[Music] [Phil Regnault] Thank you for joining us. We're going to have some fun today. We have a very serious topic to talk about, of course, and that is how we leverage the AI revolution and the age of agentic in marketing, all the way from create to activate. It's a very serious topic, but we think it's important that when you address serious topics that you have some fun doing it. So we're glad that you're along for the ride. You're coming down the rabbit hole for us. Got a stellar panel assembled here today, and they're going to join Alice on this ride today.
Why are we using Alice and the story of Alice in Wonderland as metaphor? Here's why. Alice in this metaphor is the customer, and she is overwhelmed.
She is facing this barrage of marketing messages. She's being put on journeys that she doesn't actually even want to be on. And so the question is, how can we get her out of this rabbit hole and back into some sense of reality where she feels like she's in control? That's the mission that we as creators and as marketing have because it's really an obligation that we have, I believe, to our customers, and in this case, to Alice. That's where we're going down the rabbit hole today.
This is the time to pick up your phones because we are going to pop up the first question. We just want to level set, the mindset that this audience has as it relates to leveraging AI in the world of marketing.
There we go, so which persona best describes how you feel about the potential of AI in marketing? Are you the White Rabbit who is overwhelmed but enthusiastic about it? Are you the Cheshire cat, the Cheshire Strategist who is cautiously optimistic? Are you the Mad Hatter who is bold and reckless and wants to experiment with abandon? Or are you off with their heads, the Red Queen Traditionalist, the AI Skeptic? What do you think? Who are you? [Man] None of the last one. That's crazy. We have no skeptics here. Well, that may be the bias of this audience. They did after all select to be in this session with us today. Interesting, that's where I expected it to be. It's following a normal distribution, I guess, if you discount D as an option with cautiously optimistic as being the prevailing position that people have right now. I think that actually accurately reflects what I've seen and heard throughout the Summit this week too. Everyone is may be cautiously optimistic and also curious about what this technology is actually about. But more importantly, what is the impact that the technology can have on their brand and the performance of their marketing operations. So I'm going to introduce the panel right now, and then we're going to do a quick demo, and then what we're going to do, the way the flow will be is I have six truths that I've identified that I believe characterize the imperative for marketers in the age of AI, and we're going to have just a little friendly debate here amongst the panelists on whether or not these truths actually stand on their own, or whether they should be revised. At the end of today, I'm going to show you another QR code, which allows you to send us an email and the promise, if you send me an email, this goes to my personal inbox, I'm going to send you back the results of the surveys that we took here, but also a synthesis of our findings here. So we have this point of view established right now, but what I'd like to do with this group here is we're basically going to co-create. We're going to refine this point of view. Maybe what I've come up with is accurate. I am Lewis Carroll, I am a genius...
But there may be some room for editing as well. So with that, Carly, would you introduce yourself? Thank you for joining us today. [Carly Boord] Thank you for having me today. Yes, the queen of hearts.
Yeah, hi. So my name Carly Boord. I am the Product Leader at T-Mobile, and I oversee our Contextual Experience Product. And really that just means all of the MarTech systems that come together to help us better personalize across our channels. So I've worked with Adobe for a very long time, have a great partnership with PwC. And my responsibility is really looking at across the AI landscape, how we can pull that in from data to platform to better personalize for our customers. I love it. And Carly's going to keep us honest because Carly was very clear when we were prepping for this panel discussion. - "Hey, I'm not a technologist." - Yeah. But we need that. We need someone who actually is skeptical about the technology and actually speaks for the customer and what is the ideal experience that we build for her. And speaking of building, we've got one of our AI partners here, Writer, in the form of Kevin Chung, the Head of Strategy. Kevin? [Kevin Chung] So I'm bold and reckless and I have to be as a builder. Writer is a generative AI company targeted towards enterprises. We scale and build applications for enterprises. We're now probably over 10,000 applications live in production and we serve all types of industries including big tech, retail, CPG, financial services, healthcare. Excited to partner with PwC and Adobe and working very closely with T-Mobile as well. - So excited to be here with you guys. - Awesome. Thanks for joining us, Kev. And it's okay if you want to take these hats off, but they were a great photo up to begin with. Well, now my hair's all messed up, so I can't. Yeah, that hair, right? - Stand on. - This hair could not take a hat today. No, I was looking too good. Vaish? [Vaish Srivathsan] Hi, I'm Vaish Srivathsan. I lead Business Strategy & Operations for Adobe between our GenStudio and Firefly services product. I just saw that I'm the Queen of Hearts, which is labeled as a skeptic-- Yeah. We have-- I wouldn't quite have my job if I was an AI skeptic, so I just wanted to say I'm probably the White Rabbit. But we have multiple customers. We have T-Mobile. We have partners like Writer that we work with, that we work with PwC really closely as well. So really excited to be here and talking to all of you. Awesome, thank you for joining us, and thank you for the partnership. And last but not least, my friend and partner, Roberto Hernandez. Tell us, White Rabbit, are you late, late, late? [Roberto Hernandez] I was going to say, I'm the Rabbit, but you just stole my thumb... We're all rabbits on this. I'm just the guy running crazy fast. I lead Innovation for the Customer Transformation Practice at PwC. - Thanks for joining us. - Okay. And so before we get into these truths that I mentioned, I'm actually going to ask Roberto to do a little demo for us. And he's going to take us down the rabbit hole, and we're going to meet someone named Alice. Would you like to introduce us? Demo sounds pretty boring, particularly at 4:09 Vegas time on, what is it today, Wednesday. We're going to have a party with Alice. So what we are going to do is live broadcast. Alice couldn't be with us today, so she's joining us from Wonderland, and she's pretty intrigued about these discussions. So is it okay if I just give her a call? Yeah, let's have her join the conversation.
