Expert Q&A: Adobe AI, Express, Summit & More

We recently spoke with two of our Adobe experts, Hanna Abramovich, Director of Technology Solutions, and Venu Kanduri, Head of Platform Growth in North America, to get their thoughts on this year’s Adobe Summit, Adobe’s work with AI, Adobe Express and its other new products. We also discussed how EPAM is uniquely positioned to help our customers leverage Adobe products and solutions.

At Adobe Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke a lot about generative artificial intelligence (AI). How do you see Adobe using AI to improve its offering for customers?

Venu Kanduri
Generative AI will have a greater influence on every aspect of marketing and customer experience. AI will help marketing and content teams deliver accurate and personalized experiences. Adobe’s focus and investment in generative AI will help brands accelerate the processes of planning, designing, executing, analyzing and optimizing for the entire customer engagement life cycle.

Hanna Abramovich
It was great to see Adobe staying competitive and aligned to other vendors by embedding AI in its products. And not just embedding it under the hood but bringing in the generative AI concept into its products in general. For example, Adobe’s AI art generator, Adobe Firefly, can be integrated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) assets to help summarize and generate content or images. 

An example of how generative AI fits into all Adobe experiences in various stages. 

Adobe recently announced the release of Adobe Express for enterprises. How will this product innovation benefit customers?

HA
Adobe Express is a rebranded product previously known as Adobe Spark. Essentially, it is the Creative Cloud for non-designers. It provides an easy-to-use, template-based experience plus extensive image and video editing capabilities for any user. Adobe Express will soon be embedded as an asset editor in AEM Assets. The tool will allow us to provide a lot more support to customers who do not have a creative team. 

What new Adobe product innovations and enhancements are you most excited about in 2023?

HA
One thing I am very excited about is Adobe’s new connector that enables bidirectional integration between Adobe Commerce and Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). Connecting these platforms together provides a 360-degree view of the customer and a real-time customer data platform (CDP). It even integrates eCommerce functionality, enabling transactions to directly flow into AEP. Also, having this connector available out of the box (OOTB) from Adobe means customers will not need to build a custom integration.

Additionally, it’s great to see the evolution of AEM. The platform now supports more generic content management services, which enables it to connect content across multiple repositories. This will allow customers who do not want to implement new technology to still be able to edit content in existing toolsets, such as Google Drive, SharePoint and others. This is a great offering; although it is not for every customer, it is important for Adobe to be able to provide this option.

How is EPAM taking its learnings from Adobe Summit and applying them to our work for our customers?

HA
One thing I learned, and I am going to apply, is related to customer data platforms. We learned how to automate the deployment process for AEP. Adobe Summit provided me the opportunity to “go under the hood” with Adobe experts to see how they are deploying AEP and what blueprints they are using. I will definitely be using these sets of scripts for deployment with our customers.

Another huge benefit of Adobe Summit was being able to discuss Adobe products and questions directly with Adobe specialists in the Community Pavilion. For example, I was able to ask the Adobe team of experts my questions in person about an active support ticket I had open with a customer. Through this discussion, we were able to resolve the ticket right there at the event.

VK
EPAM will leverage its learnings from Adobe Summit to train EPAM Adobe experts on new product features, build POC and POV to help increase product adoption and assess product enhancements and evangelize them with customers.

What separates EPAM’s Adobe practice from others?

HA
EPAM’s extensive team of engineers across platforms and industries gives us a unique skillset to help customers across products and platforms, even outside of Adobe. Our team is also able to work directly with Adobe on improving their products and creating enhancements that we know will directly benefit our customers.

VK
EPAM’s Adobe practice brings a unique combination of in-depth Adobe product expertise, future-proof solution approach that leverages OOTB features, delivery excellence and continuous innovation. These four principles, backed by our global pool of Adobe resources collaborating with a larger ecosystem of EPAMers, make our Adobe practice unique and make us a trusted advisor for our customers.