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Uncensored CMO
AI agents - personalisation, productivity & performance with Adobe, ServiceNow and IBM
00:35:45
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- [00:00]
Stacy Martinet
Foreign.
- [00:06]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a special edition of Uncensored cmo. Now, this is brought to you in partnership with Adobe. Everybody is talking about AI and how is AI going to impact on marketing? I was fortunate enough to go to Adobe Summit where AI was the main topic of conversation. The advances in AI just in the last six months are, quite frankly, mind blowing. So while I was there, I. I got three guests to come on the podcast and tell me what AI will mean for the future of marketing. And they are three spectacular guests. We have Colin Fleming, the CMO of ServiceNow, Billy Seabrook, the chief design officer at IBM, and Stacy Martinet, who runs communications for Adobe. And I put all the questions I've been wanting to ask about AI and how it impacts marketing to them. Fascinating episode. Three guests. You're going to love it, period. So here we are, uncensored CMO in Las Vegas, and I'm joined by none other than a returning guest, Colin Fleming. It's good to see you again, mate. How are you?
- [01:00]
Colin Fleming
This is amazing. I can't. We're in Vegas together. This will be a lot of fun.
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John Evans
It is indeed. And you're doing. Keep a keynote speech tomorrow. I'd love to get a bit of a preview if you can.
- [01:09]
Colin Fleming
So happy to.
- [01:11]
John Evans
Yeah. What's it going to be about?
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Colin Fleming
Well, it's an incredible forum. Obviously, you know, marketing to marketers is one of my favorite things. So we're going to take the opportunity to call a little bit of BS on marketing. A little bit. I believe that B2B marketing, we've talked about this in the past. We've kind of confused ourselves a little bit, right. The long and the short of it. We've talked about Peter and Les and the folks like this, but we have to kind of reset a little bit on B2B marketing. So it's just going to share some of the lessons that I've learned along the way. So five lessons around how we're really thinking about playing the long game, thinking about investing in buying groups, thinking about talking about, you know, true personalization and really just changing the perspective away from leads and into a bigger story and really speaking the language of the customer. I think that's important.
- [01:51]
Stacy Martinet
Now.
- [01:52]
John Evans
You've obviously got a lot of experience with B2B marketing. What are the things that people don't understand about how marketing works that they should do that would give. Give them advantage? Because if I just think about my kind of system, one experience, like most B2C marketers, well versed in, you know, long Term, short term, role of emotion, all those kind of things. B2B marketing seems to be a little bit more kind of service led rather than brand pool, if you know what I mean. So yeah, yeah. What are you finding?
- [02:16]
Colin Fleming
You know, I think B2B marketing and I, I'm complicit in this, so I'm a B2B marketer as a career, so it's all good. But I think a couple things are true. Number one is we markets attribution models far too much. Like, you know, the average deal cycle at my company is over 400 days. With a 90 day attribution window, you're not getting the full picture. And so really, really separating the way humans buy products from the way you measure it. I think too often they're one and the same, but really being able to separate those two things to a degree is important. Yeah. So number one there, I think, you know, we market with our org charts too often and the systems we use put a lot of friction in the system that doesn't really, really work. And I think it's about removing friction. We actually spend a lot of our time marketing for credit instead of marketing for actually impacting us, which is. No, what, nobody wants that. And then one of the things that I want to talk about is how B2B. You know, none of the Bs in B2B stand for boring. We can be opinionated, we can have, we can be culture shaping, we can have a point of view, we can be creative. And you know, 70% or so of the GDP in the US here is generated by B2B businesses. Yet for some crazy reason we've decided that our bar can be lower, held to a lower standard. Does it make sense to me?
- [03:28]
John Evans
Yes.
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Colin Fleming
So frankly, I kind of want to challenge it tomorrow, keynote and see what happens.
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John Evans
Yeah. Now there's a whole raft of announcements from Adobe about how they're investing in, you know, agentic AI is a new phrase that I learned yesterday, literally. But the world has changed a lot even in six to nine months, isn't it? It's changed. What are the big shifts that you're seeing in terms of the how AI is being used to help business?
