[Music] [Richard Whitehead] Hello, everyone. And welcome to our session. The Future of Workfront. I'm joined today by Paul Vaughn, who's the director of Product Management. And I'm Richard Whitehead, and I run Product Marketing for Workfront.
There is so much happening in the world today in marketing. We see the content landscaping extremely in crisis. This current landscape is filled with content that needs to be personalized. You might start with 8 assets, then you have 15 channels, and you want to grow that to other languages. Those languages then need to be distributed into a lot of different variations. And those variations take on even more variations. And very quickly, we're up to thousands of assets that we have to produce. And not to mention that you refresh them every single year. If in case you're doing it every month in the year, now you're talking about almost 500,000 assets that need to be managed. This isn't slowing down. In fact, we see that in the market today, 47 exabytes back in 2021 was used for content. And today it's 155 exabytes per enterprise by 2026.
And if that's not enough, it leads to this chaos that's happening when you have to manage your content supply chain from all the different people that need to touch the content, whether it be your creative team, the marketing team, legal that has to review and approve something. And it becomes this tangled mess. And if you're not familiar with the process, all of those things tie together and get munged and things get messed. Brands don't get adhered to. Time-consuming reviews and approvals. Inability to find and reuse assets and limited insights into fact the ROI of the content that you're producing.
We see this as a real pain for every single organization. We see things like disjointed and disconnected execution within internal and external teams like with your agencies. There's time lost in manual and fragmented workflows or difficulty aligning plans, data, and execution. And if that's not enough tech roadblocks for delivering those experience, some people say they don't use 50% of the assets they create. So what happens? Assets go to the DAM to die.
But there's a better way. And luckily, we have a better way for you in the context of how do you move forward for that. Being able to move from those disconnected plans into centralized plans that are integrated and work together with the execution. Work processes that used to be chaotic can now be streamlined, enabling a holistic visibility to all the work that's happening. Taking the time-consuming review and approval process and unifying that into creative collaboration between those creatives and the marketers. And then finally taking those manual workflows and asset tagging and putting in all the metadata and prioritizing, integrating, and automating all across the enterprise that is AI-ready.
To address these needs, we need to have a central way of doing that, to have central plans and ability to create those plans with workflows. We call this capability, as you can imagine, workflow and planning. With workflow and planning, you can now create campaigns and content more efficiently, starting all the way from that left side with strategy and planning to then getting into work execution where all of the work happens from the creative process all the way through to content delivery and measuring how the content is producing within those channels that you've sent it to.
We are building this all on what we call GenStudio Foundation. The GenStudio Foundation outlines the five key pillars to be able to produce this content at scale. Workflow and planning that we're talking about today with Workfront, creation and production with creative cloud applications, the asset management with digital asset management, delivery and activation, and finally, reporting and insights. All of this, of course, layered across these GenAI models.
To build a system of record or marketing system of record where all work can be centralized, can be visible to everyone, and be able to be reported on requires three distinct but connected capabilities. Planning, so campaign planning that we just talked about, or campaign calendaring, or marketing governance. Workflow, where the execution happens. This is where that work management occurs or resource management, portfolio and program management. And finally, tying it together with Automation and Integration. Work happens in a lot of different places, not just within Workfront. So pulling in other systems and other data becomes important and all layered across the Adobe Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud Integrations. So to tell you more about the first pillar, I'm going to turn it over to Paul.
[Paul Vaughn] So thanks, Richard. Let's dive in and first talk about planning the foundation of any great marketing system of record.
So these challenges that we want to talk about first, you're probably going to resonate with them and these are common across all modern marketers. So you know this, the volume and complexity of your work is ever increasing. The orchestration of campaigns, content, and delivery channels pushes you and your teams to the limit. Visibility into the work is difficult as well. Often, you're doing this in silos, and you're trying to get the pulse of the work all of the time, the status, if you will. So time is wasted, budgets are squandered, deadlines are missed, and then ultimately, you're not managing your customers' expectations. Does this sound familiar? Well, so it's not because we have a lack of data or tools. It's really about the data and the tools are fragmented and disconnected.
So what does centralized planning do? It allows you to connect your strategy, your processes, and data into a single source of truth, getting everything and everyone on the same page. So this unlocks the downstream execution. When you have this centralized, it's really going to make your teams empowered and more efficient, work consistently, and eliminate those silos, which we all want. This is really a modern marketer's dream state. Let me show you just really quick and just illustrate what centralized planning looks like in Workfront.
