The role of AI in customer engagement — intelligent optimization with Adobe Journey Optimizer
As innovations in artificial intelligence continue to revolutionize how businesses engage with their customers, a new era of intelligent systems is paving the way to transformational value. Emerging technologies like generative AI and specially trained large language models are changing the dynamics of customer-centric experiences. Significant changes are on the horizon, with 70% of CEOs saying advancements in generative AI will change the way companies create, deliver, and capture value in the next three years.
Navigating the growing demands in managing the customer lifecycle is complex. Brands face challenges collecting data from each customer interaction, analyzing and correlating data for contextual insights, and scaling decision-making with precision at every moment. In fact, according to recently published Adobe research, only one in four brands is able to adjust the timing and cadence of their communications based on real-time intelligence or customer actions. Investments to personalize omnichannel engagement at scale and initiate cross-channel data access can require a shift in how organizations operate. However, there is an inflection point at the intersection of AI and the goal of building stronger connections with customers. Businesses can gain a competitive advantage for business growth by using artificial intelligence to simplify customer engagement while accelerating value creation by delivering meaningful, exceptional customer experiences.
Adobe Journey Optimizer is at the forefront of this new era of intelligent systems, empowering brands to refine customer journeys using three core design principles for intelligent optimization:
- Understanding customer needs and challenges
- Continuously testing and iterating for insights
- Taking a holistic approach to adapting and scaling
Let’s explore some of Journey Optimizer’s latest innovations in intelligent optimization.
Discover data and customer insights with AI
Data supply chains are the foundational building blocks of personalization. In journey orchestration, bringing together customer- and brand-initiated touchpoints breaks down data siloes across channel-structured organizations. It also increases ingestion of multiple data sources to unify customer data.
However, this can lead to new challenges as brands disrupt the channel mindset and adopt a customer-centric approach to personalized engagement. Managing these centralized, unified customer profiles has created bottlenecks for data engineering teams. Marketing and product managers, consuming this data for segmentation and personalization, are tasked with ensuring data quality and visibility. Adobe has been focused on solving many customer engagement issues, from resource constraints to organizational silos and data fragmentation.
Adobe’s new AI Assistant within Journey Optimizer solves these issues and simplifies expert-level tasks, such as data exploration, insight discovery, and enterprise-grade data security and governance.
The new capabilities of Adobe’s AI Assistant include:
- Generative experience models — These are collections of base models that are grounded in Adobe data and LLMs for natural language prompts, combined with opt-in custom models based on brand-specific data for unique insights.
- In-product assistance — This allows for faster onboarding and improved productivity by providing product knowledge, workflow troubleshooting, and operational insights to help users understand datasets, audiences, and journeys.
- Enhanced analysis — This includes AI-generated data visualizations and report tables, predictive insights on conversion or segmentation, and recommended actions for teams to explore new ways of engagement.
Customers can now get real-time answers to such questions as, “How do I build a segment?” or “Where is this schema field used so I can label it properly?” This is a pivotal change in how AI can enhance productivity and performance by helping teams deeply understand their customer’s behaviors, problems, and needs.
Check out more details on how Adobe AI Assistant is redefining how our customers work in Adobe Experience Cloud.
Foster a culture of learning with experimentation
Scaling innovation can have a big impact. Building company infrastructure and cultures for large-scale experimentation minimizes the cost of launching unsuccessful products and services or not knowing what is resonating with customers. By continuously testing and iterating on how customers discover new products or incentives, companies are able to scale faster and identify quickly what is truly driving brand loyalty and strong customer relationships. Teams developing products or services need a guiding strategy for where to invest for both near-term and long-term growth. A purposeful system of engagement needs to empower brands to learn faster with continuous iteration and testing — the second principle of intelligent optimization.
New features in Adobe Journey Optimizer help brands optimize every component of their customer journeys — from copy and imagery to channel and audience mix to engagement frequency and timing.
- Experimentation in journeys — Test content for lift and conversion impact within web, email, push notifications, or in-app channels with triggered experiments in journey canvas.
- Content variant generation — Teams can effortlessly generate and test multiple variations of content, including copy, images, or campaign blocks for fast iteration and scalability.
- Send-time optimization — Predict the best time to engage with customers using optimized email and push notifications with new inference models for enhanced actions.
The future of customer engagement is fueled by tightly integrated experimentation with generative AI outputs. Brands who invest in AI with mature experimentation methods and processes can quickly iterate and learn from each customer interaction, finding more ways to create value for customers.
Scale AI-driven experiences with decisioning
The evolving dynamics of generative AI and experimentation are expanding what’s possible for business. In keeping with the third principle, brands can begin scaling personalization with AI-powered efficiency.
A majority of consumers’ favorite brands have similarities — they communicate with customers on their preferred channels with timely updates and personalized offers or experiences. This is what customers expect, and designing exceptional experiences that meet these expectations requires flexibility and granular control of personalization and performance. Using Adobe Journey Optimizer’s new code-based experience channel, developers and product teams can activate any inbound surface — web, mobile, connected TV, kiosks, ATMs, and more — with personalized HTML or JSON content natively embedded in-app or via API endpoint.
In addition to expanded channels for omnichannel orchestration, Adobe has launched a new decisioning framework and feature set in Adobe Journey Optimizer. The framework combines schema-based management, updated decision policies, and new selection strategy workflows to determine the next-best experience for each customer.
Journey Optimizer’s new decisioning features include:
- Next-best experiences — Expanding decision catalogs beyond content offers allows teams to include audiences, channels, and journeys.
- Reusable decision strategies — Enhanced workflows are now available for decision policies, configurations, frequency capping, eligibility rules, and ranking methods.
- Ranking method testing — Experimenting and testing different ranking formulas and AI models against one another drives efficiency and engagement.
These new capabilities will expand decisioning and introduce experimentation into Adobe’s decisioning algorithms. Using Adobe Journey Optimizer intelligent optimization features to measure how much lift companies are getting from generative AI is a big breakthrough for AI model efficiency and experimentation. Brands are empowered to run experiments on several decisioning selection strategies — comparing performance of rules-based ranking methods or AI auto-optimization and personalization models.
Brands that embrace generative AI, experimentation, and real-time decisioning will lead their organizations toward unmatched customer engagement and growth. Adobe Journey Optimizer's latest product innovations give businesses the power to scale personalization, optimize every customer touchpoint, and create experiences designed for customer value. The future is bright for companies who harness intelligence, pushing the boundaries of customer engagement and setting the new standard for industry excellence.
Adobe’s new decisioning capabilities are currently activated within the new code-based experience channel, with expanded channel support into 2025. These new features are available to all Privacy and Security Shield and Healthcare Shield customers.
Learn more about Adobe Journey Optimizer.
As a senior product marketing manager at Adobe, Brent Kostak brings intelligent optimization solutions to market that empower global brands to forge deeper connections with their customers. With over a decade of experience in customer experience management and developer tooling industries, Kostak helps engineering, product, and marketing teams use AI and machine learning to optimize customer journeys and decisioning at scale with Adobe Experience Platform.
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