- [03:51]
Colin Fleming
It's approachable now. Obviously it started out as a, we were AI curious to a degree. You know, you're playing with Firefly and you're placing the incredible technologies that Adobe has. We moved it to be more of a mission critical perspective. So we're implementing things like segmentation and Persona development and category entry points with synthetic research. We're doing AI agent orchestration from ServiceNow agents to AI agents from Adobe to really get the best of both worlds. Like those types of scenarios we weren't even talking about four months ago. And it's all really, it's all real now. So I do think that the ability to scale brand and govern brand has never been as accessible as it is today. And really allowing these agents to handle the sort of mundane, if you will, so we can focus on the strategic lens and the personalization and the creativity and the curiosity, that's what it really unlocks and that's where we're going to spend our time.
- [04:40]
John Evans
And I think everyone fears, don't they, that the role of the AI is to replace jobs. But I think what you've done at ServiceNow really helpfully is to add people back into your positioning and go that they're working for you, which I think is a really good idea for people. Yeah, exactly. You've got a new campaign out that's been running for the last last few months with Idris Elba as well.
- [04:58]
Colin Fleming
He's a blast. We're having a lot of fun, but again, it's trying to take this crazy technology and not make it about the technology.
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John Evans
Yeah.
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Colin Fleming
And this is what B2B marketers, I think, do. Back to your original question, which is you see a lot of AI agents being marketed as the bleeding edge technology, but I think what we're trying to do is find a way to soften it to human who make it more human with put AI to work for people, calling the agents personal minions, put them in scenarios that are more approachable. And I do think that if we can come across as the human side of AI with some killer technology, I think we'll be in really good shape.
- [05:29]
John Evans
Yeah. Now, talking about Adobe, of course, you know, they've got a suite of AI products you have as well. And we talk about orchestration as well. How do you integrate all that technology together? What's your relationship with Adobe?
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Colin Fleming
Yeah, well, first, I'm a huge fan of Adobe. They've been in my 10 months in this organization, they've been my rider, ride or die trusted partner. And they're so much more than a vendor to me. They're absolutely advising us on how to implement buying groups, how we should think about the future, how we should think about AI agents. And in turn, we're actually a design partner for a lot of their new technologies, whether it be buying groups and those AI agents as well. So there's a very much a back and forth Technology sharing, if you will. We like to play with their bleeding edge technology and give them feedback on it. So that's a lot of fun. And in turn, we're just getting the right advice and from people that, you know, this is an organization that bleeds marketing, this is what they do and so why not learn from the best?
- [06:21]
John Evans
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So anyone listening that's kind of like, you know, slightly dazed by, you know, everything that's going on, what would be your advice to marketers to kind of, in terms of, you know, catching up with what's going on in AI and making sure that they're using it in the right way, not falling into some of the traps they might fall into?
- [06:36]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, I mean, invoke the curiosity. Find your every scenario you're in, whether it be data, what other, whatever side of the brain you're using. Ask yourself the question, how can I be using AI? How can I be using AI? And finding incredible ways of unlocking this. I was commuting down to Santa Clara the other day And I put ChatGPT in voice mode and I talked to it on the entire ride down, just asking questions about how should I be thinking about this? Where is this heading, how should I be thinking about positioning, how should I be thinking about segmentation, you name it, and just finding the curiosity that we have to unlock. I think that's the big, big, big thing. And of course, don't be scared of doesn't bite. It's not always perfect. There's hallucinations, there's those things that exist, but, but those that are curious and those that implement it and those that experiment with it, are they going to be the ones that come out ahead on this? And so I'd rather be on that end than the one that's forgetting it.
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John Evans
It's interesting you use it for voice actually, because it's a different dynamic because when it's in written form, you're going, oh, that's not quite right, or that word seems a bit odd. But in a voice is like conversation where you're exploring something with someone and going, oh, I didn't mean that, I meant this or that's right. You know, it's a different experience, isn't it?
- [07:40]
Colin Fleming
If you haven't done this yet, it's kind of mind blowing actually. I encourage you to do maybe on your flight. Yeah, I look like a weird person on the subway sometimes talking to myself. But it is fascinating. And again, I'm challenging myself every single day just finding ways to be more curious. And I do think that's an unlock for people here is finding the curiosity with Adobe Technologies, with ServiceNow Technologies. What other scenarios should we be thinking about? Because the technology is there, we have some work to do on data. We're all suffering with a little bit of lack of data quality from this, but the opportunity and the technology is there. We are truly only limited now by our curiosity.
- [08:13]
John Evans
The data's a very good point though, isn't it? Because you need to be training the tools on the right data set to get to get the good answer out fuel.
- [08:19]
Colin Fleming
And if you put poor fuel in anything, you're going to get pour out. Right, so poor racing analogy, but there it is.
- [08:26]
John Evans
Brilliant. Well, listen, looking forward to your keynote tomorrow. It's going to be very good and yeah, look forward to the reaction it gets.
- [08:32]
Colin Fleming
Awesome, thanks. Great.
- [08:33]
John Evans
All right, that was Colin telling us about how they are using AI ServiceNow. And now we go over to Billy Seabrook, who is the chief designer for IBM to find out a bit more about how IBM are using AI and how they're partnering with other companies to implement it as well. Here we go. So, Billy, welcome to Uncensored cmo. It's great to have you here.
- [08:50]
Billy Seabrook
Thank you. Nice to be here.
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John Evans
Just for anyone listening, watching, just introduce yourself. And what does a Chief Design Officer do?
- [08:57]
Billy Seabrook
Sure, yeah. Well, I'm Billy Seabrook. I'm the Global Chief Design Officer for IBM Consulting. Been with the company just under 8 years and I have a background in marketing, digital product engineering, change management and brand building and design, of course. So worked at companies like a bunch of agencies, ebay, Citibank and others.
- [09:19]
John Evans
Now, everyone's been talking about AI for the last few years and I'm really intrigued to get your perspective on kind of, where are we on the journey now? In my day job at System One, I get to work with tons of technology companies and it's really fascinating that everyone has got an ambition to be leaders in AI because they can see where the kind of ball's going next. But actually most of them are on this kind of discovery phase where they haven't quite worked it out yet. I was just intrigued to know, I mean, given the role you do, where do you think we are on the journey?
- [09:43]
Billy Seabrook
That's right. Well, I mean, it is moving so fast and I think some people are early adopters and some are a little bit laggard and some are in between. We've done a lot of research on the topic. We've released a few studies from IBM, actually a bunch of Studies from IBM through our research arm, the Institute of Business Value. And we actually just launched one here at Summit this week. It's called the Content Supply Chain AI Awakening. And it really does probe on people's adoption of AI in the content creation process and sort of where they are in terms of what their aspirations were. And what we discovered is that for all the people that have answered the survey, and we're talking 1100, 1200 people, that only 50% of them have actually reached the goals that they had anticipated for adopting it. However, over 80% think that there's huge advantage to adopting AI. So they know they want to do it, they know why they should do it, they know what to do. It's a little bit, bit of not knowing how to do it properly and responsibly is where they get hung up. And actually the trend is growing. So over 60%, almost 2/3 of the people think it's only improving that there's even more endorsement of AI in Content Supply Chain. It's just getting there. And the risks behind it are kind of the usual suspects, you hear. So it's trusting the AI output, the risk around legal and compliance, actually change management of the workforce is a big one that spiked. And I think that's maybe underestimated in terms of just retraining your people into new behaviors and helping them along that journey, especially if they've got to change their entire skill set. And there's cost still. Even though the cost of AI is going down rapidly and people are adopting more small language models instead of large language models, there still is cost there for marketers. Yeah.
- [11:32]
John Evans
Now, in terms of the use case for using AI in creative development, what are the principles of a really, really good and effective kind of campaign output?
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Billy Seabrook
Well, I think authenticity is key, you know, accuracy. So there are good use cases for AI and poor use cases for AI. Currently, anything that requires this level of accuracy, that's going to actually have a legal compliance to it. Or you're say, launching a product that you can't just take risks on the generation of that image, you're going to want to do more classic image generation for that type of work. But if you've got the flexibility to change out more abstract backgrounds, fantastical type of imagery, it's actually getting more and better and better in terms of realistic lifestyle imagery. So if you want to extend, use it for versioning and resizing purposes like the really last, the end production phases of a project, you start to get huge productivity gains and you can trust the output. But I Think authenticity is key and that's where you sort of get the spectrum of possible use cases. But I also think personalization is huge. That's what everybody gets excited about, personalization at scale because of the volume of content you can now produce instantly. And that means translation, that means obviously resizing for different media formats, changing out the backgrounds for the context of maybe the geography you're talking to or maybe even the Persona you're trying to reach. Those are those great opportunities that excite people because that we know for a fact that more personalized content that is contextually relevant for the user is going to drive more engagement.
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John Evans
Yeah. Now give me some data on this because you've been running this for a couple of years now.
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Billy Seabrook
Yes.
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John Evans
On some of the IBM campaigns. What's the data telling you?
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Billy Seabrook
Yeah, so we were quite early adopters at IBM, especially in our marketing organization. Of course, on my side, I work with clients on their adoption of AI and their campaigns. We actually have been on a journey for over four years with Adobe. It's important just to set the context of how we've built trust in the technology over the years. But about four years ago we realized we needed to simplify our marketing stack, simplify our marketing period to get more roi, be more cost effective, drive better results. And we went on a four phase journey. And the first one was just getting our data in order, putting it, centralizing the data, de duping things like that, cleaning it up. The second big phase was moving, simplifying our stack and going to the Adobe solution which took out huge amounts of cost right then, then and there and just made it much more efficient CMS and use of assets. Then we went to phase three which was really the change management, reorganizing the entire, you know, marketing organization being much more simple, allowing more nimbleness and again building confidence in the tools which was then allowed us to, to jump to phase four, which was experimenting with AI. So when this all sort of, and of course, you know, for, you know, for context, IBM is an AI company. You know, we are in the space, so we've got a little, probably a little experience and faith in the technology.
- [14:29]
John Evans
And Adobe use your AI as well.
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Billy Seabrook
That's right. And Adobe uses our AI in their technology as well. So the underpinnings of AEM is actually some, there's some Watson AI in IT as well as the redshift, excuse me, Red Hat OpenShift technology that allows them to put AEM on different clouds, which was just announced today. So about two years ago, rewind Two years ago, Firefly was just announced, it was in effectively beta. You couldn't use it for commercial uses. And it was announced here at Summit. And our CMO and the marketing team were blown away by the potential of using AI to generate hundreds of assets that would take a designer and a creative team a very long time to do. So we had the Masters golf tournament coming up and we wanted to do a big social media campaign. So we got special permission to use Firefly to generate the campaign. And it was a very simple concept. It was just, it was the what if campaign. It was supposed to be provocative to get people thinking about what if. And we just did hundreds and hundreds of versions of this question mark textured in golf related themes. We released it on social media and it was the best performing campaign in the history of IBM. It had 26 times engagement click through sharing. And you can probably attribute it to the fact that there's such variety and such personalized and contextually relevant creative that we put out. So that gave us a huge boost of confidence. And we then since experimented more and more in our content creation. We've built AI tools ourselves to accelerate the whole content supply chain for IBM. We're very excited about the gen studio announcement because I mean they're really starting to connect the dots in terms of the two clouds of Adobe. But yeah, last year we did the next wave. So if we, we understood that generative AI is great for the production, the long tail production, that's 80% of the creative process. Huge cost savings, huge productivity savings. That's what we did with the Masters last year. We actually tried to go the other side, the ideation phase of the creative process to see if generative AI could give us new inspiring ideas and accelerate that process. And we launched the trust what you create campaign here at Summit last year, commonly referred to as the fishy fish, Fishy AI campaign. And we used generative AI to come up with, if you aren't familiar with the campaign, it's effectively a bunch of fantastical fish swimming around in a fishbowl that represent AI that's gone wrong. Untrustworthy AI. And the idea is that Watson can come in and clean up all the, the fictitious or the mutant fish and turn them all into beautiful goldfish. But to come up with those mutant fish concepts of, you know, and they're all various characters and it was very conceptual and funny. We used Firefly to generate those characters. So incredibly, it was an ideation booster, creativity booster and it accelerated our workflow to actually give those models to a real CG engineer and actually develop the.
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John Evans
Now we're having this conversation in Vegas, aren't we? And they appeared on the sphere, didn't they as well?
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Billy Seabrook
Exactly. So that was a big media placement for sure. We took over the sphere. It was perfect. And I said the sphere. We knew we were going to do that. So that inspired the creative concept obviously of turning it into a fishbowl. But it was a highly referenced campaign. People loved it. And again, huge, huge business benefits for us. Not only did it just get great word of mouth and it present, you know, communicated our concept, but it saves so much time. It just wouldn't have been possible normally to do a campaign of that magnitude. And all the versioning, you know, that happened.