So plans are modeled in and reflect in custom records. These records can be visualized and shared in a variety of formats, including marketing calendars and tables and timelines of use. These records can also be filtered and sorted and grouped to provide visibility that aids in that strategy and checks and it also helps in that decision making. And then if you click on that record, it's simple, brief experience that makes it easy to see all that metadata appears, and you're able to just get everything you need at once. That's what centralized plan management does for you.
So building on the launch of our planning in 2024, we are now enhancing and making a stronger native connection to Workfront Planning and Workfront Workflow, bringing planning records into existing intake workflows, and we're providing better ways to flow from planning a campaign all the way to creating and linking to projects. So very exciting. And then one more thing we're adding as well is we're adding those automation services to really make this come alive and amplify your work and make it more efficient.
We're also extending Workfront Planning to become the unifying metadata layer across the entire content supply chain. So you're able to centralize and manage metadata and your taxonomies natively in GenStudio for Performance Marketing, AEM, Assets and Sites, etcetera. Very exciting stuff. So we're also surfacing Workfront Planning data with campaigns, and products, and personas right inside GenStudio for Performance Marketing. This provides that critical context that you need to create that compelling generative content.
So let's talk about the next step in that marketing system of record and that's really the execution of your plan using Workfront Workflow. So you'll remember, or maybe you're not aware, we delivered a ton of great features in 2024. We talked about environment promotion from your content sandbox to production, added new business rules, the AI Assistant came to help you, and then also Workfront Priorities which we'll dive into in just a moment.
But before we dive into what's coming, let's get on the same page. So why is it critical to streamline your workflows? Well, it's really to create a stronger connection between your strategy, your plans, and your execution. Also, to leverage that centralized data to resource, execute, and report on work.
And also to create shareable views, monitor status, and share progress, and also identify at-risk deliverables. Let me show you really quickly what that looks like and how your business can unlock that end-to-end visibility. So if you open your campaign in Workfront for a comprehensive view of campaign components, use filters to identify projects at risk, and you identify the areas that require attention to either allocate those resources to support or make a plan to talk about it and figure out what you're going to do next to get it back on track.
So there's a lot coming in 2025. And just to highlight a few things, we've got more AI-powered capabilities coming, which Richard's going to speak about just a few more minutes in-depth. But also, we've got the Canvas Dashboards & Visualizations providing you a simple and modern UI for your reports and all of that information that you need. Review and approval integrations across the entire Adobe content supply chain are coming. I'm very excited about that. And then we're going to enhance resource and financial management, and then also Azure availability in EMEA.
So you know this, Workfront has served project managers and helping them manage those complexities and content development across multiple teams for years. But we've also heard that sometimes there can be too much complexity for the individual contributor. So to that end, we launched Workfront Priorities last year. It's all self-contained. It's all relevant information, easy to find, a simple interface. It's intuitive. But what if you want more detail, you want to be able to dive in? Let's just show you how that works. This was a number one piece of feedback. This said, we heard this is great to see this info this way, but I also want the ability to see the information at a project level. And so now we've got that right rail added and coming for you. It's all in context. You can edit the details, and then you can also link back to that full project, which is super exciting. So you get to the information faster that you need without diving too deep. So check out Workfront Priorities if you haven't already. It's very exciting. It's in production. It's ready for you. Take a look at it and see how this can help your team.
So we also know that individuals and we've heard this individuals have preference to see their work. So sometimes they love a good list, but some want to see their view in a calendar. And so we've done that now and added that calendar so you can look at all your work by months. You can customize your styling, you can make it your own, make it super beautiful if you're really into lots of colors and really make that work work for you.
Okay, now sometimes you're away from work. Thank goodness. We're excited about that. Awesome. But the work didn't stop, if I remember correctly, while you were gone. So we have this new feature called Catch Me Up. Using AI, we're able to focus you on your project updates that are relevant and get those insights to you when you get back to work, helping you get back in that stream of work just a little bit faster.
