Elevating customer experiences

Please tell us about LEAP participation this year.

At LEAP, we have officially announced the opening of our regional headquarters in Riyadh, which will serve the whole Middle East region. This is an important milestone in our journey and will accelerate our growth.

We’ve been doing business with several private and public organizations in the Middle East for the last 20 years. In the Kingdom, specifically, we’ve been working with the Saudi Tourism Authority and STC. We have also announced a strategic partnership with Riyadh Air at this event. They have an ambition to create the most innovative airline in the industry globally, and to do that they have chosen the best technology partner they can find, which is Adobe.

As I mentioned, we have been conducting business in the region for many years, but now is the time for us to forge closer relationships with our customers. When we look at the rapid pace of change and innovation, the Kingdom is home to some of the most pioneering projects we’ve encountered. As a global player collaborating with renowned brands such as Nike and Coca-Cola, we are witnessing world-leading ambition and the rapid evolution of projects in the digital space here.

We have a significant partner ecosystem in the region as well. We are partnering on the Riyadh Air project with IBM, and we collaborate closely with PwC, Deloitte, Accenture, Microsoft, and AWS. This ecosystem is crucial to us. However, we don’t want to rely solely on them, so we decided to have a direct presence in the region. There are numerous disruptive brands and organizations here striving to be at the forefront of technology. We aim to assist them in leveraging the benefits of our portfolio centered around GenAI. We are a major player in the GenAI space and excel at helping brands become leaders in their industries.

One significant topic for us is addressing the challenge of achieving personalization at scale in the realm of customer experience. However, our investment here is not just about the technology; it is also about our ability to help develop the talent pool in the region as well, as we have creative tools that are accessible to everyone.

How is Adobe leveraging GenAI in its product portfolio?

First of all, we have been in the AI and ML space for over ten years, so this is nothing new to us. We are one of the early players and we offer ready-to-use, robust use cases. You should check out Firefly, our creative GenAI model family. Firefly helps creators accelerate their work and assists them with content creation. It operates on a text-to-prompt approach, where instead of painting, you express what you want to achieve, and you’re provided with a plethora of options and possibilities that foster creation.

We see GenAI as a catalyst for boosting both creativity and productivity. A significant challenge facing our customers today is the exponential growth of content. In fact, a recent study we conducted revealed that 88 percent of brands confirmed their content creation has tripled over the last two years. This trend is expected to persist over the next two years, with growth potentially reaching 5x or 10x. It’s akin to a hockey stick trajectory.

To cope with the explosion of content, Gen AI will serve as a facilitator and enabler for creating content at scale, not just from an ideation standpoint but all the way to the ability to accelerate intelligent workflows. This will leverage data and content to personalize the consumer experience in real time. We are extremely excited right now because our use cases around GenAI are widely adopted. Firefly, which we announced about a year ago, has already generated four and a half billion images through its GenAI capabilities.

We stand out in the GenAI space by addressing some of the major challenges. One is the identity of content and preventing misinformation. We follow ethical AI principles rooted in responsibility, transparency, and accountability. This is the core of our DNA.

We were among the first to rally the industry around the Content Authenticity Initiative, a coalition of about 2000 organizations worldwide aimed at digital content provenance. When we talk to brands, their number one concern is how they can use content safely. We address that concern, and all of our GenAI offerings are commercially safe to use because we train our models based on our assets. Adobe Stock is our own image bank, which is one of the richest in the world.

If you’re an enterprise marketer or a digital leader, you would want to use GenAI as a copilot to create more intelligent workflows and develop content and personalization at scale. Most brands face this challenge. Right now, it’s good to have content and data, but without velocity, it’s pointless because consumers today expect a real-time, meaningful experience. So, we believe today that we have entered the era of customer experience, where you cannot solely dominate your market based on how good your product is. That’s a prerequisite. You’re going to need to differentiate based on customer experience, which will be the key to sustainable competitive advantage.