- [18:17]
John Evans
Well, listening this morning to the keynotes, they were talking about on average a 10x improvement in speed.
- [18:24]
Billy Seabrook
That's right.
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John Evans
And a 30% increase in click through rates, which is astonishing.
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Billy Seabrook
It is.
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John Evans
But presumably that has pretty profound impacts for your organization as well. What do you see as the next step once this becomes the norm?
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Billy Seabrook
I think there are two things that are happening. One is this incredible productivity boost. Assuming you've got all the governance in place and you still need quality checks for all these, a lot of the more hero assets and things, even the derivative assets, you really do need trained professionals doing quality checks. But still it is like 10x of improvement in productivity. Which means what do you do with that banked time? You know, do you just move on to the next project? Do you work with less people or do you actually open up the possibilities? You can do two things. You can actually take that time and invest it in some of the early concepting and research phases of a project that don't. That's usually a short shrift in a project. It's all about coming up with the idea as fast as possible, spending the time to produce the hero asset and then all the production on the tail end. If you can eliminate or at least reduce all that production, you can look at all the, the thoughtfulness that can go up front. So that's a good distribution of time. But you can also, instead of just doing one campaign, now you've got all this headroom. You could do five campaigns and you can get more thoughtful about the personalization and the localization of those campaigns so they're more effective. So that's sort of one thing of like, what do you do with all this time? The other area is sort of skill set shifts too. And that means both the role of a desire being less on the production Side a little bit more on the conceptual direction side is a big shift. And also including more people in the creative process, so democratizing the whole creative content supply chain, allowing more field marketers to do their own versioning of work with tools like Express. But it's like any change management. People have to go and learn new skills, change their skills, get used to new kinds of ways of working. And then the third thing I would just say is we did a study actually last year on the impact of AI on designers specifically and marketers and we realized that there were some blind spots from some of the respondents saying what are the most important skills that you need? Hard and soft skills in the age of AI and creativity boomed at the top speed of delivery was huge, decision making was huge. These are the skills that people really value now. But on the very tail end that people weren't thinking about were empathy and caring about the end users and the impact of what you're doing. And that was a bare. Nobody thought that was important. And I think that's a huge blind spot. It is huge. We're going through a massive change. People have to be open and willing to learn new things, but also not forget that good professional craft skills are still really important.
- [21:10]
John Evans
And that I think is where the debate is. Do you see it as a threat and is a CFO just going to use it as a cost cutting exercise or is it an investment where actually you get more time back to be creative, more times about to be spontaneous. That's right, be reactive. And there's a huge opportunity for people that want to take it.
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Billy Seabrook
That's right, yeah. And that, and that comes down to company, company culture, your, your, you know, your business goals. You know, every company is different in how they, you know, square that equation of where do they, where do they adjust, you know, and take and unlock new forms of value. Yeah, I think at IBM specifically, we are definitely redistributing some of those savings. We're definitely banking some, you know, cost savings are great, we're definitely moving faster, which is great. But we are redistributing some of the time to be more thoughtful in places that never, we were able, we didn't have the time to do it. And quantity and personalization of the campaigns is huge for us. Yeah.
- [22:00]
John Evans
Amazing. Billy, thanks for sharing your time and expertise on this. It's a fascinating subject and it's great to talk about how you're using it at IBM. All right, last but not least, over to Stacey Martinet. Now, she has been running Adobe and their Communications and put the event on. She knows an awful lot about AI, so I, I wanted to catch up with her and find out what it means and what Adobe are doing, particularly as they are marketing to marketers and they are using their own products themselves as well. Now, I should just say quickly, this was recorded in the conference itself, so there's a bit of background noise, so hopefully you'll forgive that, but the content will be worth it. Here we go. So, Stacy, here we are at Adobe Summit, and this is part of your role, isn't it? But tell me a bit about, bit about your role. How long you've been at Adobe and what have you been up to?
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Stacy Martinet
Yes. Well, thank you so much for coming and thanks for having me here. I really admire your podcast.
- [22:49]
John Evans
Thank you.
