior at any given moment. That means a retailer should be able to deliver ever more granular pages based on what it knows about visitors as they move through the shopping process. The more customized the experience, the more likely the shopper turns into a buyer.
Adobe is also looking at new delivery channels, particularly voice, as devices like the Amazon Alexa become increasingly popular. As with the web, mobile, print and other delivery approaches, marketers need to be able apply basic tasks like A/B testing on different voices or workflows, and the company is building these into their tools.
All of these new features are part of Adobe’s ongoing attempt to streamline its marketing tools to make life easier for its customers. By using artificial intelligence to help guide the workflow, they hope to drive more revenue from the digital experience side of the house. While these tools should help, Adobe still makes the vast majority of its money from Creative Cloud. The Digital segment still lags at $586 million (up 18 percent YoY) out of total quarterly revenue of 2.20 billion in the most recent report in June.
The company spent a hefty $1.68 billion in May to snag Magento. They are due to report their next quarterly report on September 18th, and it will be interesting to see if the Magento acquisition and increasing use of artificial intelligence can help continue to grow this side of the business.
Powered by WPeMatico
It’s still hard to say if the voice-controlled aluminum can will be the next smartphone or the next Segway, but either way, brands are preparing. This morning Adobe launched a new set of analytics tools, Adobe Sensei for Voice, to help brands take advantage of conversational data to improve targeting and, ideally, conversions.
Adobe says it can consume data from Alexa, Siri, Google… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
With its Creative Cloud, Adobe made an early bet on offering its tools for creatives as a subscription service. With its Document Cloud, the company also offers a subscription-based service for its more enterprise-focused document management tools. Acrobat DC, the PDF-centric flagship service of the Document Cloud, is getting an update today that introduces a number of new features that… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Adobe announced a number of new products at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that will expand the company’s set of mobile core services in its Marketing Cloud and make it easier for enterprises to manage content for their mobile apps. Adobe’s Experience Manager, its enterprise tool for building content-rich sites, is getting the biggest update today. The company is… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Adobe is kicking off its annual MAX conference in Los Angeles today. Traditionally, this is where the company announces its latest updates and gives us a glimpse of the new features it’s working on for products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Premiere Pro. This year is no exception. The company is launching a slew of new features for almost all of its Creative Cloud products… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico