In our April issue of The Shift, we share Adobe Summit 2024 highlights hot off the heels of their Digital Experience Conference held in Las Vegas last week. Attended by over 10,000 individuals representing an ecosystem of clients, creatives, marketers, technologists, complementary tech partners, systems integrators and industry analysts, this conference shed some light on some of the trends VShift is currently tracking. Here are our key take-aways:

1. Artificial Intelligence: Everything Everywhere All at Once
   Just like the Oscar-winning namesake movie, AI is baked into almost every product offering and impacting the everyday work of creative and digital marketing professionals. Firefly, Adobe’s creative generative AI tool, undoubtedly, is changing how creatives develop concepts along with the associated workflow for taking AI-generated content into market. Another game-changing use of AI involves generating brand compliant experimentation pages – at the click of a button – to support campaigns and learn from winning user experiences. It can be a lot to navigate, especially for CMOs—you can read about building brand trust through AI here.

2. Vision Gap: Pragmatically Supporting Your Organization’s Reality
   Adobe’s executive leadership team presented a big vision for seamless integration, mass personalization, streamlined execution and go-to-market effectiveness that can only be fulfilled by optimally resourced and funded organizations. Today’s reality is that organizations have lost headcount and budget. Enterprise-wide digital transformations are effective when technology providers pivot from “do more with more” to “do more with less.” Read about thinking small and pragmatically here.

3. Vendor Lock-In & Interoperability
   Vendor lock-in was a heated topic at the conference, with organizations clamoring for interoperability between Adobe products and non-Adobe technologies. We were particularly interested in learning how Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) has a universal editor and a universal connector feature that allows users to source content from non-Adobe repositories while also providing a decoupled, visual site builder. These concepts show strong composable momentum and an ability to reduce the risk of vendor lock-in. Read about composability here.

To read more of VShift’s thought leadership, check out our Ideas blog.