Okay, we've also heard that you want flexibility to organize your day, your week, your month. So now you have that with prioritization buckets or groupings. So you can organize yourself, name the groupings what you want, and then drag and drop those tasks however you see necessary, really helping you make that work to be done make more sense to you. So priorities is all about removing the complexity where you don't need it and then getting to the work faster.
Okay, we also know that real time docs and proof have to be available to you. You've got to be able to see all of that relevant information in one place. Now today, this has not been able to be updated in real time, but that's not the case anymore. Now this is all updated in real time with real time presence and there's no need to refresh. It's just right there getting you or your teammates everything they need all at once. Very exciting. Now one other thing we're adding, which is super exciting, I'm moving through this quickly, but I just want to be able to get to it all, is we're using Smart Filters now...
With AI to be able to use natural language to be able to find exactly what you need. So you might be able to type in something like, just show me the, tasks, and be able to get that coming to you right away. So there's much more coming in Workfront Workflow. We just invite you to attend frequently, what we do with those roadmap update sessions. Come and see what we're doing. We're always updating and making this better for you and for your teams. Also, you can always check out Experience League for more details. You can see what's going on there. So I'm going to hand it back to Richard where he's going to share that next pillar of your marketing system of record.
Thanks, Paul. I feel like we need to do like a virtual high five or something in the screen. I just like, don't know if it's this side or this side, but high five to you, Paul. There's so many amazing things coming out with Workfront and the capabilities with Planning and Workflow. And so now what I want to talk to you about is that final pillar, that final capability that allows you to build the marketing system of record, and that we call Automation and Integration. With Automation and Integration, it allows you to develop and build that end-to-end process. We all do the same sorts of things on a regular basis. But we want to eliminate some of that reentering of data, creative briefs, accelerating project resourcing, and set up an execution, and really automate the downstream content activation, that's otherwise led to campaign latency and delays and all of the things that we hate about creating content or managing our marketing work. So if we take a look at how this works, your marketing teams can import a campaign brief from a file, and then Workfront will automatically extract the relevant information from that and put it into the corresponding fields within the system. Then Workfront utilizes historical data and similarities between tasks and auto-assigns individuals and tasks to those particular content streams. And then upon completion and approval of those, you have all of that synchronized back into AEM Assets, ensuring quick activation and consolidation and visibility into all of the available assets for future projects. No longer to the assets, go to the DAM today.
Next, we're coming out or we have come out with the native integration with AEM Assets. Nobody likes to go in and put in all the metadata associated with an image or a file. And so when you do it in the context of Workfront, all that project information is also tagged on the asset so you can find, tailor, and reuse that content in the future. Linking those assets and the metadata that Paul talked about to those projects and tasks and automatically apply that to all of those different files associated with that project. And again, automatically publish those final assets from Workfront to AEM. So no longer people saying, is this the final asset or the final, final asset or the final, final, final asset? We also have native integration, and we're coming out with more integration with GenStudio for Performance Marketing. This has been an exciting launch for us to build an application that's purpose built for paid media. So here you can see that right within GenStudio for Performance Marketing, I'm able to review and approve all of the stuff that I'm making these variations of content. And then I can tie that back to Workfront for advanced reviews and approvals or multi-stage review and approval and surfacing Workfront Planning data, like campaigns, products, and personas right inside of GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
The next we have is our integration with Frame.io unified review and approval. The experience needs to be the same across all of these different platforms that I have and different applications. So starting out with, we're integrating Workfront and Frame.io via a Fusion integration. Here, you can synchronize assets in your Workfront project folder, synchronize comments between the two systems, make a review link generated in Frame, make that available in Workfront for review and approval. So what this allows for is your creative work in progress assets could be done in Frame.io and then that could be tied back to the project and the information back into Workfront, making that experience seamless, and unified, and being able to share information between the system.
There's a lot more coming with our integration and automation capabilities. And the main thing I want you to remember here are things like Automation services. Like I said earlier, there are a lot of things that we do that we would wish we didn't have to do on a regular basis. Use automation services. That's part of our roadmap to more easily create and streamline those automations. We're improving capabilities within Fusion for automating and improving scenario design, leveraging AI for contextual information, and finally, streamlining all of those timesheets and those management right inside of Microsoft Dynamics, Finance, and Operations.
