Adobe Summit 2023 Recap

This year's Summit was as good as ever! As usual, there were hundreds of sessions covering every imaginable topic. However, there were a few themes that were new this year and deserve special mention.

Generative AI

Adobe's implementation of GenAI comes in the form of their Firefly toolkit (currently in beta) that takes in a textual description of an image and generates artificial images that match the provided description. For example, you could ask Firefly to create a "flat design logo for a towing company featuring a tow truck using grey and orange and primary colors". And Firefly will produce several images to choose from and tweak.

You can customize things like the aspect ratio, content type (photo, graphic, or art), styles, color and tone, lighting, and composition to create truly custom and unique content. Additionally, Firefly can also generate text effects. 

Features under development include vector recoloring, text to brush (create custom Photoshop brushes), training Firefly's machine learning (ML) algorithms on your own proprietary content, and monetization for users using their content to train Firefly. 

Competing products include Midjourney. Firefly has some catching up to do but has the advantage of OOTB integration with other Adobe products such as Photoshop. 

CDP and Next-Gen Products

It was about ten years ago that I decided to build on my Java/Javascript background and move into the Adobe space. Since then, I have been continuously impressed with how aggressively Adobe pursues the development, acquisition, and integration of products. 

Their product roadmaps are always going at warp speed. While Adobe's legacy products like AEM, Target, Analytics, Launch, and Campaign continue to evolve at breakneck speed, next-gen products such as AEMaaCS, AEP (platform/edge), CJA (analytics), OD (optimization/personalization), AJO (campaign with OD), JO are being built (and implemented) to directly feed off the CDP (data lake) for real-time personalization at scale. 

All of these products are still evolving. For example, CJA will be adding audience sharing and derived fields in the coming months.

The innovation never stops. Nor does the learning. 

Universal (Visual) Editor

Adobe unveiled an editor-as-a-service that allows (with stack-agnostic custom coding) for pages to be edited from external applications such a Microsoft Word and Excel. 

The idea is to pair it with a headless implementation of AEM. But authors who don't wish to be trained on how to author in headful AEM could also avail of the facility. 

The other UE value-proposition is that content to be edited could be sourced from sources other than AEM. 

Questions remain about how permissions will be integrated and whether publishing will still have to be initiated from AEM. 

UE is not to be confused with Content Fragment Editor (CFE) wherein the author cares only about the content, but not about the layout.

Mix Modeler

Adobe recently rolled out a Sensei-powered, self-serve solution that measures marketing campaigns and optimizes planning holistically across paid, earned, and owned channels. 

Marketers trying to answer questions like "How will a 10% change to paid search budgets impact bookings" can now leverage Mix Modeler to augment Experience Cloud data (analytics) with new and essential summarized datasets like marketing spend, walled garden, offsite engagement, and exogenous data. 

Figma

With some legal details pending and the focus of the conference being on Experience Cloud (rather than Creative Cloud) there was little to no mention of the much anticipated acquisition and integration with Figma, which is likely to bring an end to the product roadmap for Adobe XD.

Sessions

Some of the best sessions included Red Hat's discussion on CDP selection. I really enjoyed their analogy of store bought cookies (third party cookies) and homemade cookies (first party cookies). 

The Elevance (formerly Anthem) presentation on data-driven healthcare experiences blew me away with their step-by-step discussion on how to learn from data and push the boundaries of the tools (AJO, CJA) and the use of HIPAA-ready Healthcare Shield (and AEP add-on designed to overcome AT/AA shortcomings). 

The day-long immersion sessions I attended on CDP and CJA were also extremely useful. 

Potpourri

In closing, I'd like to share a few miscellaneous learnings from this year's Summit.

I met an Adobe client (major car manufacturer) who assembles pages outside AEM and then uses Workfront Fusion to integrate with AEM. An interesting idea worth exploring further (also see UE above). 

During the lab on automating AEP deployments, we learned that Postman Newman is a command-line tool for running collections. So, for example, when implementing the CDP you could prototype all your feeds before wrapping them up into something more robust using Python or Java.

Adobe's App Builder can be used to extend content fragments (CFs) to fetch external data or add UI elements.

Further Reading

I'll leave you with a couple of interesting blog posts I learned about at the Summit.

Why the Death of Sessions is a Myth


This post was also syndicated on One North's website.

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