I just hope that she's not very moody today. Hey, Alice. How are you? [Alice] Oh, what a curious greeting. I am quite well, though I do wonder is one ever truly just well or are we always a little bit curious, a little bit cross, a little bit like a tea party that never quite ends? Tell me, what's been stirring in your Wonderland today? So we just started a very interesting panel here at Adobe Summit. So I want you to just tell us as a customer, what do you think, Alice, about the role that marketing should play in conjunction with generative AI to create experiences that are delightful to customers like you? Roberto, what a splendid question. It's like asking what the Cheshire Cat thinks of disappearing. It all depends on the grin, doesn't it? If marketing is to be truly delightful with generative AI, it should be like a garden in Wonderland, full of unexpected blooms and curious paths. It should know my whims before I do, anticipate my needs with a wink, and perhaps even tell a riddle or two. But tell me, Roberto, do you think this garden should be perfectly manicured? Or should it have a touch of delightful chaos, like a Mad Hatter's tea party? So I'll leave that question to the panelists, and you can talk to them later. But before we go into the panel, Alice, just help me with something else. Imagine that you were back in London, and you wanted to go shoe shopping. So as you learn more about what this generative AI thing is all about, and you think about your shoe shopping adventure, what would you expect as you walk into a shoe store in the way brands leverage generative AI to create a delightful experience for you.
Shoe shopping. A most excellent quest indeed. If generative AI were to be my guide, I'd expect something far more enchanting than simply rows of shoes. First, imagine stepping into a shop where the very air seems to shimmer with possibilities. The AI would know my size, of course, but more than that, it would understand my style.
Perhaps it would conjure up images of shoes that match a dress I wore just last Tuesday or suggest boots perfect for a Wonderland adventure based on my expressed desire for practicality and whimsy. But tell me, Roberto, should this AI also offer me a riddle to solve before revealing the perfect pair? I know you really want me to play with riddles right now, Alice. But we are going to get back to the panel. We might come back to you a little bit later, okay? Thank you Alice for joining us. How about a hand for Alice everybody? Yeah.
Roberto was right, of course, when he corrected me when I used the word demo. Demo would suggest that something is pre-scripted. This was not. So we built a model called Alice, but we did not actually pre-ordain what the questions would be. We did not even know exactly what words would come back from Alice. I catch myself calling it her a her, by the way, even though I know it's bits and bytes, but anyway, I think it's just a great example of the pace of the innovation that we're seeing right now and the creative applications of those innovations.
We also got some ideas from Alice in terms of how experience design can really change things for the brands that we all represent. So as I said before, Alice is overwhelmed by all this mixed messaging that she's experiencing, but most importantly, again, want to emphasize the point that it's not just about this sense of overwhelmness, but it's this notion that she's not in control.
And I think the obligation that we as marketers and technologists who support marketers and creatives have, is that we should put her back in control. We should be willing to seed control, so that she feels like she owns her journey, and has control over the choice of which brands she chooses to interact and transact with.
So that's what we're going to talk about, is what can we do to leverage what we at PwC refer to as the experience supply chain, so that we can get Alice back in control. All right, I'm going to start with a huge number. That is, this came out of the last PWC AI study, which suggested that AI is going to add 16 trillion as with a T, to the global economy by 2030.
That's a massive, massive number.
We as marketers are all about growth. So this 16 trillion is the opportunity that we as marketers have to create. So the question is, okay, how do we capitalize on this opportunity and take as much of that 16 trillion and consume it for our brands as possible? And so with that, we come to the first truth, which I'm going to first posit to Carly and ask her to comment on, and that is that leveraging AI in the content supply chain and external experience supply chain is the new frontier for marketers. - True. - True, okay. Tell us from your perspective as an experienced designer. Yeah, So, I mean, I think the days of just building segments and targeting mass numbers of customers is changing. I don't think that fits the bill anymore. Customers are expecting their interactions to be personalized and true to them and customers know that this technology exists. And when they're interfacing with brands they're expecting that level of personalization. And it's not just some single touchpoints, it's leveraging AI to seamlessly guide them through journeys. And we know that humans are multifaceted beings and we're not always on a singular journey. We're on multiple journeys at the time. At T-Mobile, we are really focused on-- We're a huge telecom communication company.
