Adobe’s new AEP AI Assistant is here to help brands master customer data and outreach

Back in 2019, which now seems like an age ago thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and various other global events, Adobe launched the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), a real-time customer experience management (CXM) solution designed for enterprises that wanted to manage and use massive amounts of customer data in real time when creating marketing, outreach, promotional and ad campaigns — especially the new standard in marketing and advertising: personalized communications, where the product includes a specific user’s name or other information (in compliance with laws and standards).

At the time, the AEP had already been beta tested for several months by large brands including Best Buy, Home Depot, Verizon Wireless, and Sony Interactive.

But a lot has changed since then in marketing and advertising technology, namely, the advent of generative AI, which marketers can now use to not only sift through the data using conversational queries, but can also create content and perform actions on their behalf.

So today, Adobe is launching arguably the biggest update to the AEP since the tool first went generally available: the AEP AI Assistant, which is essentially a gen AI chatbot hooked up to the AEP and an enterprise’s storehouse of advertising and customer data, brand assets, content collateral (at their direction).

As a result, the AEP AI Assistant seeks to answer most questions a marketer might have about their data, deliver insights within seconds, and create personalized content automatically at the user’s direction.

The AEP AI Assistant was first shown off at Adobe’s annual conference Summit in Las Vegas in March 2024 alongside other major Adobe software updates, but is now rolling out over the coming weeks to all AEP AI Assistant users.

What AEP AI Assistant does

Some of the kinds of questions AEP AI Assistant can answer, according to Adobe, include “How do I  build an audience segment? What is an identity map? How often is this audience segment used?” and “Where is this data filing instruction used so I can label it properly?”

These questions don’t just deliver text responses — the Assistant can actually bring up audience segments and features within the AEP tool, including identifying so-called “high value” customers and the optimal time to re-engage with them. See an example of this in the demo video Adobe provided below:

AEP AI Assistant can answer these questions even for non-technical users without any knowledge or use of structured query language (SQL).

Furthermore, AEP AI Assistant is hooked directly up to Adobe’s AI image generation model Firefly, and as such, can be asked to create entire marketing assets on demand, such as emails and web pages including copy, design and images, as well as internal content or content for partners including creative briefs.

Future updates planned

Adobe says that it will also soon be adding the capability for AEP users to ask the AI Assistant for predictive analytics as well, including questions like “How many conversions should I expect from this particular segment?” and “How would that change if I applied this additional attribute?”

While all these capabilities seem powerful and help, especially for customer acquisition, engagement, and outreach specialists — they are unlikely to quell Adobe’s other problems with creatives balking at updated Terms-of-Service agreement language that further clarifies the company can remotely access their creative content for use in moderation and with machine learning techniques to “improve” its services and tools.