[Music] [Peter Parker] All right. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I hope you had a great lunch. Hope you're not too full. Got a lot of great content for you. So welcome to the Workday Adobe Summit session. We have a lot to cover today. I hope that you walk away here with either two things. Either motivated to take on a cloud modernization journey like Workday has done or with more clarity on how you want to approach your modernization journey.
So who am I? Believe it or not, I am Peter Parker. I am Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Adobe. I had the distinct pleasure of bringing some of our greatest innovations to the cloud to market. So I'll talk about some of those later, like the new AEM Hub, excuse me, Experience Hub and the AI Assistant. So I'll talk about those in a little bit. I also have the pleasure of taking and helping some of our customers adopt cloud service, whether they be on Managed Services or On-premise. I'm joined today by Ravi Surampudi at Workday. He's a Senior Manager of Digital Customer Experience there. And he and his team have really re-envisioned how Workday does customer experience and engagement. And I couldn't be more happy to share their story here with you today.
So I want to take just a moment to talk about some of the incredible momentum that we're seeing on AEM Cloud Service. So starting in 2020, and now 5 years later, we have over 1,000 customers that rely on Cloud Service every day to drive the Digital Experiences for their brands. And we're really privileged today to have one of those great leaders with us, Workday.
So if you attended my session last year, I told the audience then that we were beginning to see that GenAI was driving cloud modernization. That organizations were getting a bit of FOMO and pulling forward their modernizations because of AI and GenAI. I'm excited to share today that AI is the primary factor driving cloud modernization, with 90% of organizations saying that's the sole reason that they're pursuing modernization. A third of those organizations are saying that it saves them time. And that's really the reason why, is because GenAI is proving its value. And two-thirds of these organizations are saying that they're going to pull forward their modernization into the near future for that same reason.
And yet and still, we know that there are so many challenges that remain for cloud modernization. One of the challenges is we know that organizations that are on-premise or self-hosted have this limited scale and ability to expand their customer experiences.
And they find it often difficult to offload some of the management responsibilities or security obligations that they have. And all of this means they get limited access to the latest innovations, and they ultimately have lower ability to respond to market changes and therefore reduce competitiveness in the market.
We've talked a lot at Summit this year about intent-aware experiences. Simply put an intent-aware experience is one that uses AI to understand and anticipate a user's needs and objectives and render an experience around those needs and objectives. Whether it starts with intent capture to decisioning, building the experience or all the way to delivering on the actions and insights, organizations are changing the way they construct, orchestrate and deliver digital experiences in the era of AI.
So how then do we get to the cloud with all of the challenges we just spoke about? I think the answer is that besides simply being a capability to unlock when you move to the cloud, GenAI actually alters the cloud modernization value calculation. We're seeing that for teams that build GenAI use cases into their cloud modernization, they're seeing an ROI of up to 110% and 7X the ROI of peers who don't consider GenAI use cases when they're planning for their cloud modernization. So something you want to be thinking about as you plan today.
So as I mentioned earlier, I want to talk about a couple of the innovations that you may or may not have heard so far at Summit. The first here is AEM Experience Hub. Experience Hub is the new home for all agentic experiences in AEM Cloud Service. This is a place where users will now see a tailored experience based on their persona, their objectives and it's all built around delivering faster execution by servicing the next-best action to deliver more seamless execution.
The second one is our AI Assistant. This assistant lives in context within Experience Hub and allows you to ask detailed product questions and receive in human language answers and guidance in using AEM and resource location. Ultimately, goal here is to increase productivity and ROI.
The last innovation is what I'm particularly excited to share with you, and it's really relevant for this session. We have an early access feature called Experience Catalyst. You can see this demo to the Adobe booth right now. We're using AI services to do two really critical things. The first is to prepare content for use with AI by vectorizing that content so that machine learning models can understand the context and the meaning behind the content. And the second thing is to streamline the onboarding of that content to AEM Cloud Service. So this is an early adopter thing. We're still working the kinks out, but there's some really exciting stuff here. You can scan this QR code to sign up for the Early Adopter Program. And be sure to stop by the Adobe booth and see a live demo of this feature.
So the journey we're seeing that organizations are taking today for cloud maturity looks like this. All roads start with cloud modernization of applications and data.
Once that data and those applications are no longer siloed and on-premise and legacy implementations, organizations are free to tap into a content supply chain and tools like GenAI and ultimately to deliver the intent-based experiences that I was just talking about.
As you consider this journey, I want you to know all of the tools and resources we have available to you to help to ensure your success. We have advanced tooling, things like the Content Transfer Tool and the Best Practices Analyzer that are available within Cloud Acceleration Manager. We have incredible experts who have done dozens and dozens of migrations and modernizations with Adobe Professional Services. And, of course, we have over 350 solution partners, many of whom are here at Adobe Summit this year.