We're going through a digital transformation really going from traditional brick and mortar retail into more digital space. And with that, really bringing in AI to help guide those journeys because it's not just about selling things for us. You know, we have our network, we have our offerings, we have our service and customers really count on us. And so we need those real-time signals to understand how like, what the customers need from us in real-time so we can meet that need proactively. So they aren't calling our care rep to ask about their network. We know it before they do. And so I think it's just, again, really making sure that you have the right signals and you have the right data and you're actually listening to your customers, when they're actually calling you. But all of the intent that they're showing is they're interacting online, offline, retail, and making sure that you're leveraging data to understand that that same customer that walked in the front door yesterday is the same customer that walked in the back door today, right? And so you have to have that unified view. And I think from the experience as your designing experience, AI can really help. It's not about campaign here, campaign there. We're going to talk to this customer in that channel. You need to leverage AI to adapt to how that customer wants to be branded, to be sold to, to be helped in a certain situation. So yeah. I think the potential that's so interesting right now is that as we engage with those listening signals, the way of marketing may even just two years ago would have been, we used that in order to slot them into a pre-defined customer journey. Yeah. Now what AI allows us to do is actually create a journey that is truly a case of one. So, Vaish, I know you've been on the forefront innovating with GenStudio for Performance Marketing, which allows us to do just that, to personalize content so that the look, the feel, the experience actually really is unique. Tell us a little bit more about just your view on this new imperative for marketers. Yeah, I want to say two things. I think the first one is every transformational journey is a long one and a really painful one. So just want to acknowledge that finding clarity with AI is a journey we're all on. As much as we are on the product side building these products, we're also customer zero for ourselves and we're going through this journey. And what we're realizing is there's a three-step like, three-phased approach that we're thinking about.
The way we start thinking about this is with the first vector of efficiency, right? We have content supply chain, we've been shaping this narrative around how do we bring all of the Adobe suite of products to actually address the bottlenecks in the content supply chain. And the thing that was always missing is we do not have enough content, right? And the response to that was always, how do we go back and make content more discoverable and reusable, and now with generative AI we can take that and scale it without incurring very heavy costs. So how do you put more content out there, more effective content out there? That's the first phase of efficiency. The second one we're starting to think about now is innovation. As a marketer, to your point, Phil, we're going from a place where the ad side, the supply side is pushing ads to what does the customer want, how are they pulling us, how do you tell a story that is appealing to the customer in a channel where they're at and in a messaging that resonates with them. And this is where we're starting to think about bringing the concept of the content, the data, and the journeys together. And the journeys are no longer linear either. In a lot of industries, you have to acquire the customer but you have to retain the customer. Sometimes you have to reacquire the customer and keep building that loyalty. So how do you think about using AI as an innovation lever to do that as the second phase? And the final one is the complete transformation, right? What could marketing look three years from now, five years from now? None of us know, right? Is the talent stack the same? Is the technology different? Do we have the same channels? All of these questions are up in the air. After 10 years of working cloud transformation, digital transformation, now it's this next vector of transformation that we're entering. And this is a paradigm that none of us are used to because fundamentally the technology is non-deterministic. So how can you actually leverage the power of it, not treat it as a bug but more as a feature and a delightful way to actually bring unique experiences and innovate and transform ourselves as brands. That's what we spend a lot of time thinking about. Way to drop the word vector twice there. So effort, effort, effort was-- The technicals-- Especially because vector art, Adobe, all of that stuff. Hey, speaking of art that's created with Gen AI, all of the images that you're seeing on these slides were in fact created with Adobe Firefly. So kudos to Adobe for the incredible innovation. But I want to also tell you that when we created the graphics that were going to go on this slide, I spent a lot of time with a creative to do that.
I'm not a creative.
I came up with this concept, but I needed to work with someone who was a real artist to create these beautiful images that we see here. He used the tool that was Firefly, but he did not defer to Firefly to create, and we co-created it over the course of multiple iterations to arrive at what you see here. And so that to me is emblematic of this notion of keeping as we've heard on stage multiple times this week to the human in the center of what we do with AI and in creative and in marketing. And so that brings us to the second truth, which is all about putting the customer at the center. So empowering the customer with transparency, trust, and control in AI-powered journeys is the mission for marketers right now.
One of our PwC loyalty studies showed that even loyal customers will leave a brand that they've been fond of to the tune of 32%, just based on one bad experience. So the question to the panel is what can we do to prevent that one bad experience so that we, as Vaish was saying, don't have to reacquire a customer who was already hard-earned.
Who's got a take on that? Yeah, I can jump in on that and I would love to hear from you on this from the T-Mobile side. So I think brand obviously is super important. And one of the things I remember early on, maybe two, three years ago when we were talking about GenAI, people were like holding the technology to a higher standard than that we hold like our own employees. It was like it cannot be wrong at all. It has to be 100% accurate. And the question we'd always ask is, "Well, would you like say that about an employee? If an employee made a mistake, would you fire them immediately?" And the answer was always no. And so, but one of the things that ended up, once we got over that hurdle was actually did you know that AI doesn't get tired? It can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It can continue to optimize, look at brands, really actually create that transparency. And so as people got more comfortable, they realized actually what it's really powerful at doing, which is consistency, driving that reliability. And so what brands can now do is they can actually get a workforce of 10,000 people, 100,000 people to all actually represent the brand in exactly the same way, right? And so AI is now enabling us to do that through the power of being able to understand a brand, understand compliance. But it goes beyond just brand. It's like legal compliance and pharma, for example. We can actually create content that is matched against FDA guidelines. And some of these FDA guidelines are like thousands of pages. There's no human that's going to read that and try to interpret it. So right now that's almost table stakes now. It's like we can actually create that brand consistency and the transparency as a result of that is we're getting higher quality with more consistency across the board. Yeah, and I think that's interesting. So we are working with Writer in some of our service space because again, T-Mobile is a telecom, we are an essential service. We also sell Wi-Fi, we sell phones, we sell all of the things. And often times-- - None of which we can live without. - I know. Well, and oftentimes I think marketers immediately go to sales, obviously, yes, we have revenue goals. That's why we're in a capitalist market. We have to do the thing. But for us, it's like and I think I like that you touched on brand. Every time a customer interacts with you, it is an extension of your brand. And how can we leverage AI to make sure that you're staying on brand, staying on voice because whether it be an agent or a bot in your chat, or someone's an IVR and they're interacting with AI bot, they don't think about that as operations, they think about that as your brand. So making sure that all of the AI touchpoints and all of the customer touchpoints are consistent and on-brand is really important because the customer isn't thinking like, "Oh, well, the automated payment or the automated upgrade is operations." It's part of the holistic brand story. And I'm excited to-- They're really helping us stay on-brand, the work that we're doing with Writer. And that holistic is what we're referring to as the experience supply chain. You want to talk about that a little bit, Roberto, what that means? Yeah, so consistent, absolutely.
