The digital landscape is evolving faster than ever with the integration of AI. From helping you in initiating a conversation with prompts to transforming how companies approach content creation, customer experience, and commerce, AI is everywhere. With the rise of new technologies, businesses must adapt to remain competitive and effective in their strategies. Adobe’s State of Digital Customer Experience report that was released earlier this year, revealed that 57% of Indian consumers would choose an AI-enabled tool or service over human interaction. Furthermore, the report also revealed that the global average of consumers who would choose an AI enabled tool or service over human interaction is 39% while for the APAC region, it is 48%. Despite this huge demand among consumers, only 15% Indian brands are leveraging AI to enhance their customer experience as compared to 18% brands on a global forefront, the report reveals.
In conversation with BrandWagon Online, Loni Stark, vice president, strategy and product, Adobe, talks of how Adobe works towards embedding AI deeply into their operations to enhance creativity, streamline document productivity, and drive digital transformation. From integrating AI into content creation tools and commerce solutions to committing to ethical AI practices, Adobe is seemingly setting new standards in the industry. Loni delves into leveraging AI to redefine content creation, the impact of recent developments like Content Hub with Experience Manager Assets, Adobe’s approach to ethical AI and the challenges the company faces in the Indian market among others. (Edited Excerpts)
Adobe has been increasingly focusing on AI in its recent work. How does AI fit into Adobe’s strategic vision, and how is the company working to redefine the narrative that AI is predominantly associated with tech giants like Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft?
At Adobe, we align our AI vision with our mission to help people and companies be more creative, drive document productivity, and facilitate digital transformation. We use AI to support these areas by focusing on the customer experience and creating content at scale through three key aspects.
First, there’s the data. We have rich data sets from creativity, documents, and customer experiences, which allow us to train our AI models with high-quality assets designed for commercial viability and professional quality. For instance, I recently spoke with a large financial institution in India that wanted to use generative AI to create content at scale. They had many questions about ensuring the content generated was commercially viable and copyright-safe, which underscores the importance of responsible AI.
Second, we invest heavily in our custom models, with deep expertise in imaging, vector, and video spaces. Our Firefly technology leverages this expertise to enhance our offerings.
Third, we focus on integrating this technology seamlessly into the tools people use. This ensures a smooth workflow in the enterprise, where employees can create personalised content while maintaining proper reviews, approvals, and governance.
In the consumer world, we see 9 billion generations of images and videos, much of which happens through interfaces like Creative Cloud.
With Adobe’s focus on AI, how your custom models contribute to enhancing customer experience (CX). While discussions about CX often centre around chatbots and WhatsApp integrations, Adobe isn’t a company like Meta. How does Adobe define CX, and how do you utilise AI to improve it?
At Adobe, we’re really leveraging AI to enhance customer experience (CX) in some exciting ways. Our custom models, like Firefly, play a big role here. They’re designed to help companies create content that really aligns with their brand voice by training on their specific assets. This means the content produced stays true to their brand, which is crucial for maintaining a consistent customer experience.
For enterprise clients, AI brings a lot to the table. Take Photoshop, for instance—users can now use AI to add fun elements, like a dinosaur, to their images or easily adjust the aspect ratio and extend images seamlessly. In Document Cloud, AI helps by summarising and querying PDF documents, making it quick and easy to extract and reference information. And with Adobe Experience Cloud, our real-time customer data platform, the AI Assistant helps users pull insights from data that used to be accessible only through manual interactions.
We’ve also introduced content variation capabilities, which is a game-changer for companies looking to generate and personalise large volumes of content, like images or text, for their websites. AI makes it easier to test and optimise these experiences, allowing companies to scale their personalization efforts efficiently.
Overall, our AI tools are all about boosting efficiency and providing real-time insights. They help companies deliver more personalised and relevant experiences, whether it’s for marketing or product content.
Adobe has been investing heavily in both commerce and content. How does this investment intersect with the deployment of AI in building commerce solutions?
