Adobe Experience Platform Optimizes ‘Customer Journey’ with Cloud, AI and Real-Time Data

Adobe is looking to improve customer experience, by infusing apps and workflows with real-time data and intelligence. The idea is to provide a personalized customer journey.  IDN takes a look at the just-released Adobe Experience Platform.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: Adobe, AI, cloud, customer journey, data integration real-time,

Adobe is looking to improve customer experience, by infusing apps and workflows with real-time data and intelligence. The idea behind Adobe Experience Platform is to provide a satisfying personalized customer journey – in real time.   

 

Adobe’s AEP is an open and extensible cloud-based platform pulls together data in real-time from across the enterprise based on customer’s profiles. To further enrich customer experience, AEP also is designed to take advantage of the coming Adobe Sensei’s AI and machine learning capabilities.

 

“Every enterprise today is struggling to handle the massive explosion of data that is being driven by rich customer experiences, multiple devices, and IoT. Adobe is offering Adobe Experience Platform to bring together all data sources from across the enterprise and rationalize the data for real-time actionability,” Adobe CTO and executive vice president Abhay Parasnis said in a statement. 

 

In specific, Adobe Experience Platform collects and processes real-time data from multiple sources and organizes the data into Experience Data Models (XDM).  AEP is designed to work at superscale and high-speed, clocking a rate as high as tens of millions of events per second, he added.

"Solving today’s data challenges requires a cloud-based, hyper-scale architecture with a rich data pipeline and real-time customer profile powered by AI and machine learning," Parasnis said.  

 

Under the covers AEP provides these features and benefits: 

  • A rich data pipeline and semantics: AEP is built with a rich data pipeline from multiple sources that enriches real-time customers profile. It also provides a robust set of tools that are natively-integrated to ensure compliance with current regulations and policies controlling the management of data (e.g. GDPR, etc.) 
  • Real-time personalization at scale: AEP also powers Adobe’s new real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP), which combines data to activate real-time customer profiles across multiple channels to aid the ‘customer journey’ with intelligent decisions and segmentation.
  • Intelligent decisions enable real-time actionability: More intelligence for the ‘customer journey’ is powered by Adobe Sensei, which leverages predefined data-driven operational best practices, AI and BI for real-time decisions and actions.
  • An open platform and robust ecosystem: AEP’s open platform is powered by a common semantic data model to standardize and organize all data, intelligent tools and services to create new experience applications and a broad industry ecosystem to help brands scale.

 

 

AEP also works with Adobe’s latest AI capabilities, Adobe Sensei AI Services. Available in beta in AEP, Adobe Sensei provides the intelligence layer to connect data and content — ensuring brands consistently deliver the right message on the right channel at the right time. 

 

A thoughtful Adobe blog post from  Anil Kamath, an Adobe Fellow and data scientist explains the link between ‘customer journey’ and AI.

For any company, long-term success is built on consistently making the right call in everyday decisions that affect the customer experience. Picking the right course of action has never been more difficult, with customer journeys becoming increasingly hard to understand as people move between multiple digital and physical worlds.

While advances in AI have provided isolated signals and novel insights, it has yet to power real decision-making that improves every customer experience with a brand—until now. Already, Adobe is unveiling the next generation of Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning technology.

Features across Adobe Experience Cloud, from Anomaly Detection to Smart Tags, have already enabled marketers, data scientists and others to intelligently automate cumbersome processes and uncover better insights. Adobe’s new AI services are an industry-first and will further elevate the role of AI in the enterprise, going beyond novel feature implementations to empowering businesses to make mission-critical decisions much better and faster.

Among the coming Adobe Sensei’s AI services are:

  • Customer.ai for engagement and retention: Customer.ai in Adobe Sensei will let brands accurately uncover specific segments of users and target each with the right marketing campaign. This will drive decision-making on specific brand experiences that help retain users while at the same time, targeting happy subscribers with upsell services. A membership site, for example, could sue smarter retention scoring to determine which individuals might be happiest – and which ones could soon cancel their membership.
  • Journey.ai for ‘customer journey’ orchestration: Journey.ai gives brands a means to orchestrate journeys across millions of users. Adobe’s Kamath notes that “customers engage with brand messages every day and across different channels like email and social. The fight to acquire and retain customers is won in milliseconds by sending the right messages, at the exact right times.”   To deliver these benefits, Journey.ai is constantly analyzing behavioral data and activating brand experiences at the optimal times. It will enable a retailer, for instance, to orchestrate different paths for longtime customers versus early prospects, he said.
  • Attribution.ai for understanding impact: With Attribution.ai, brands can now see the conversion impact driven by owned, earned and paid media across the full customer journey, and make informed resourcing decisions.  Kamath underscored how AI helps stakeholders better allocate their limited resources.  “Key decisions around resource and marketing investments can only be made through understanding the real impact of channels and campaigns. Much of this is still done with blinders on, with outsized focus on the first and last touch with a customer.”  With Attribute.ai, a hotel chain, for example, could see the influence of a video campaign on website bookings and expand the program more broadly, he added.

 

Major consumer brands, including Home Depot, Verizon Wireless, and Sony Interactive Entertainment are using AEP to deliver a real-time experience to clients and activate insights across Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.




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