Compliant, absolutely. But you use a word that I think that over the next couple of years we are going to have to rethink, Phil, that is the word control.
And I think that long gone are going to be the days where brands should claim that they control the experience and that they know better than the customers that they are trying to serve effectively. Just think about the example that we were playing with a few minutes ago with Alice. And think about the power that brands are going to have with this amazing technology that is here, but even more amazing technology that is coming our way. We as consumers or customers are going to be able to define our own adventure. I always use this analogy. I used to love these books from back in the day, the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I don't know how many of you were familiar with them. That was a very analog way to pick an ending that was different than whatever the author had selected for you. And you could navigate through that adventure by just going to different pages based on some decisions that you were making. Think about that with what is happening with AI and GenAI today in particular. If I want to go shoe shopping with Alice, I'm going to be able to. I just spoke to someone that is an algorithm that sounded like Alice. I'm going to be able to go to a store, and maybe who knows, if I'm the type of customer that likes the Alice in Wonderland characters, I might see some holograms that depict that, and they are the ones that, with the human in the loop, are going to be selling me shoes, getting me through that adventure. So the control needs to be on making sure that the technology is properly used, that the technology provides the level of consistency and compliance that is required, but we need to let go. We need to be orchestrators of experiences, not owners of experiences on behalf of those customers. Vaish? I was just going to say something that happened last year that really caught attention for me is, there was this particular airline that had a chatbot, I don't know if you guys were following the news, they got sued for a very small dollar amount, but I think it set the industry back by a few months. The technology is moving really fast. To Roberto's point, it's not about the technology anymore, it's about how do you leverage the best of the technology, but in the right way. So this paradigm of like test and trust, right? It's not just like software, you just don't throw it out there and expect it to work, it's because of that non-deterministic nature. You put a lot of guardrails around it. You ensure that you run multiple tests, even from a product building perspective at Adobe, we have to run so many tests before we put an AI capability into the market, right? And there are people out there that are pushing features out the door. We're being more thoughtful, more careful, and that's because at the very crux of a lot of that is that concept of responsible AI that we've-- It's been at the heart of what we do from the way we source the training data for building Firefly to the way we release our products every single day. It's very, very thoughtful. There's a lot of testing. I would really, really encourage that the people who are also buying these AI products out there to run their own set of tests before they trust because today it is just a piece of software, tomorrow it's an agent that is doing the work on behalf of your brand. So just really test and trust is how I would think about it. So I think you've all brought up the word brand in the last few minutes, and it reminds me that what we do as marketers is work to enhance the brands. It's half of the job. We talk about Performance Marketing as being the other half. But when we talk about the adoption of AI in the Enterprise...
I think it introduces a lot of risk. To your point about what happened with that particular airline, it introduces risk for the marketers that they're not in control of right now because the entire enterprise, in one way or the other, contributes to brand, it's not just marketing. So there's an opportunity right now, which is also an obligation I think for marketers to actually assert themselves more throughout the enterprise and not just curate and protect the brand through marketing channels, but really through any aspect of the enterprise that manifests some an interaction with the customers. And so that brings us to the third truth, which is that managing the enterprise wide impact of AI on-brand perception and on customer trust and business success is a marketer's duty.
