Artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to advance the ways companies collect and interpret data to enhance the customer experience. In the era of ad blockers and savvy consumers, data can keep marketing from being creepy and instead instill a magical experience, according to Adam Justis (pictured), director of product marketing, Adobe Experience Cloud, at Adobe Inc.

“I was just having conversations with my children, and it kind of blows my mind,” Justis said. “They literally wonder why when we order something on Amazon, it’s not there like within an hour or two. ‘Didn’t we just buy that?’ And interestingly, in some markets you’re almost at a point where that’s actually reality. One of the magical things is that we’re still surprised and delighted on a regular basis.”

Justis spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Imagine event in Las Vegas. They discussed the ways customer experience has evolved at Adobe (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Making the magic around a good customer experience

So what helps create a magical customer experience? As Adobe has evolved, it has found that it’s no longer enough to have a winning product or service. People want an experience around that product or service that actually feels like it’s worth having, according to Justis.

“It needs to feel like something that actually not only feels natural, but it feels additive to our lives in some way,” he said. “And so, what was once … a relatively straightforward product development process or promotional process now is very much about ‘How are we addressing the needs of the consumer in a way that is holistic, that respects the channels that they want to interact with our brand on, that respects the devices through which they want to either consume our product or research our product?'”

Adobe is working hard to understand the dynamics of markets and bring solutions within this broader understanding of customer experience. And in order to deliver a meaningful customer experience, businesses have to understand the customer. This is where the cruciality of data comes into play, according to Justis. The pivotal question is how to help tell a story with someone’s data and then leverage it to tell a brand’s story without violating privacy and being respectful and trustful.

“And Adobe’s going directly at that … to effectively coalesce a meaningful point of view or sort of representation of the customer in a way that respects their privacy that an experienced steward can then look at that and say, ‘Not only do I understand who this person is, but I have context and an understanding of what it is they’re looking for, what is their intent, what is the context of this interaction now so that I can present a meaningful experience,'” Justis stated.

But knowing a customer is only half the battle. That’s when rallying around meaningful tools and content come into play to help communicate in a compelling, effective way to the customer.

“At Adobe, we like to say that emotion is the currency of experience, and if you’re not actually leveraging meaningful content and presenting it in context, then you’re not going to evoke an emotion that is worth evoking,” Justis said.

Adobe is using artificial intelligence and machine learning for their Adobe Experience Cloud — which is a collection of solutions for marketing, advertising, analytics and commerce — to make this exchange happen in multiple ways between a company and customer. AI helps shorten the span between marketers’ ideas and actual execution. It’s also helping shorten the space between a signal in behavioral data that shows up either in an app or on a website and marketing actions that can be taken to communicate about that customer’s behavior.

“[We can] apply algorithms to kind of determine what is the next best offer, next best experience, and then present that in a way that actually feels if not real time, pretty close to it,” Justis concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Imagine 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Imagine 2019 event. Neither Adobe Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE