Adobe Summit Reflections: AI, Edge, & Content Supply Chain

This year’s Adobe Summit in Las Vegas was my first outside Europe. It was my second trip to the world’s entertainment capital. I had been there 15 years prior for 24 hours with an old schoolmate of mine. A man who exists at the more virtuous end on my spectrum of friends and associates. Despite reservations about spending so long in the city, the place really did grow on me over the 5 days I was there. I also managed to get out of the city for some mountain biking near the Red Rock Canyon. But this isn’t a travel blog, we’re here to talk about content, customer experience and Adobe technology.

The first thing which chimed with me was a point Adobe made regarding Generative AI. It’s time to move from toys to tools, they said. I really liked this sentiment. To this, GenAI for content creation went mainstream last year, behind AI applications for coding and certainly for data use cases. The announcements made in Las Vegas really demonstrate a fast evolution within the past 12 months. As part of these changes, Adobe launched GenStudio. GenStudio gives marketeers the ability to create marketing touchpoints with the full support of AI, in the form of Adobe’s Firefly product. This integrates to Workfront facilitating the connection to the briefing information and associated metadata. Core assets can be used from AEM Assets DAM if the product is licensed or stored in GenStudio if not. A standout feature for me is the ability to train Adobe’s AI on your brand guidelines. This is then used to automatically check what has been produced and feedback to the user where content deviates from guidelines. It is great to see that Adobe are thinking about this part of the Content Supply Chain. Where AI enables the production of almost limitless content, the ability to approve content becomes an obvious bottle neck to address.

Adobe are in pole position with respect to realising the promise of end-to-end, AI fuelled Content Supply Chain transformation. For me, this means that technology acts as a copilot across the whole process flow, starting at using insights to drive what should / could be created, all the way through to landing the right experiences in the hands of customers. They already have the core foundational elements of Creative Cloud, Workfront, DAM and now Firefly. One thing they need to achieve strategically is simplicity. An efficient and effective Content Supply Chain does not come about by adding more links to the chain. Adobe’s success will come through adding shared GenAI and workflow services across all their tools as well as enabling content to flow by seamless connectivity between the steps, and applications involved. To this very point of seamless connectivity, Workfront activities will now be available directly within the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). This promises greater governance and simplicity around activating site experience changes from Workfront, as a central task and planning tool, end-to-end.

My second area of interest was Adobe Experience Manager Edge Delivery Services (EDS). The proposition has moved forward significantly in the past few months. Historically EDS has been positioned with the following key benefits.

1.       Site performance. EDS offers significant benefits with respect to how pages are rendered and optimised for speed. Increasingly important for success.

2.       Document based authoring. The ability to author content for websites within documents, such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

3.       Engineering simplification. Greater developer flexibility with respect to support for common web application development frameworks and simpler code deployment options.  

In my opinion, document-based authoring is not the best option for all scenarios. Good for simple copy rich pages and where the layout doesn’t need much alteration. And yes, some people will simply prefer authoring within Word and Google Docs. But AEM already has, arguably, the best interface for authoring web pages in the industry. It’s versatile, visual and (when well set up) intuitive. Much of this is lost in the document authoring model. So, Adobe have two updates which were music to my ears. Firstly, the launch of a new authoring interface, AEM Universal Editor. As well as bringing UI improvements, this offers consistent management for all forms of AEM content, headful and headless. It will also allow developers to utilize virtually any framework or site architecture of their choice, which in turn means full authoring support for sites built for Edge Delivery Services. Through Universal Editor and Edge Delivery Services, Adobe are bringing next generation services to business users and end customers alike.  

We then move on to consider the general direction of travel from Adobe. The way EDS renders pages for speed aligns with industry innovations in rendering, caching and edge side processing. Adobe are saying that they are on a drive to introduce greater innovation and simplification into the underlying AEM technology stack. Focusing on modernisation and having a lighter weight application for engineers to manage. EDS is leading this transformation across the AEM ecosystem. Further to this EDS is also being used as an integrated front-end for Commerce and Forms. By using open standards and following principles of composability, EDS should provide the flexibility for engineers to innovate and build performant experiences using both data and content services from across the Adobe ecosystem as well as 3rd party systems, data sources and APIs.

I would though, like to finish on the technology innovation which impressed me the most during my trip to Vegas. Despite all the AI, Content Supply Chain innovations and even the new Sphere Entertainment Centre, the winner for me were the curved escalators in Caesars Palace. Yes, you heard that right, a set of escalators which run in sweeping arcs. I have since looked them up and found that they are 20 years old, built by Mitsubishi Electric. Shows that great innovation and engineering can have an enduring impact. Well done to them. Well done to Adobe. And well done to all the attendees and speakers who made Summit 2024 an enjoyable and edifying experience.