Kev, would you agree with that? And what are you doing to-- Is there anything that like Writer as an example as maybe just an example of the industry is doing to get marketing and the rest of the enterprise in sync too? I would say a truth but with a caveat. I think as you represent a company or you work at a company, we're all marketers and to some degree of that brand. So it's really everybody's responsibility. We actually just issued a survey this week that talked about who is actually owner of AI in an organization? And we found that it was, well, the first thing we, the headline was more like, your employees are sabotaging your AI strategy. And the interesting when you dig into it a little bit more, it's not because that they don't want AI to work. They actually just don't think that the organization is aligned on how to run the AI strategy. They've got the CIO building some stuff and the business owner is like, "I don't want to use that [CURSING] you just built me because it doesn't work. So I'm going to go use my credit card and buy something else." And so, but the whole point of that survey was really just to align on the fact that everybody actually wants the AI to work. They just want to make sure that it's aligned and that it actually does work and performs what it wants to do. And so the big thing that we see, I think the big opportunity we have in the market around being able to use that is actually how do we scale it to a degree that people can start to really leverage it. So I'll give you an example of what we're seeing when we talked about like control and where we're seeing things going. About two years ago, a lot of AI was like, "I just want to use AI to superpower my work." I have all of this stuff that I have to do in my day. It's manual, I don't want to do it. Can AI just do it for me? Can it answer my emails? Can it write this thing that I have to do? Can it summarize this meeting I had? So that was all of the good stuff that came out initially. As we moved to the next phase, it was like, "Okay, can it start to do a little bit more for me, right? Can it start to reason logic? Can it actually start to come up with creative thought?" So then we got to that phase. Now as you guys know, the hype word in AI is agentic, right? We're all hearing about agentic. So agentic means different things to different people. But in the Enterprise and what we're seeing is people are saying, "Well, I have not only one task, I have a chain of 30 tasks that needs to happen." And I'm always looking at each one or I need multiple people to get involved in it. What if I could actually have AI help me facilitate and complete all of these tasks at once, right? It's a crazy thing. So one of the workflows we built for a Fortune 10 company was they wanted to launch a new product. They needed to launch it from a brand new thing. So they actually created a concept in Firefly of an image of what the packaging would look like. The packaging had the label, all of the names, the nutritional facts of what this product was. It was a product that you could, it was like a vitamin product, right? What they were able to do was they were literally like, "I'm only going to do one step." I'm going to put the image of this product into my DAM so they put it in box, right? It kicked off a workflow that basically created all of the content in Salsify, product description. It translated into 30 languages, it made sure it was SEO optimized, it actually rebranded the guidelines so they could sell on Amazon that was different from Walmart, that was different than their dot-com. It pushed it into AEM and basically was like, "Okay, I'm ready to publish that." The person didn't have to do anything but upload the image into a DAM. So that was basically the steps to create multiple workflows, agentic workflows, and we're already at that reality today, to be able to do that. So basically we've created something that's done 99% of something that would normally take like a week for somebody to do. So what we'll be talking about a year from now is just going to be incredible progress from there.
99%, but Carly, Experience Design is still going to be important. - We still need the human in the process. - Totally. And I think, just speaking very blatantly, we've had an adoption problem within our marketing team because I think AI has become so ubiquitous that it's almost become meaningless in some people's minds. I know for me because my title is ambiguous, like contextual experiences. What does that mean, right? Personalization at scale. Cool. Well, people will start come to me like, "Oh, contextual AI/ML as if it's the same thing as if it's one word." I'm like, "Well, no, it's different." Right? AI is different than ML. Contextuals, they all take and tie together. But I think marketers specifically, especially when they've got goals around revenue and they're responsible for not only nurturing the customer experience, making sure that it's critical touchpoints that they can meet their revenue or conversion goals. It's been tough, right? You have to make sure that your models are good and they're trained. And so the marketers have the trust to take their hands off the wheel and let the machine do its thing. And that's the journey that we're on, right? Like I said, there's a stated mission of data-informed AI-enabled digital-first. For a telecom company, that's like we're on this. We are in a true digital transformation at the same time that AI is just so hard to keep up. And so, yeah, I think it's me as the product. So I sit squarely in between the business and the marketing team. I'm in service to them and our data science and our technology teams. And so I'm constantly having to, and it's an honor to bring these solutions, but really make sure that the marketers understand like we're not here to replace you. It's like use it as a tool to help free up your mind and your space to do the more strategic things. But yeah, I think adoption, people are so excited, but then there's so much out there that I think there's a lot of skepticism too. It's become a buzzword, which is unfortunate because all of us on the stage, we have our hands in it every day. So we see the power. How do we message that and make people comfortable with it. It is a buzzword, but if we were holding this conference, let's say the equivalent of this conference 27 years ago would have been the internet. - Yeah. - And the World Wide Web. Now it's AI. It will become commonplace soon, but it isn't yet. We're still trying to figure that out. Hey, Kev...
You used the phrase SEO just now. I'm actually reading articles about AIO, optimizing for AI, not search engines because the next truth is that the new reality for marketers is that they have to learn how to market with AI to AI.
What a time to be alive. - That's like, yeah. - What a time to be alive. That's like some inceptions. Inception [CURSING] right there.
Well, so I'm going to lean more false. I think we will-- Somebody had made a funny comment that they were like, "Now we're going to have AI like write emails that other AI is going to read that email and literally we're not going to talk to each other." I mean, that's probably true at some, but I do think it's AI that's still going to human, right? A lot of the stuff that Carly and I have been talking about with T-Mobile and stuff we're doing with other customers is, we're using the AI to customize things so it's going to be very specific for you, the journey of one, right? So instead of it being you get this email and you're like, what the emphasis email has been even relatable to what I want, now it's going to be very customized to you, right? So I think it's going to be AI to humans in a meaningful way with certain exceptions where, yes, obviously the computers will be talking to each other, but I think the customization piece is going to be very important for the time being, right? It's like the AI is going to know exactly what you want. It's like when you're on Instagram or TikTok, right? It's like it knows exactly what you want to look at, right? The algorithm is like super good and it's like starting to get there. But we can do that in a better way with Enterprise because you obviously, don't want to get too much into the rabbit hole on that stuff. But there's going to be significant stuff that's going to be pretty important there. Rabbit hole, nice. I actually think I have a slightly different point of view on this. I think there will be a mixed scenario where I think a lot of the content will be serving humans, but there will be an increasing push towards marketing to the model providers. The reason being who wants to sit and read 25 blue links of information, right? A lot of people are starting to adopt chatbots because all you want to know is how do I fix my problem, right? And so what is going to happen is just like early signs is the need for higher quality content is going to go up. And I think I would say from an SEO perspective, people made that a little bit of an art and a science, but it moved more and more towards keyword hacking instead of actually providing high quality insights and thought leadership in the market. And I think that bar will go up. So I'm excited to actually see brands step up and provide really high quality content that actually, to Kevin's point, caters to me, but it is routed through an LLM, right? - So it needs to pick up-- - It's a little bit of both. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. It's more of a mixed bag at this point, yeah. And, Phil, the interaction is going to change, right? To me, this is not about machines talking to machines and taking us out of that equation, but let me ask the audience, who knows who Tony Stark is? Raise your hand if you know who Tony Stark is. Keep your hand up if you would like to have your own version of J.A.R.V.I.S.