All right. So what you've all been waiting for, Workday. I don't think this requires a ton of introduction. At Adobe, we rely on Workday every day to manage your global workforce of more than 20,000, help engage them and help retain them.
And what you may not know is that Workday has over 11,000 customers around the globe. And what Ravi and his team have done is to build out a better interface for their customer experience so that they can continue to deliver the one-to-one customer engagement that they want to be able to do.
All right. With that, I'm really proud to hand things over to Ravi at Workday to talk about the incredible Workday story.
[Ravi Teja Surampudi] All right. Post-lunch session. Yay.
Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Peter, for the wonderful introduction.
My name is Ravi Surampudi. I manage the Digital Customer Experience team within Go-to-Market at Workday.
That roughly translates to we enable digital experiences for our customer experience team, right? So what I'm going to talk about is not a migration journey...
From an existing AEM platform to the cloud, but rather how we chose to be on AEM on the cloud in order to solve a fundamental business problem that our customer experience team has been facing.
And particularly one customer portal that I want to use for this use case is Workday Resource Center.
Workday Resource Center is a unified experience that is a single entry point for all our customers.
Every customer touchpoint, once you are a Workday customer, has to go through the resource center where we are enabling a unified experience. We do not want the users to look for the content that they need in different locations. We are providing critical announcements and notifications. We are enabling them to self-serve as much as possible. And we are also automating their onboarding, which was largely white-glove in the past. And this experience is fully powered by AEM on the cloud. But as you could see, it also connects to all our Workday downstream systems, creating a very frictionless and a unified experience.
And these are some of the core teams that we work with. Our CX, our product teams, marketing and obviously, business technology, Go-to-Market, and our infrastructure.
So before I begin about what we did and how we got there, I want to talk about a few statistics of what being on AEM on the cloud meant for us.
We operate a highly personalized application with an average four-second load time, which in general, is considered performant.
Our uptime is about 99.92%. This was a very critical factor given that we have centralized all our customer access. And if we go down, our customers lose access to all their Workday systems. And today, about 500,000 customer community users actually access our application.
And this is really important because I'm going to circle back onto this by the time we are done so that it all comes together.
So let's talk about why we got here where we are, right? So we were presented with a problem from our CX stakeholders where we, about three, three and half years ago, there was a fundamental problem of our customers experiencing fragmented solutions. And I don't think that's an uncommon problem. I think everybody who's in customer experience across B2B have this. Because we tend to build applications for different needs at different points of time, and later realize that our customers are experiencing a pretty disapparated experience. We also want to scale and modernize our experience, especially digitally. And then given where we are and how much growth we have experienced in the past few years, we've outgrown the white-glove onboarding model. And there was a need to digitize that process as well.
And that gave us an opportunity to think about how do we unify our customer experience across all of the channels and all of the properties that they're accessing. And how do we support customers to self-serve because the modern day customer is very savvy. They don't require a lot of handholding as much as we anticipate. And they prefer to self-serve before they reach out to either the support or their CSMs in general. And we also want to eventually capitalize on a potential cross-sell opportunity if we are able to unify the experience.
And the solution that we came up with is to build that integrated portal experience that I was showcasing earlier. Centralize knowledge management, search, create an insight-driven customer experience and provide a guide for every customer of ours to go on a self-discovery journey, right? Now in order to get there, I think we look at three building blocks that I'm going to go through on how we thought about this.
We wanted to bring an experience that's more personalized and contextual, where every bit of application that the customer accesses is persona based, and it's for them by that, right? And we wanted this experience to be connected and transparent as they navigate away from this application across whatever the downstream systems that they need to access.
And we want this application to be proactive and data-driven because as we work on changes and as we work on evolving this application, we want to understand what the customer actually wants, and then release that as a feature.
Now with that, we obviously made a decision to actually transition to AEM on the cloud. And I'd like to talk about why that decision was made. And today, we are actually unifying around AEM as our Customer Experience Enablement solution.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not a migration activity for us. This is a net new decision that we had to take, that we chose to go with AEM on the cloud. And I'm sure there are numerous reasons in order to be on it. But these are the five things that really mattered to us. Because when we looked at building this as a new consolidated solution, we wanted to future-proof it rather than build something that's unexisting and later deal with a migration activity. And we also wanted to take advantages of some of the innovation capabilities that you see here that we've known a few years ago. Now we are talking about Edge Delivery, generative AI, and improvements in the Enterprise DAM. But we knew this was part of the roadmap a few years ago.
We also wanted something that we can Go-to-Market quickly.
Something that's secure. And obviously, for everybody who's managing a budget, it has to be cost-efficient. And yeah, from a maintenance standpoint, we want to get some early access to AEM features. Have an ease of maintenance as we work through with it.
