What ties Adobe Experience Maker Awards winners and finalists together? The relentless pursuit of excellence, not just for their brand but for their employees and customers as well. Behind that drive is a commitment to continuous improvement, powered by new technologies that elevate the way they create and deliver personalized experiences.
This year at Adobe Summit, we invited several of these visionaries to share their takes on one of the most exciting technologies changing the world of work: generative AI. On day two of Summit, I had the pleasure of hosting five of these exceptional experience makers. Read on for the insights they shared.
Karina Vidal, Sr. Manager, Marketing Operations and Automation, Bonterra
Karina Vidal kicked off her talk with a bang. “People are worried because they think AI will take over our jobs and it will…not. At all,” she said. Her optimism for innovations like Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, was infectious, setting the scene for predictions about how generative AI will improve content creation for marketers and drive sales for brands by shortening the sales funnel.
“Anyone who uses Adobe Marketo Engage knows how easy it is to integrate with chat,” Vidal said. “Imagine having a chatbot that connects directly to assets like PDF files that get people up to speed with your products. So instead of having a sales rep jump into their journey hoping it’s the right time to convert, we can send them directly to the relevant team and they can have the conversation on their own terms.”
Vidal also called on marketers to draw inspiration from other industries to inform their personalization strategies. For instance, Bonterra provides its customers with a software platform for fundraising and engagement but found inspiration in the travel industry, which uses psychographic information to build customer profiles and go deeper than the surface-level analytics of the past.
Rakesh Pasupuleti, Martech Application Engineer, Amazon Alexa
Rakesh Pasupuleti predicts that delivering end-to-end improvements across the content supply chain, powered by Firefly features in solutions like Adobe Experience Manager, will empower creators to work faster while making assets more impactful.
Creating a page for campaigns can be a slow and fragmented process, involving multiple handoffs and revisions. Going forward, Pasupuleti expects project stakeholders will use an all-in-one platform where they can collaborate with a trusted assistant powered by generative AI to produce content and validate assets against pre-established standards throughout the creative, editing, and approval process.
The benefit is clear for Pasupuleti: faster turnaround times, fewer errors, and a more streamlined content creation process. “Webpage creation is like building a house,” he said. “You don’t want to wait until you move in to discover and fix issues. You want to manage them efficiently along the way.”
Pasupuleti also brought an important nuance to questions about how generative AI will impact jobs, arguing that brands will still need content authors, strategists, and talented creatives to train the learning language models behind tomorrow’s AI technologies. To drive the point home, he ended his talk with a poignant quote for reflection. “Technology will never replace people,” he said. “People who use the technology will replace people who don’t.”
Shekhar Gowda, Global Head, Marketing Technology, The Coca-Cola Company
For Shekhar Gowda, we are at the dawn of a new era. Just as the world never looked back when Henry Ford invented the first automobile, or when IBM released the first commercially successful PC, generative AI is leading humanity to a new singularity, and it is up to us to ensure the technology remains a force for good.
Gowda started small, revealing that he used Adobe Firefly to create the presentation to accompany his talk. “In essence, I had my twin doing all the work for me. I’m just speaking for it,” he said, noting that as people increasingly rely on AI to make our lives more efficient, we must be guided by use cases that enhance the human condition.
Upping the stakes, Gowda then explored how AI models will help doctors deliver more personalized treatments for cancer and empower medical researchers to discover new drugs that improve our quality of life. “If we can personalize marketing campaigns, why can’t we personalize medicine?” he posited.
Gowda ended by imploring the AI community to be conscientious in its approach and evaluate the broader implications of its work. “We could create a utopia of happiness around the globe. If you’re involved in AI today, please ask yourself the most important question: ‘Why are we building it?’”
Aidan Connor, Digital Product and Data Director, Bulk
With much of the discussion around AI focused on its future potential, Bulk’s Aidan Connor brought the audience back to the present by challenging them to ask an important question: Does this problem need AI?
“Why would you be AI-first when not every problem needs an AI solution,” he said. “Look for business challenges that need AI solutions, otherwise your strategy is just driven by FOMO.”
While that might sound pessimistic, Connor is anything but. In fact, he is excited by the ways in which AI makes people, products, and processes more efficient across the organization. And, for the first time ever, AI provides a technology that doesn’t just underpin a business’s infrastructure, but actually augments the technology tools that drive the organization.
“Instead of having a technology support your people, product, and processes, you finally have one that sits within each of these pillars,” he said, adding that instead of rushing to be #AIFIRST, companies should instead focus on taking advantage of this new reality by using AI to power innovation where it counts.
Lokesh Alluri, Manager, Digital Analytics, Lenovo
When Lenovo’s Lokesh Alluri asked the audience how many people use AI in their personal or work lives, almost every hand in the audience went up. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, but the deeper question for Alluri is how people plan to use the technology in the future.
“AI is not a set and forget solution. It is an ongoing journey of learning,” he said. “It’s about driving the narrative and shaping a technology that does things with unprecedented power and precision.”
Alluri is particularly excited at the potential of AI to transform analytics, reminding the crowd that in its purest form, AI is data, logic, and algorithms, after all. “People in the analytics world spent the past decade — the big data boom — creating data lakes, data ponds, and data water bottles,” he joked. “It’s high time we put an AI layer on top of that foundation to drive results.”
Technology is at the core of what we all do. Once we get past the challenges, incorporate feedback mechanisms, and understand its power in the long run, we can do greater things and drive meaningful business outcomes.
Hungry for more insights? You’re in luck. We also hosted three other Adobe Experience Maker Awards winners and finalists on day one of Adobe Summit. Click here for exclusive takes from the event, hosted by Gina Casagrande.
Ready to unlock the potential of generative AI for your business? Learn more about Adobe’s latest generative AI capabilities and how they can transform the way you work.
Don Bennion is the senior director of Adobe GenStudio product marketing. Bennion’s career at Adobe spans 19+ years and began at a Utah based company called Omniture which was acquired by Adobe in 2009 and formed the foundation of the digital experience business unit. For 10 years he led the business strategy team for the digital experience business before shifting to product. While at Omniture and Adobe, Bennion has had the opportunity to spend three years abroad working in Tokyo, Japan, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Sydney, Australia.