We all do, right? Do you want to shop for something? And the two options are, I have my version of J.A.R.V.I.S that helps me with that shopping, or I want to get emails and continue to scroll through websites and apps until the end of days.
And the last time I checked, for those of you that raised your hand and know who Tony Stark is, he was still the cool dude in that movie, right? It was not J.A.R.V.I.S taking over the world, although at some point he tried. The experience is going to change, but the human is going to be part of that experience, but the experience is going to be incredibly more delightful, thanks to the use of that technology. Thanks to really moving away from the environment that we have today into something that truly leverages technology. I'll end this section. With this I don't know how many of you have read the book by Reid Hoffman that he just published a few weeks ago called Superagency. One of my favorite parts of that book is the story that he tells at the beginning of the book, where he tells how Socrates used to hate books.
And that's why you cannot find anything that Socrates ever wrote, unless you go and read Plato. And the whole story is that Socrates didn't like books because he felt it was going to assign too much power to the people that were eventually going to get access to those manuscripts, and that he would lose control of that experience because he didn't know who was going to get access to those manuscripts. So why was he going to be sharing his wisdom in a place that he couldn't really fully control? And I think that we are going to be talking about the same here. It's going to be about moving from the experience that we have today to seeing ourselves in the marketing and experience areas as orchestrators of that experience, providing the ecosystem, providing all of the ingredients, but letting people be the ones that create their own recipe, and then decide how much influence do they want the machines to have as part of that experience. That's really fascinating about Socrates. And I think the other risk with books and putting anything in writing is that you sign a sense of permanence to that written word, and if there's anything we're learning right now, there is nothing permanent, let alone certain right now. I want to move on to the next question that is, or the point rather, that is, let's just get practical here. You're all here to take something away from Summit. Hopefully, the first thing you're taking away is some inspiration, but then the next phase of this journey involves some perspiration, which is about putting it into execution mode. How do you actually apply what we're learning here this week, what we're getting inspired by into action? And we believe that reinventing the internal operating models and talent strategies in response to AI's potential is a marketer's new imperative. So, Roberto, you're the resident consultant on this panel. You love redesigning operating models and doing workshops, right? What's the journey you're going to take clients down for them to figure out how they can actually adopt things? Give them a box of LEGOs. Okay. And what I mean by that is you cannot build incredible experiences until you let your team try different experiences with the technology that is now available. We talked about Firefly before. Regardless of the role that people at your respective teams play, when is the last time that you gave them access to a tool like Firefly, and say, go and play, and let's come back and have a dialogue around how is that tool going to transform our experience. We are seeing all of these GenAI solutions left and right. A lot of them offer a lot for free. I'm not saying that you're going to take that right away and say, "Well, we are going to be implementing this and going rogue." But it needs to start with that intellectual curiosity, with that level of experimentation, that is going to demystify what is good and what is not quite yet perfect, in the way in which these tools can be utilized, but you are never going to find out if you just implement firewalls all around your technology stack, so no one has access to it. Let them play.
Speaking of playing, actually, according to World Economic Forum, 77% of firms are putting AI training programs in place with their companies right now. The only response to that I have is what are the other 23% doing? Are you getting your people ready, Carly? Yeah, well, we totally are.
If we look at it as something that is meant to enhance human interaction versus replace human interaction, I think that's where the sweet spot is. And I'll get my hands slapped. I don't see anyone from T-Mobile in here. There's another presentation coming, but when I joined T-Mobile, I was fascinated. Actually, we have an ex T-Mobile person right over there. I was fascinated at how many people it took and still takes to put a picture on the internet. It's fascinating.
Teams and handoffs and like, "Oh, my God, and my first job at T-Mobile was more in marketing automation." And that was my job. I came and I looked at the campaign from initiative briefing in our system all the way down to publishing.
And I [CURSING] you not, it was like 15 teams.
But it's one campaign.
Honestly, we don't put a lot of sexy content out there. We do. But if we're selling a device, you can only sell an iPhone so many different ways. But the cool thing is now that we have such a broad spectrum of offerings, it's not just cell phones and plans, we've got plug for T-Life. T-Mobile Tuesdays benefits Netflix on us and all of the sexy partnerships. We can play a little bit more with content. But I say this all to say what I'm really looking at and what I'm excited about and I was a little kid in a candy store watching all of the fireflies because I live that, I live that in real-time of marketers having to like go in and create a copy doc and create a brief and they go into Workfront and they hand it off, and then the designer picks it up, and then different channels go and brief in their agencies and it comes back, and then it gets hand off after handoff after handoff after handoff and you're like...