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Stacy Martinet
You've had a lot of people I respect and also a lot of friends, so it's an honor to be here. Adobe Summit is Adobe's annual digital experience conference. We're here in Las Vegas, and part of my role is I lead events, communications, social media, so that all rolls into one to come to life here, here at Summit.
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John Evans
Now, the slightly funny thing about your role is, like, you're effectively a marketer and you're marketing to marketers, which I just think is quite a wild idea. What makes great marketing for marketers?
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Stacy Martinet
It's very meta.
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Billy Seabrook
Yeah, it is meta.
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Stacy Martinet
So, you know, my first job was I worked in communications and public relations at a newspaper. So you had to do public relations for journalists. Yes, which was also very meta. And maybe the things that they have in common is that what makes great marketing for marketers is like the story and simplifying the power of what Adobe brings to our customers. Yeah, we spend a lot of time in the marketing industry talking about tools and the craft to deliver to end customers. Right? Yeah, Consumers or if you're B2B businesses. But we don't talk a lot about the marketer. Right. The person who has to go into the boardroom every day and defend the effectiveness, the efficiency, do more with less. And so I love that that's what we do at Adobe and that's what this conference is about.
- [24:14]
John Evans
Now, I love the fact that you said simplicity, because actually, the thing that I find completely incredible is the pace of change. I mean, I've been learning loads of new words this week, and AI particularly is in a completely different place to where it was six months ago. So it must be like a big challenge that how do you kind of communicate all this change to marketers and help make sure that they're kind of up to date.
- [24:36]
Stacy Martinet
Well, it's all about AI. Absolutely. And you're right in that when you think about even three months ago or three weeks ago, what was the news driving AI and what was going to happen next? It is very fast. And part of it is the models. Right. These data models that power AI are rapidly evolving. And so the architects and the engineers and the scientists are finding more and more use cases that they can be applied to much more quickly than they were two years ago. Right. Because that's the usage that informs the model. So you get this cycle that's like the more people use it, the quicker you can actually innovate with it.
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John Evans
Now, one of the big. One of the big things for me was the difference between kind of back, you know, AI being deterministic, as I think is the right phrase, isn't it?
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Stacy Martinet
Correct.
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John Evans
And then agentic AI and understanding that was a big revolution, isn't it, in how that turns out? Can you just explain what that is?
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Stacy Martinet
Yeah.
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John Evans
And the use cases that you describe.
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Stacy Martinet
I talk about original AI.
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John Evans
Yeah.
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Stacy Martinet
Which, you know, we've been. AI has been around for a long time. Adobe's been working on AI and it's been in our tools like Neurofilters and Photoshop or Liquid Mode and Acrobat, where you can really zoom in on a text. That's AI and that's deterministic. But the breakthrough was around reasoning. So agents can reason, they can take the data and they can start to make decisions. Right. And agents, how we define agents, are AI that can work with you, they can communicate with you as a human, but they can also communicate with other agents.
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Billy Seabrook
Wow.
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Stacy Martinet
Which unlocks a lot when you think about what's possible in your workflow and making you work smarter, faster. So what we announced was a series of agents through our Adobe Experience platform that you can use to speed up your productivity.
- [26:22]
John Evans
Yeah. And which bits of a kind of marketing mix do you think this will impact? I mean, can it do everything or are there certain parts of the marketing kind of role that it will impact the most? Where you think it's going to be felt?
- [26:33]
Stacy Martinet
We're focused on the tasks or the areas of work.
- [26:37]
John Evans
Yeah.
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Stacy Martinet
That tend to take a lot of time, but they aren't inherently the most strategic or the most creative. Right. It's not where you're doing your best work or where you want your talent focused. Right. And so when you think about things like audience segmentation, you can now use a certain agent to go in and say, I have this Product. I'm trying to sell it at a certain price point based on past campaigns. Serve up these audiences.
- [27:02]
John Evans
Yes.
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Stacy Martinet
Right. They can do it like that. Then you could say, great, I have hundreds of assets that I've run over the past few months. Can you go through and pull the content you think would perform best for these audiences? Right. And how long would that take without this agent? And you would be in multiple tools and maybe you'd be on your desktop, you'd be looking in your phone. And now the agent can do it. So the agent works on your behalf. That's one part of it for the practitioner. What I think is really exciting, and we talk about with brand concierge, is for brands to be able to develop agents that they interact with their customers.
