General Motors pioneers new ways to fuel zero-friction experiences.

General Motors (GM) is much more than a car manufacturer. The iconic brands in our portfolio, which include Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC, represent the past, present, and future of American automative innovation. I lead GM’s Marketing Technology Organization, which builds and designs the tools our company uses to fuel our modern marketing experiences.

Our most ambitious project has been the transitioning of GM’s marketing organization from a product-centric model to a customer-centric approach that allows us to personalize at scale. Backed by an integrated suite of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, we can now combine, analyze, and activate real-time customer journeys across geos, channels, and platforms.

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform has completely modernized our personalization strategies and customer experiences. So much so that we won in “The Catalyst” category at this year’s Adobe Experience Maker Awards. Our partnership with Adobe has unlocked new value for millions of GM customers while strengthening our complex global ecosystem of online platforms, branded content, business units, dealerships, and partnerships.

Fueling connected experiences in real-time.

Like many large companies, GM previously struggled to unify and activate our customer journeys across brands, tiers, and marketing channels. That’s where Real-Time CDP came in, allowing our marketers to align their campaigns with buyer lifecycles and interests based on high-value behaviors such as browsing a particular vehicle category or submitting a lead form.

This was the first of many use cases for Real-Time CDP. Today, our customer journeys are fueled by integrations between the platform and our entire Adobe stack, including Adobe Campaign, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Target, and with key activation platforms like Google and Facebook.

Since going live with Real-Time CDP, we’ve unlocked major process efficiencies, accelerating our time to market for building audiences and predictive models by 50%. As a result, our marketers can enrich every GM customer experience at the individual level across our digital channels.

Crucially, these enhancements have turned GM’s digital experiences into major value drivers for our business. Take our Build and Price service, which allows customers to design, personalize, and order their dream GM vehicle via our website. With better insights to fuel our Build and Price service, we can continually optimize it, which in turn drives more customer completes.

The key to driving big-time change? Start small.

GM now draws on its Adobe stack to power our marketing activities in key regions around the world, from the United States, to Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. But we didn’t achieve this scale overnight. Quite the opposite, actually.

By taking time to build and fine-tune our customer experiences and clearly define our customer journeys, GM was able to make incremental progress in the early stages of our transformation that sets us up for an even broader global roll-out down the line. I can’t overemphasize the value of starting with simple use cases in the early days of a marketing transformation project, especially those that can deliver measurable and significant business value.

Today, we are applying this iterative approach to new AI use cases. Powered by Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, GM is testing accelerating crucial marketing tasks like audience and journey creation, content creation, customer queries, and predictive modelling and analytics. We are also implementing and scaling Adobe Workfront as our core workflow enabler, which promises to drive new efficiencies across our content supply chain, from creation through activation.

Our work is never done, and that’s a good thing. The road to innovation is long and full of challenges, but that’s what makes it dynamic and fulfilling. Our ongoing relationship with Adobe helps GM’s brands grow stronger, more relevant, and more connected to our customers every day.

For more on GM’s transformation and its innovative use of Adobe Real-Time CDP, read their story on the Adobe Experience Maker Awards site.

Hass Khalife is the Global Director of Marketing Technology at General Motors and is the executive responsible for designing and building the tools and technologies used to fuel GM’s modern marketing experiences that drive digital engagement across their iconic automotive brands and digital businesses.

Prior to General Motors, Hass led the content platforms at Apple and was responsible for the technology, delivery, syndication, and measurement of marketing content across their vast partner retail ecosystem.

Prior to Apple, Hass’s career was spent as a consultant at Accenture, Sapient, and Capgemini, bringing transformative Marketing Technology solutions to Fortune 100 clients. He also spent time as an entrepreneur and advisor. Hass’s career has been focused on delivering end-to-end integrated digital experiences at a global scale using various enterprise technologies.

Hass lives in the Greater Detroit Area with his family. He holds a Technology & Business degree from The University of Michigan.