"There's AI for that." - I'm like, "Come on, guys." - Yeah. Plenty of room for efficiency, probably. Totally. Yeah. So it's marketing efficiency, it's operations efficiency, it's also even analytics, right? We put all of these experiences out there, leveraging AI to extract your insights and define that next journey or that experience and starts to move away from these more, I have a placement here and I'm going to put X amount of content in there and then I have a placement there. It's getting to more adaptive and letting the AI adapt to that customer's journey on that next click, read those intent and then that signals to make sure that we're redefining the experience for them in real-time. I think that's the expectation for all customers. Well, I think the reason why you probably have 15 teams involved in developing the content is that there is an imperative to get it right. Yeah. And we love your color scheme, by the way. What do you call it color? - Magenta. - Magenta, right? Yeah.
You have to get it right. Certainly the color, the whole tone and feel, the messaging, and all of that, of course.
But there's another aspect I think that I suspect is driving this expansion of number of hands and algorithms that touch the content production process, and that is this notion that you want to go out with content that also is reflective of responsible use of AI. You see how I just made that transition? So, Vaish, I'm going to come to you. I know we've partnered with Adobe on this idea of the Content Authenticity Initiative and the standard setting bodies around C2PA, which I think is the best example of responsible adoption of AI in the creative process. There are other plenty of dimensions of other dimensions within the notion of responsible AI, but just tell us a little bit about how Adobe is approaching things philosophically. Yeah, so like I mentioned, from the very beginning of Adobe building AI, we've taken a very trust-centric, responsibility-centric approach. We bought a company-- Sorry to interrupt, but I'm going to ask people also-- Yeah. Sure. While you're talking to respond to this question on the survey as well. So go ahead, sorry. So we bought a company way back in 2012 that became Adobe Stock. So we had access to license data for us to be able to train our model. And the thing we kept hearing from the market is, "Hey, all of these products that we're playing with in terms of our generation, they're all very good, but we don't want to get sued." Right? We're really worried about taking any of this into production. These are all fantastic for ideating as a starting point and the promise with Firefly for us is it's a tool that takes you all the way from concepting and ideation all the way to production, right? We want that content supply chain, we want to be present across the board. And again in 2019, we set up the Content Authenticity Initiative because there's this basic schema around fingerprinting for provenance that is really, really important because tomorrow if the content fails on any account or if it infringes on copyright issues and so on and so forth, that you want to be able to trace it back to where it came from. And because of the content authenticity initiative and the fingerprinting we'd already done, we have greater control over the prominence of what is getting created with Firefly, which is not something a lot of other players out there are able to talk about. So this is not just about getting not sued, but it's also about if you're Coke and you're creating an asset with Firefly, you can be fairly confident that something that's not in your brand doesn't show up, and that's why Coca-Cola partners with us today. That's why T-Mobile partners with us today. We are all in extremely competitive markets, but we want our brand to stand out and speak for us. And we do not want another brand's representation sneaking in any shape or form. And that is the core of how we approach AI. And like I mentioned earlier, we also think about productization in a very responsible way. We do run this concept called evaluations in the AI process, which is the equivalent of user testing in software where every product that we put out there, we were just talking about the labs framework, right? We're setting up labs inside every Adobe product where we put the product out there, we get the feedback, we understand that there's a minimum level of quality bar that we're meeting before we put something in production. So that way we're actually being responsible and especially, as we get into the agentic world where agents run-in loops and just go on for a little while autonomously, we want to ensure that there's a human on the loop who's reviewing and checking what's going on. It's the same like test and trust philosophy that we're bringing into the agentic world as well. And you'll see this approach reflected time and again in every single feature, every single product that gets out with the name Adobe on it. The human stays in the loop. I like that. Well, the survey results are in and more than half of the respondents say that transparency is in fact key. There are-- Well, there's a few bold Mad Hatters here who say they'll ask for forgiveness and maybe even apologize to, but I think that dovetails to the truth being that embedding responsible AI principles into marketing strategy execution and governance is in fact a marketer's obligation. There's probably not a lot of debate around that. Okay, we're going to wrap up with one last item here, and then we want to open it up to the audience for some questions in the last few minutes that we have remaining here, but we have a blank page here, and that is the Marketer's Playbook, and I think the one thing that we've all agreed to is that we have to start now.
I don't think waiting is really an option. Actually, when we open it up, I'd be interested to hear if someone actually strongly differs from that, but my position anyway would be it's not a question of when because when is now, the question really is what and the how. So just open it up to everybody, what advice do you have for our guests here in what first step they should do, what first word they should write on this blank page? A single word. - No, I think it's important to-- - Attend Adobe Summit. Yeah, no, I honestly, I think that brands need to get on board and the ones that don't are going to be left behind. It changes. I'm just fascinated even since we brought in OpenAI to T-Mobile. And from the time that we got access to it, to how it's grown, it's insane. So I think that from a brand perspective, it's embrace AI trust but verify, organize yourselves around it and really embrace it as a force multiplier and not a replacement.