In our case, one of the key areas where AI is making a significant impact in commerce is merchandising. When we think about personalised marketing, it’s not just about tailoring messages but also about putting products into the right context. For example, if someone is looking at running shoes, but they’re more into hiking, we want to showcase those shoes in a way that resonates with their hiking interests. Similarly, a city jogger might see those shoes in an urban setting. This contextualisation helps consumers feel a stronger connection with the product, which can lead to higher conversion rates.
Our Firefly technology plays a big role here. It allows for advanced object placement and generative capabilities, which means we can create rich, immersive content—like videos and personalised images—that aligns with the consumer’s interests. For Adobe Commerce, this means connecting product SKUs with high-quality content to enhance the shopping experience. We’re focused on helping companies grow their digital and e-commerce channels by providing tools that support creating engaging assets, generating content variations, and ensuring a smooth review and approval process.
During a recent trip to India, I found that some companies are particularly ambitious, aiming to double or even triple their digital growth. Our AI-driven solutions in Adobe Commerce, along with our content supply chain capabilities, are designed to support these kinds of goals. By making it easier to present physical products and properties in a compelling way, we help businesses reach a global audience and drive their growth effectively.
On Content Hub with Experience Manager Assets, how does this new development change the scenario for your consumers?
AEM Assets is an enterprise digital asset management solution used by leading Fortune 50 organisations worldwide. It helps companies like Under Armour manage and control their assets with metadata, making it easier to find and utilise those assets.
Content Hub expands this capability by making these assets accessible to a broader range of users across the organisation. It offers an intuitive interface that integrates with Adobe Express and Firefly’s generative AI. As more employees and partners need to create and find high-quality digital assets for marketing, merchandising, service, and sales, having access to these assets becomes crucial for serving customers effectively. We are providing these solutions to enterprises to support their needs in this evolving digital landscape.
Adobe GenAI, enables marketing organisations to swiftly plan, create, manage, activate, and measure on-brand, high-performance content. How do you think this will impact agency behaviour and influencer marketing, especially considering that a significant amount of content today is created by influencers?
Adobe Express is already popular among influencers for creating cool images and videos. Gen Studio takes this a step further by allowing businesses to ensure that all their employees and partner agencies can create content using generative AI. This helps marketers scale up their content production more effectively. As social influencers continue to impact brand marketing, brands need tools that can help them generate larger quantities of content for social media, ads, and other areas quickly. Gen Studio enables them to do just that with the efficiency of generative AI.
Given the risks associated with AI and the evolving regulatory landscape—such as the regulations in Europe and the fact that India is still developing its policies—what is Adobe’s stance on ethical AI? How are you ensuring clarity and adherence to ethical guidelines when deploying AI, especially as specific regulations are still being established?
At Adobe, we take the ethical aspects of technologies like GenAI very seriously. A recent study in the Indian market revealed that 57% of consumers appreciate AI-assisted experiences, which is notably higher than the global average of 39%. However, there’s also a strong call for transparency about when AI is being used.
To address these concerns, Adobe is involved in several key initiatives. For example, we are part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a technical consortium that includes companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Sony. This group is working on developing standards to authenticate digital content and disclose its origins.
We also offer Content Credentials, a free, open-source technology that functions like a “nutrition label” for digital content. It helps users see which parts of the content have been created or altered using AI.
Additionally, the Content Authenticity Initiative, which includes prominent members such as Press Trust of India, The Hindu, Nvidia, Nikon, Canon, and BBC, is focused on ensuring that digital imaging technologies maintain content authenticity. This initiative helps media companies ensure their images are not altered or misrepresented elsewhere, preserving trust in their content.
These efforts are crucial for maintaining transparency and trust in AI-generated and modified content. The Content Authenticity Initiative, for example, has grown to over 3,000 members since it started, showing just how important and supported these efforts are.
Are there any challenges you foresee in the Indian market, and what are your plans to overcome them?
One big challenge we see in the Indian market is scaling effectively. Companies like Tata Capital and HDFC have highlighted the need to manage a vast population and find cost-effective solutions.
To tackle this, we’re investing heavily in the content supply chain to help companies scale their personalisation efforts. This means not only automating content but also using generative AI to enhance content creation and make it easier to find. In a market like India, delivering exceptional experiences at scale is key, and our solutions are specifically designed to meet these needs.