AI made me an artist. Can it make my business?

If only Adobe Firefly was around 30-plus years ago, my dream of appearing in Tony Hart’s Art Gallery (the UK’s version of Bob Ross) may have come true. Then again, I’m perhaps not the only one.

Talking to our customers over the past few weeks (maybe more), the first question on their minds—no prizes for guessing—is, “Can we just embed AI into our content creation process and get to market faster?” The simple answer? Yes, but don't. Let me explain.

Syncing artificial intelligence with organisational reality.

There’s no denying that content is what ultimately makes or breaks a personalised customer experience. If you are not producing the right content, at the right time, through the right channels, and in the right volumes, your customers aren’t going to remember you. Those are a lot of rights to not get wrong. Which is why having an efficient content supply chain becomes so important.

As an organisation, you perhaps have a workflow currently in place that does the job for you—and if I had to illustrate it (with the help of some tool, of course), it would broadly look like this:

Now, if only leveraging AI to spin the above wheel faster was as simple as the drag-and-drop feature used to paste this creative here, your content supply would be through the roof, wouldn’t it? And, well, none of us would be here. But that’s not the reality.

AI is not, and will never be, a ‘one size fits all’ plug-in—that defeats its purpose. Understanding your organisational processes, the content demand of your industry and, most importantly, the needs of your creative teams is what empowers AI to grow your business the way you need to.

Leveraging artificial intelligence to fuel creative intelligence.

Here are three steps to figure out when, where, and how technology can enable your content creation process, and increase business value.

Step 1: Review your content creation process through the 4 phases of the lifecycle: Creation, management, distribution, and measurement. For a leading telecom operating in Australia, Adobe Professional Services held workshops with key stakeholders to understand pain points and business needs throughout the end-to-end marketing workflow, mapping out each of the steps and defining the who, what, where, when, and why for every phase.

This process will give you a much-needed overview of the existing organisational processes and the resources aligned with them. And more importantly, it will help you build trust with everyone involved in the project.

Step 2: According to a recent Adobe survey, 90 percent of creatives say generative AI will help them do better work. Drill down on the friction points your teams currently face. Ask who is facing what issues where and why? For example, you might identify that the creative teams are finding it difficult to send multiple versions of the content for approval over emails, but that’s been the practice for a long time. A telecom company solved a similar problem by engaging with Adobe experts to set up automation using a simple spreadsheet-based matrix to create multiple versions of content through pre-defined templates—making the approval process easier too.

Understanding legacy processes gives you an idea of organisational behaviours and helps determine if change management is something you need to focus on. Remember, it’s no one’s fault. It is about optimising processes to ride the automation tide and get ahead.

Step 3: Finally, see how technology can enable your processes to come to life—not the other way around. Understanding your people and processes will help you implement automation to meet the ever-increasing demand for content, while also maximising operational efficiency by aligning technology to your business goals.

For example, with Adobe Experience Manager, you can cut the number of templates required for generating content variations by 80 percent and improve speed-to-market with automated image cropping for different channels.

Next step? Get in touch with Adobe Professional Services.

AI is presenting you with the unique opportunity to review and improve your content creation process and take on the future of hyper-personalised customer experiences. You could grab it with both hands. Take the first step now!

Contact us to learn how you can leverage technology the right way and accelerate your ability to engage your customers with hyper-personalised experiences.

P.S. For those wondering, here’s my masterpiece of Harry (my dog) that I will be submitting to Tony Hart’s Art Gallery under the guise of Tim, aged 7, at the earliest opportunity.