- [27:37]
John Evans
Oh, interesting. I hadn't picked that bit up. That's quite interesting. So you can sort of delegate the customer service responsibilities, solve their problems.
- [27:44]
Stacy Martinet
Yeah. And think about it like the next level of customer service and experience where, say you're a Marriott Vaughn boy member. There's a lot of things Marianne knows about you. Right. The cities you've been to, the restaurants you've eaten, the classes you've taken. And so now it says, oh, you're coming to Las Vegas, John, do you want to stay at this hotel again? Right. Last time you went out and you had Mediterranean. Here's a great restaurant that we recommend. And so it can start to truly personalize your experience.
- [28:12]
John Evans
I love that because, like, we've been talking about personalization at scale for so long now, haven't we? It's been one of those kind of buzzwords and it feels like it's finally arrived.
- [28:20]
Stacy Martinet
And it does feel like the promise of personalization is upon us now. AI has accelerated that and these agents play a role in the day to day and making that happen.
- [28:29]
Colin Fleming
Yeah.
- [28:29]
John Evans
One of the things I think is fascinating about what you do is you're kind of between creativity and technology. You're bringing technology but to a creative task. I'm quite fascinated about what are the challenges that creates and what are the opportunities that it creates that maybe unleash creativity.
- [28:43]
Stacy Martinet
Yes. I mean, creativity and technology on one hand could be controversial, but on the other, I mean, creativity has long evolved because of technology, whether that was the printing press. Right. The advent of television, the Internet, and now AI. And certainly at Adobe, we believe that creativity is an innately human trait and it is the right to everyone to be able to express their creativity. And so we're not taking that away, but we want to do two things. One if you're a creative professional, how do we expand the aperture for you? Whether it helps you with ideation, whether it helps you with tasks or switching mediums. Right. I mean, for us, we had to grow up learning either design or video. There wasn't as many of us who switched back and forth of mediums. But AI can let you do that now and that's increasingly required. Or for people who don't have the skills but have an idea, it can help them onboard. So I think it enables more creativity, not less. It doesn't replace. I think we also have to say it's here.
- [29:50]
Billy Seabrook
Yes.
- [29:50]
Stacy Martinet
So it's upon us to learn how to do it. And Adobe has taken a lot of thought and a lot of pride to doing it right and making creativity a human trait and using AI to support that.
- [30:04]
John Evans
Yeah. I love the ServiceNow example actually as well, because as their advert was brilliant with Idris Elba in it, but kind of explaining that basically, you know, the agents are doing all those tasks you don't want to do.
- [30:15]
Stacy Martinet
Right.
- [30:15]
John Evans
To free you up to do things you do want to do. So if we see it as an opportunity when we spend time on creative and strategy and innovation, then it frees you up to do lots more.
- [30:23]
Stacy Martinet
So, yes, if someone came to you and said, hey, John, I'm going to do all the stuff you don't want to do in a day and you do all the fun stuff, you say, yes.
- [30:30]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [30:31]
Stacy Martinet
And that's what, that's what is possible.
- [30:32]
John Evans
Yeah, yeah. Any tips in terms of. Because it was really interesting listening to the Marriott presentation where she was saying, okay, let's be honest, how many of us here know how to use it? You know, we're all kind of here going, sign us up tomorrow. Any tips on maybe how to kind of, you know, make the most of it and how to adopt it in your organization?
- [30:49]
Stacy Martinet
Yeah, certainly with any new technology there's a learning curve. I mean, remember the first time we all got phones, right. Area cell phone or you had to learn how to text. Just start trying it. Like Adobe Firefly. You can go to adobe firefly.com and just put in a prompt and plus generate and see what image comes out and it's delightful. And just start trying that and I think you'll get more comfortable using. It's a conversational interface, you know, and increasingly that'll be voice to text too, which so many of us are used to in other use cases.
- [31:19]
John Evans
Very true.
- [31:19]
Stacy Martinet
So I would say just try, just try.
- [31:21]
John Evans
That's lovely advice actually. And Actually, James Quincy mentioned that, didn't he? He said at Coke, they kind of just jumped in, start experimenting, and they learned as they went, and now they've done some amazing things because of that.
- [31:33]
Billy Seabrook
Yeah.