What I would add to that, Phil, is the time to do it is now, but have a clear objective in mind. So this is not just about experimenting for the sake of experimenting. Let's do 1,000 POCs that then at the end of each of them, we have no clue on what to do next. At the end of the day, link it to how are you going to be creating value. And the creation of value can be expressed in many different ways. To some is gaining efficiencies, entering a new line of business, growing revenue, again, the choice is yours, but you need to have that business objective in mind, and the business objective cannot be, "Hey, we are just going to run some tests." I think just building on that, take a holistic approach, right? This is not just a change in the technology. Your people need to be on board, like Carly said. Your processes need to be re engineered. Take a holistic lens on what value you want to derive out of all of this and use technology as almost a forcing function to have those conversations. The number of times I end up in customer conversations where we're talking about GenStudio and the conversation veers into is the creative going to become more data oriented, is the marketer going to do more creative. These are all questions that are extremely important for us to be grappling with. We should be having these conversations, but if the technology is forcing us to have that conversation, use the moment. That's the way I think about it. Kev, you represent Writer. What are you going to write? I would write a bunch of stuff, but I would say from the lens of the future, probably selfishly the way I look at the technology is how do you as an individual learn so you can reskill? Because I think our jobs, in terms of our roles and responsibilities, will be completely different. Every company we talk to, whether it's CPG, big tech, pharma, they're creating AI center of excellences, and they need AI people. That doesn't mean they need AI engineers, they just need people who are savvy with this technology. We've really never seen anything like this. You don't really see people in an organization being like, "I need somebody who's going to be my search engine optimization person necessarily." Every single organization is like, "I'm building an AI center of excellence." So that's number one. So I'm trying to like teach my son, I'm like, "Hey, let's play around with AI because I want you to know how to use it in your everyday life." So that's one piece that's really interesting. But the other piece as a steward of basically an advocate of your company is how do you empower your employees? How do you empower, Roberto was saying like, how do you give the people who are actually learning on the cutting edge of this, how do you make them the champions? How do you really get them to really drive that change? Because we're not at a point where this is something that you can wait around on the silent for. You actually have to do it, otherwise you're at a competitive disadvantage. So it's really about understanding the reskilling is actually happening in real-time, get ahead of that, and then really reward the people who are actually the big champions of that. That's right. Okay. I want to hear the-- Thank you, Kev. The path forward, I want to hear from you all as well, answer the last poll question if you would, and then let's open it up. Time flew, my goodness. It's almost at the end, but any burning questions amongst the crowd? Yes, please. I think the recordings, I have to repeat it back to you. Basically, how did we bring people along to help solve the operational issues that we saw as we were onboarding AI? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of shuttle diplomacy. I think you had to bring people along early and often and show them the value and make sure that they know like we're not trying to replace your job, but like you also don't want to spend your time digging through copy and pasting and handing off. And we have this amazing set of tools like our entire MarTech stack is Adobe. We've onboarded Writer that is integrating with us to help with our service messaging.
And so it's starting to get better and we have OKRs around it. I think establishing goals around it, around the efficiency, around the speed to market, around the reduction of the platform interfaces and how do we let marketers, the ultimate goal for me and what I like is like, how can we let a marketer just through natural language query. I want to...
Talk to customers about upgrades in Apple iPhone and literally let the agents run, right? One agent is going to go get the data and eligibility. One agent is going to go create the creative. One agent is going to go and publish in that in AEM.
And that's not saying a marketer has no value.
They should be driving the long-term strategy and building the brand and looking 3, 5, 10 years ahead. And let the robots do the ground work. So we're not perfect. We're still getting there.
We're working really closely with Adobe on the whole entire content supply chain from EDAM all the way up to Workfront and even further beyond and looking across there and how can we optimize in there. We're looking at all of our data structure and our data architecture. We're really optimizing the Adobe platforms that we have. AJOD is a great one for like automated journeys omnichannel decisioning. So yeah, it's a lot of shuttle diplomacy, a lot of bringing people along. I was going to come back to that. Your first phrase was the right one. You closed with it, shuttle diplomacy. That's what it takes off internally. Phil, do you mind if I just add something-- Please, yes. I was going to say, I think a lot of the resistance comes from what Carly was mentioning which is like, "If I don't do this, what is my job?" So starting to actually come together and defining a vision around, hey, here are possible things that we want more time. We want to be spending more effort from a human perspective doing, especially, with the creative teams I see this a lot when we talk about Firefly and GenStudio is, I used to spend a lot of time removing backgrounds and resizing and I'm like, "Nobody went to design school being like this is what I wanted to do 90% of my time," right? Yeah. What do you really want to do? Where can you truly add value and move business outcomes by not doing ground work? And like if you provide a vision for people to see what that could look like, and look, we're all figuring it out to Carly's point, right? I think the more we figure it out and we share our learnings and we all shape this together as an industry, I think putting that message out there is going to really, really help remove some of these bottlenecks around, I don't want to change the way we're working right now. And one quick thing that I would add, Phil, is that I would also encourage everyone to have the dialogue with your teams on how you can expand the reach that marketing has to other parts of the organization, if you create that bandwidth as a result of embracing the technology. Think about a lot of the brands that we all interact with on a daily basis, where you can clearly tell that the marketing function is involved only in pure marketing and maybe a little bit on the sales side of things. But then you go into the customer service areas, and marketing is not necessarily directly involved there because it's not always a revenue generating unit. The more bandwidth that you have, imagine creating those delightful experiences that are orchestrated by the marketing department, that you are now going to have time to be part of.
I like ending on a challenge like that, which is for us to just imagine.
Imagination was what this was all about. We went down the rabbit hole together. Alice is out, she's safe, she's out in the real world now. She's in control of her journey. She's interacting with brands in the way that she wants. Join me in thanking the panel please.
And scan this QR code, would love to hear from you. I never even formally introduced myself. My name is Phil and I lead the Adobe Business at PwC. It's nice to meet you all. - All right, thank you all very much. - Thanks everyone. All right, look forward to hearing from you.
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