And I want to talk about how we went through our enablement journey and the four hurdles that we took in order to get there.
As I said, we chose to implement this as a net new implementation. And obviously that came up with our partner selection as well and the decisions that we made pre and post our partner selection. It is also something that I want to highlight is, it was a journey for us in understanding what are the dos and don'ts of working on the cloud. Because it's something that's often overlooked because you are so used to building solutions on a system that you typically tend to understand, "Okay, this is an AMS based AEM instance, when I migrate over, it's going to function." But the reality of it is not everything would work. And we also have to choose how we went with our implementation. And we chose a purposefully content and an experience fragment-based solution as we looked at it.
And then came a pivot point as we wanted to build and develop. Because I think as we started to be operational on AEM, we got to know that there is a certain amount of control that you have to give up.
We are all used to having ninjas in our team going in and saving the day in the last minute. But that is something that may or may not be possible. So it puts you in a path to really test and verify your solutions before you go live. But the plus side of things is you wake up knowing that what is there on your production system is what you want it to be. We also had to go through refinement in how we built. And this also maps back to our understanding of dos and don'ts of what we did with cloud, and then also understand what works on cloud and what doesn't.
And there is also a thing that I want to highlight here is the decisions that you make in order to build your solutions on AEM on the cloud has a direct impact on how your licensing is structured because of the subscription nature of this product. So it also helps you understand and build solutions the way the product is intended to work for and also the way you planned in your cycle.
The other thing that I want to also highlight here is we've managed to create an operating model that treats this entire application as a product. And our product manager who's unfortunately couldn't be here, has come up with this model that I'm going to go through in a few minutes that essentially helps us build and deliver these experiences as if we are building a product. And that essentially helped us or enabled us to look at this at a more scaled fashion where each and every solution that we're building out is thought out for a future use case.
And now we are in a position where if we choose to and if our marketing partners choose to come on AEM on the cloud, we have strategies to share solutions between programs. We are working on a multi-program strategy that allows us to operate independently but also not duplicate across our organizations.
And yeah, this is the product operating model that we were organizing around, which essentially defines the core experiences that we have enabled for our Customer Experience Business Partners. But it is organized across the stream where the solutions not only cater for customer enablement, engagement, and retention, but they're also capable of being adopted to some of the growth and expansion strategies as well.
This is where we originally started, before we went on AEM on the cloud. And as you could see, it's a very simple page that's probably built on Okta. This is the first pass of what it could look like.
But as we went on to AEM, this that you see at the far end here is a highly personalized portal that is meant for you as you are our customer. Every bit of this application is customized for you, your role, and your account with Workday, so that you are not getting the information that you may or may not need but you're actually receiving all the critical information that your account and your tenant needs and the announcements that you often have to chase.
We saw this earlier as far as the key results are concerned. But once we went live, once we were operational for about a year or so, in the past year, we were able to achieve an average of 30% increase in monthly users.
There was 15% increase in case deflection. Our customers' reliance on support has decreased.
And most importantly, I was able to save 200,000 per year on operational costs.
So a little bit about how we operate. I'm not going to go into the details of how this has been structured. But if anybody's in engineering, this is how hypothetically the operating architecture looks like.
For my fellow engineering nerds, yes, I know we are proxying through AEM. And yes, there is a reason, but essentially, we have structured our model across Experience Manager being the center of our web hosting platform, where we are enabling solutions. But we're also working with our downstream systems as we look at this.
And from a content authoring standpoint, which is another critical factor as with any AEM implementation, we started off with an API-based content approach.
Other programs currently that are operational on AEM currently use the Adobe Page Model, as well as the data topics for our guides.
We chose to go to content fragments and experience fragments so that it puts us into a pathway to leverage edge delivery and as you look at our personalization. And later in the year, we are looking to leverage some of the generative AI capabilities and also start to generate some of our knowledge and support content through an AI.
As I mentioned, today we are on the CX side, we are operating as three separate cloud programs. And we are organizing around a multi-program strategy that's built on some of the core foundational principles of what we're used to when building things on AEM.
We are leveraging connected assets between our programs. We are working out a code sharing model in order to avoid duplication. And we are defining a governance model that covers users, groups, and permissions so that we have some amount of audit as users go across programs. And what we are currently working on is defining a Digital Asset Manager IA and centralizing around the Workday comprehensive taxonomy that marketing already uses. I don't know if anybody attended the IBM session yesterday. I think as we look at, I think Betsy, she's the Head of IBM.com She mentioned this as well, and that's one thing that I do want to highlight is...