- [31:33]
Stacy Martinet
If you wait to figure out the right time for a technology, it'll never come because it's changing. And so you want to be in that innovation flow.
- [31:41]
John Evans
Yeah. So mentioning that then. So you guys are very much at the forefront of this. Where does it go next and what should we be thinking about in terms of future proofing our marketing?
- [31:51]
Stacy Martinet
I'm really excited about what we talked about this week at Summit, which is the combination of marketing and creativity and how AI unifies it now. You know, I mean, just from your career, creativity and marketing have always gone hand in hand, but we never thought about the technology stacked together. We thought you do this amazing creative over here and then you bring it over and you activate it and you measure it over here. And that's not the case. AI has brought those two together and so leverage that.
- [32:20]
John Evans
Yes. And the thing that struck me as well is how fast you can do that and kind of test and learn as well. You know, your experimental software allows you to go away, do a test, learn from it, improve it, and then roll it out to market as well. Which is.
- [32:33]
Stacy Martinet
That's right. I mean, the job is never done anymore. Right. We don't live in a season by season. Whether it's TV programming, certainly on social media, it's always on. So you have to be able to iterate, test, make a new one. And so it is pretty quick. Yeah, if you embrace it.
- [32:50]
John Evans
Yeah, definitely. Now you're responsible for putting on this incredible show. I'd love to know what kind of like, what are you most proud of in terms of this whole event? Because it is pretty epic in terms of what you just put on the last few days.
- [33:00]
Stacy Martinet
Well, thank you. That means so much. There's an incredible team at Adobe across the company that puts a lot of blood, sweat, tears and love into making this show for our customers. And I just love walking through the Community Pavilion and seeing the buzz and seeing people actually smiling.
- [33:17]
John Evans
Yes.
- [33:17]
Stacy Martinet
Because like you said, these technologies move really quick and everyone's here to learn and learn together, but to do that and have fun and have a positive vibe about it, that really just makes.
- [33:28]
John Evans
It, I have to say, I totally agree, actually. The amount of energy is great, but the conversations around, I mean, particularly AI. I know, because that's a core part of it. But I mean, my learning is just like gone so far forward. Just in two days, just by meeting people, talking to them, comparing notes on presentations and stuff. So. So congratulations.
- [33:46]
Stacy Martinet
Good.
- [33:47]
John Evans
Well done. All right, so there's so much been going on the last few days. There's been like, you know, amazing keynote speeches, really amazing breakouts, lots going on, lots of entertainment, everything. There's so much to choose from and a bit of unfair question, but, like, if you had to pick, what has inspired you the most over the last couple of days, what would it be?
- [34:04]
Stacy Martinet
It's. It's so hard to pick. We've had amazing speakers, news, all sorts of exciting updates. I've met great people. But I think the thing that stands out for me is in our day one keynote, Shantanoon Orion, our CEO of Adobe, had a fireside chat with James Quincy, the CEO of Coca Cola, and he said every interaction is a communication. And he was talking about a decision he made about what to wear to a certain employee meeting and what that would signal.
- [34:34]
John Evans
Yes.
- [34:34]
Stacy Martinet
And I thought that was such a beautiful encapsulation of great marketing.
- [34:38]
John Evans
Yeah. Actually, it's interesting because you've had some incredibly powerful, important, successful people on the stage and what struck me is how humble they all came across, didn't they? And how open and honest they were. I mean, James is a good example.
- [34:50]
Stacy Martinet
Yes.
- [34:51]
John Evans
Of just being very candid. Quite funny, you know, just sharing his, you know, just sharing his data insights. It's great, wasn't it?
- [34:56]
Stacy Martinet
Yeah, I think it's nice. It's nice and I think it speaks well to where we are as an industry where everyone's trying to learn together.
- [35:01]
John Evans
Yeah. Because we used to see them on tv, all polished. It's great to have a proper chat with them and find out they're actually human after all. Yes.
- [35:07]
Stacy Martinet
What makes them tick.
- [35:08]
John Evans
Yeah, that's really big. I totally agree with you on that, Stacey. Thank you so much.
- [35:11]
Stacy Martinet
Thank you so much.
- [35:11]
John Evans
Thank you for having me.
- [35:12]
Stacy Martinet
Just such a pleasure.
- [35:13]
John Evans
Yeah. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on XenSoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.