M+E Connections

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas March 27 to disclose additional details about the Open Data Initiative (ODI), including a new approach to publishing that the companies said will enable enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) functionality.

ODI was announced by Adobe, Microsoft and SAP at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando last year, where they said the new initiative was designed to enable their customers to derive more value from their data to help companies transform their customer experiences via real-time insights delivered from the cloud.

“I’m very excited about ODI,” Nadella told Adobe Summit attendees, explaining: “The most important asset that everyone in this room has is the data that you have, which is yours. Except it’s locked up sometimes in silos. The partnership that we formed with SAP [was designed to] unlock this data and really help each of you enrich this data.”
Nadella also cited 5G streaming and mixed reality as two of the most significant new technologies.

Out of the gate, ODI was focused on enhancing interoperability between the applications and platforms of Adobe, Microsoft and SAP through a common data model with data stored in a customer-chosen data lake, according to the companies. That unified data lake was intended to allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services, the companies said.

To improve that process, the three companies now plan to deliver in the coming months a new approach for publishing that they said will be “enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, activated through” Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer’s data lake. That “will enable a new level of AI and machine learning enrichment to garner new insights and better serve customers,” the companies said in an announcement the same day that Narayen and Nadella spoke during the second Adobe Summit keynote.

Unilever, a mutual customer and one of the initial brands to express support and excitement about the ODI, announced its intention to simplify a previously complex business outcome based on these data connections. At Adobe Summit, Unilever demonstrated how it plans to bring together disparate customer, product and resource data and use AI-driven insights to help reduce its plastic packaging and encourage consumer recycling. “By eliminating the silos of data, Unilever will be able to tie inventory and plastics data into Adobe data to enhance customer experiences and encourage participation,” the companies said in the announcement.

“To accelerate development of the initiative,” Adobe, Microsoft and SAP also announced plans to convene a Partner Advisory Council that will include more than a dozen companies, including Cognizant, which — like Adobe, Microsoft Azure and SAP — is a member of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA).

Also at Adobe Summit, more than 16,000 attendees received an up-close look at the latest technology being developed in Adobe’s R&D labs, including AI, mixed reality and voice. Hosted by actress Mindy Kaling, Adobe’s “Summit Sneaks” offered a look into the future of Adobe innovation. In its eighth year, Sneaks gives Adobe engineers, researchers, product managers and UX designers the opportunity to submit proposals for a chance to present their work at Adobe Summit. Audience favorites then have the potential to become actual Adobe product offerings, such as Smart Layout in Adobe Experience Manager and Attribution IQ in Adobe Analytics.

This year’s Summit Sneaks provided an augmented reality (AR) demonstration in which an airline mobile app is equipped with an AR feature showing “AR zones” on an interactive terminal map. Customers can walk up to a bookstore and see custom promotional offers as AR objects that can then be instantly redeemed via a digital wallet, Adobe said. To help brands “accelerate” their AR offerings, Adobe also showed how “tight integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud can deliver the technology backend to quickly build and scale experiences in AR,” it said.

Adobe also presented new technology at Summit Sneaks that applied Adobe Sensei’s AI and ML technology’s deep learning capabilities to predict future actions, and also showed how documents can be enhanced with AI and voice.