You do not want to get into AI without getting your IA done. I think that's essentially one thing that we are focusing on as more and more content gets migrated and starts to live on AEM. How do we define an information architecture? How do we store content on AEM? How do we cache? How do we bring external content within AEM or render it in AEM? These are things that we are working on defining them. And I want to say that that is really critical as you're building through a multi-program strategy.
Right. What's next? This year's big bet for us on the CX side is personalization, where we are turning on Adobe Target. If you go back a few previous slides, the highly customized portal that I showed a glimpse of is largely programmatically driven. And we are taking a step to move towards personalizing with Adobe Target, where we want to create offers in Target. And because of the fact that we chose to go to an Experience Fragment based solution prior to our implementation, it allows us to create some of the static content or export some of our static content directly into Target.
We are working on integrating our CRM data to personalize experiences. And we want to leverage dynamic content personalization. And from here, we will eventually move to connecting our CRM data to our RTCDP. And this is something that Workday already does across our marketing ecosystem. We want to build look-alike models using the AI capabilities of what RTCDP offers, and we want to optimize our personalized offers through Target and avoid any programmatic personalization.
Yes. Right. As you could see, the launch was a foundational investment. We defined an MVP, we went live with an MVP.
We made some investments in order to make a lot of security improvements and architecture improvements. We have created a training and governance model. A customer experience portal that's cared for customers need to be very secure. So as we evolved our application, as new features came into onboard, there was a significant parallel investment that was made to make that application secure.
Today, we are in the process of going global with our customer experience solution, personalizing them. We are integrating this experience with our marketing ecosystem to deliver better value for our prospects and not just customers. We're also implementing a global customer journey tracking, where we want to understand all the touchpoints that a prospect or a customer takes before they eventually get to a point where they either convert or if you're already a customer, when do you reach out to support after you've exhausted all your options. And this information is critical for us in understanding whether the content that we are providing to our customers is actually relevant for them. Because you know when you are going to support in order to ask a question, that means that whatever you are receiving so far is not what you're looking for.
And ultimately, we want to move towards an agentic experience across our CX enablement. On the engineering side, we want to create a modular architecture that's again set up for scale. And we want to continuously test and optimize our experiences as we work.
Three key points that I want to highlight in our journey as we've learned in the past couple of years is when to use and not to use AEM is a critical thing that you want to have in mind. Not every solution that you're trying to enable...
Would be a perfect use case for AEM. And understanding that and making a decision around that is really, really important. And I've also highlighted this earlier where you want to avoid legacy implementation. Follow Adobe's best practices in order to implement...
Whatever the application requires you to do. And lastly, this is something that I clearly, I mean, I originally come from a partner side and I know this. It's really, really important to set an expectation with your solution partner.
I highly recommend having skin in the game, work with their team, collaborate as a unit rather than-- As great as partner ecosystem is, and I stand by it 100%, there is still some amount of, I mean, at least the control freak in me wants to exercise that amount of visibility as we are working with partners. And that's something that has worked really well for us.
And I look at Adobe partnership as also us working with partners. And we've all had our fair share of interactions with Adobe support. Some of them were memorable, some of them were not so memorable. But what we learned in our journey was, are we actually engaging with support the right way? Are we actually talking to them, explaining our problem, or are we voicing our frustration? And fortunately, we did move to ultimate success as Workday. And that allowed us access to Adobe resources who allowed, at least created the opportunity to consolidate the problems that we are experiencing, escalate as needed, and timely report on what's happening and on each other's programs. Because there was a brief period of time where we were so busy with our own implementations that we didn't know what is happening across the other side of the aisle. And we could have taken some of the learnings from there and adopted to our solutions that could have resulted in a better implementation or a quicker resolution to the problem.
Right. With that, moving on to some of the key takeaways.
When we started our planning journey, we started in looking at it from a more modular system state-of-the-art, how can we create content anywhere and deliver that content to our customers. That was our goal when we got there. But now with the advent of generative AI, as you're looking at planning your solutions and implementations, look for what capabilities that you want to enable for your customers, for your users, and plan for that in advance as you're building your implementation.
And again, I cannot emphasize any further.
Being on the cloud requires you to trust that system that it's going to do the things it's supposed to do if things are done right. So there has to be an expectation internally that is set that you cannot do things the old ways once you're on the cloud. You have to be okay to let your engineering team not be able to manipulate things on production, not save the day in the last hour.
But like I said, once it goes through a series of quality control checks before things go to production, and those are there for a reason, and they actually work if you follow them.
And the last thing...
One thing that we've learned in the past couple of years with our implementation is not sit around with it. Because as you build and as Adobe starts recreating or reimagining some of the features or expanding their capabilities, it's important for us to start looking at how do we continuously optimize what we've built for our customers, and how do we learn from what's released, and how do we scale and integrate that within our systems? With that, I'll hand it over. All right. - Thank you, Ravi. - Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. [Music]
