Adobe Releases Retail Innovations for the Experience Cloud

Adobe today announced four retail-focused innovations in Adobe Experience Cloud that use machine learning and artificial intelligence “to drive a more personalized experience across a variety of touch points,” says Michael Klein, director of industry strategy for retail at Adobe.

“For retailers, [we’re looking to] help them drive what we would call personalization at scale,” Klein says. “That’s a big piece of what we’re doing around our experience-driven commerce and allowing retailers to be more agile in their development of experiences.”

The first of these innovations is the ability to leverage Big Data to personalize the shopper experience. Adobe is expanding Big Data capabilities in Adobe Campaign, allowing retailers to leverage all their data stored in Hadoop. Retailers can seamlessly connect to their Hadoop infrastructure to query and segment data without the need to import datasets or store them within Adobe Campaign.

The second is the ability to automatically tailor and optimize images for different screens. The Smart Crop feature, powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically detects and crops the focal point in any image, while Smart Imaging automatically detects the available bandwidth and device type to minimize image file size by up to 70 percent upon delivery. The goal is “to better optimize asset delivery in the mobile space so that consumers aren’t sitting around waiting for a heavy image to load and perhaps abandoning the experience because it’s spinning on their mobile device,” Klein says. This capability arose, he says, from Adobe assessing how retailers, in manipulating original artwork, could “require less human intervention in optimizing those images in terms of cropping and getting to what is the true sellable portion of an asset.”

The third is the ability to deliver 3-D, panoramic, and virtual reality imagery. Via an integration of Experience Manager and Adobe Dimension CC, this feature aims to simplify retailers’ workflows by replacing costly photography and photorealistic 3-D assets and delivering the flexibility to repurpose any asset, from any angle, any light, and in any setting.

The fourth innovation is the ability to customize omnichannel commerce. This feature comes from a set of flexible commerce microservices built on Adobe I/O Runtime that are designed to power experience-driven commerce. They aim to assist retailers in providing shoppers with a connected experience across all touch points. More specifically, they seamlessly expose processes across digital, physical, and back-end systems so that retailers can contextually engage customers at each phase of their shopping journey.

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