All right, it wouldn't be a great presentation unless we talked about AI. So let's take a minute and talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way that we work. We're focused on some key things in 2025. And so as we look at the first half and even beyond, we're doing things like Project Health Advisor, AI Reviewer for being able to understand and review an asset before it goes to humanize. AI-Powered Requests, Experience Platform, integration with marketing Adobe marketing agent into the M365 Copilot, creating synergies between all of our applications for summarization, and finally custom agents. All of these things will help you work faster, work better, and be able to get your work done in time so that you can go do more strategic things, or get home and have some dinner, or whatever it is you're going to do that night. Let's start with Project Health Advisor. Now within Workfront today, of course, you can go in and you can see the status of a project. So it tells you the condition. Is it on track? Is it behind? Does it need some work? All of that's looking at is just basically of all the tasks that are in this project of all the things that are here. Am I going to meet this date? And so it says green, yellow, red, whatever status you've put in there. That's not a really good example of what's happening with the project itself. With the Project Health Advisor, we can actually go in and monitor and check with AI other things that are applicable to that. So as I go through this video here very quickly, I go in there and I choose what it is I want to monitor. Is it the number of tasks that are being created? Here I can see that my score overall is 65. I've had people change things within the project. Their sentiment is different. So for example, I use this term good to go instead of actually putting in real specific information and what you saw very quickly. Like I said, I apologize that it was so fast, but we moved the score from a 65 to an 86 because the Project Health Advisor not only told me some of the problems, but it helped me fix them.
The next capability is AI Reviewer, and I am one, I am very excited about this capability because I hate looking at the same thing over and over. So all of us have brand guidelines. Some of those brand guidelines might be about colors. Some of them might be about specific type of imagery, the tone that we use and things like that. And so with the AI Reviewer inside of Workfront, we can create these many AI Reviewers to do that work for us before we have somebody look at it. So here I'm going to drag and drop a document for my brand guidelines in GenStudio. It's going to create this brand for me. Then we're going to use this brand to create an AI Reviewer right inside of Workfront, just like I would request an approval from a person. When I've selected that and then run that across all of the assets in my project, it comes back and tells me what that score is going to be. So as you saw earlier, that score wasn't quite right. And so I needed to fix some things. Once I fixed them and run it through the AI Reviewer again, now I can see that it's met 100% of those brand standards. And either I can go look at it or I can say that's good to go.
Thousands of assets can be handled at a single time. Next is, Requests. Requests can be very difficult. I don't know what I'm looking for. So use AI to auto-generate requests for you and ensure that the work is getting into the right place. So just like before we could type in a prompt, but even better, let's go ahead and drag and drop a document right inside of the Request. When I drag and drop that in, it's going to analyze that document, and then it's going to automatically populate the right form for me, in this case, for a campaign request. And then that campaign request information can be submitted to the person that I need it to go submit it to. And now we've got all of that information in one place. Instead of having static documents that get lost, they don't get updated, all of that now is dynamic and held within Workfront.
All right. We work with all different types of organizations. Agencies is a big part of that.
Services, so if you think about system integrators and those type of companies, a lot of what they do is around financial management and resource planning. But we also know that's something that you do within the Enterprise. So we're coming out with new capabilities, financial management, granular billing rates, detailed permissions, resource management, staffing plans, and reporting to, monitor those financials and hours in a time-phased format, and even non-labor resources that I'm going to show you a slide about. All of this is underpinned with Enterprise scalability to ensure that you have just exactly what you need across your Enterprise. As we look at that first one with top-down staffing.
Here, you can see that I have this new capability for planning of resources from a macro view. This allows me to align the capacity of your internal teams to the client contracts. So again, if you're an agency or a system integrator, within your own organization, you might be doing this. That allows you to ensure that you have commitments on inbound projects before they're even executed.
The other one is non-labor resources, and what this means are things like cameras or studios or conference rooms and things like that that might have a cost to them, or you might want to check them out as part of a project. So if I'm running a campaign that includes a photo shoot, I can include a camera. I can include multiple cameras. I can include a studio, and those types of things, so that I can leverage the power of Workfront to manage and track the use of those non-labor resources just like I do with people.
Well, thanks, Richard. It's super exciting. The future of Workfront is very bright. We've got so many innovations coming soon. And then throughout the year, we hope you join us for this amazing journey. On behalf of Richard and myself, thanks for attending this online recording, and we hope you have an awesome day. [Music]
