Adobe unleashes an army of AI agents on sales and marketing teams
by Mike Wheatley · SiliconANGLEAdobe Inc. is taking aim at its rival Salesforce Inc. in the customer experience department with the launch of a new tool for orchestrating artificial intelligence agents within its flagship Adobe Experience platform.
It’s joined by a suite of highly customized “Experience Platform Agents” that can perform various tasks relating to customer experience, such as optimizing websites, content production, refining target audiences and more. Adobe debuted the Adobe Experience Agent Orchestrator tool at Adobe Summit, its annual user conference that showcases the latest capabilities within its digital experience platform.
Though the company is best known for its creative tools such as Photoshop, it also rivals Salesforce and others in the customer relationship management industry. The Adobe Experience Platform is a suite of tools designed to aid in customer experience management, acting as a centralized portal through which companies can store all of their customer data. It also provides tools that companies can use to leverage this data and create more personalized experiences for their customers, while providing a comprehensive view of their preferences and previous interactions.
The Adobe Experience platform is home to a ton of customer information, and that makes it ideal fodder for AI agents, which are more advanced artificial intelligence systems that can perform tasks autonomously on behalf of users, with minimal supervision. Adobe says AI agents are quickly becoming essential to all marketing teams, because customer experiences are becoming more dynamic and personalized than ever before. Simply put, humans can’t keep up, and they need AI agents to help automate much of the grunt work.
In this regard, Adobe is following the lead of Salesforce, which dominates the customer relationship management software industry, and has already released dozens of its own AI agents, as well as its own orchestration platform.
The Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator can be thought of as a portal for managing multiple AI agents that can tap into enormous volumes of information stored in the company’s customer data platforms. By training AI agents on a customer service-oriented knowledge base, which also captures the interplay between an organization’s data, content and workflows, it can dramatically enhance their reasoning capabilities. That makes them much more dynamic and capable than traditional AI-based assistants, the company said.
AI agents unleashed
Of course, there’s little point in having an Agent Orchestrator without having any AI agents to orchestrate, which explains why Adobe also announced its first 10 out-of-the-box “Experience Agents,” saying they’re ready to be deployed in a matter of minutes.
According to Adobe, these AI agents can perform various work-related tasks using a wide range of its tools, including the Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Journey Analytics platforms.
They include an account qualification agent that’s designed to evaluate and advance new sales leads in business-to-business markets, and an audience agent (below) that can assist marketers by analyzing cross-channel segment data to identify and optimize high-value audience segments for marketing teams.
In addition, there’s a data insights agent that can analyze multiple customer signals from across the organization and surface valuable information and trends from them, and a data engineering agent that performs tedious tasks relating to cleansing, integrating and securing customer and sales information. The experimentation agent can help teams responsible for creating personalized marketing initiatives by hypothesizing and simulating new ideas and conducting impact analysis, while the journey agent assists by orchestrating cross-channel experiences.
It almost goes without saying that there’s a content production agent to help in generating marketing materials based on a customer brief, and there are yet more AI agents tasked with site optimization (below) and workflow optimization. Lastly, the product adviser agent helps with brand engagement by surfacing product recommendations to customers based on their preferences and previous purchases.
What’s significant about Adobe’s latest AI play is that it shows the company is getting more focused on using the technology to drive business outcomes, Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE.
“In the past year its bigger AI announcements typically had much more of a B2C-focused, “Big Bang” appeal that was aimed at making headlines,” the analyst said. “Now, Adobe is doubling-down on a new view of AI being applied to everything from account engagement to qualification, not just to understand the complexities of B2B buying networks, but also to personalize and contextualize each stage of the complex B2B discovery journey.”
As for the new agents, Miller said she’s most excited about the new Sites Optimizer agent, which analyzes real-time traffic data to predict and diagnose issues and recommend fixes that can be implemented immediately.
“This is a great example of where AI is being applied in a behind the scenes in a way that can drive massive results,” Miler said.
The Brand Concierge
Saving the best for last, Adobe also unveiled a new Brand Concierge, which is said to be the first AI agent that can interact with consumers on behalf of brands across multiple channels. According to Adobe, it represents the evolution of transactional chatbots and web-based agents, delivering a richer experience that draws on each company’s unique brand attributes to create a personalized, conversational experience for every customer.
Using the Adobe Experience Agent Orchestrator, companies will be able to configure and manage their brand concierge to help guide customers through every step of their journey, starting with exploration and ending with their purchases. In other words, it’s like having a personal digital sales assistant that’s ready to help and advise consumers at every step.
In addition to helping consumers, the Brand Concierge can also be invaluable to business-to-business sales teams, which often find themselves much harder pressed to close on deals. To help them, Brand Concierge will go beyond providing general product information and deliver original, tailored content for each customer based on their existing account relationships, while also handling tasks such as booking follow-up meetings.
Adobe isn’t stopping with its own AI agents either. It also announced a new AI Agent Partner Ecosystem where its customers can draw on the help of third-party agents while managing them within the Agent Orchestrator. Its launch partners include the likes of Acxiom Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., RainFocus Software Inc., SAP SE and Workday Inc. They provide access to AI agents across customer service, enterprise resource planning, human resources, collaboration, productivity and data management.