Adobe Inc. is enhancing its Experience Cloud platform today with new artificial intelligence and analytics features aimed at helping brands engage consumers online more effectively.

Experience Cloud is a suite of services that helps marketing teams collect data about their target audiences, then turn the data into personalized promotions. The toolkit is underpinned by an artificial intelligence technology dubbed Sensei that’s comparable to Salesforce.com Inc.’s Einstein.

The first Experience Cloud product being updated is the Data Science Workspace tool for building machine learning models. It’s receiving an AI engine, Product Recommendations, that generates shopping suggestions for online buyers based on their purchase history. If Product Recommendations sees that a customer has, say, bought a new handset recently, it might produce a list of matching phone accessories.

Also new in Data Science Workspace is a feature called Retail Sales Forecasting. It too takes historical customer buying data as input, but instead of shopping suggestions, the algorithms behind the scenes produce an estimate of how much product demand a company can expect in the future. That data can help brands plan “major moments in time (i.e. holiday shopping) and how to price products the right way,” Ronell Hugh, the head of go-to-market strategy for Adobe Experience, wrote in a blog post.

The third new tool Adobe unveiled today is rolling out for a different product. People Based Destinations, as the company calls it, allows brands to tap customer information stored in their Adobe Audience Manager database to create personalized promotions for social media users.

“For example, an airline can better personalize communications based on offline profile characteristics such as loyalty tier (i.e. bronze, silver, gold), to share targeted offers via social platforms,” Hugh wrote. “People Based Destinations uses Audience Manager’s existing data governance and privacy controls while also honoring consumers’ choices about their data.”

Adobe Experience Cloud competes with Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. The latter company has likewise built out a formidable suite of data processing features optimized for customer information. Earlier this year, Salesforce added three more marketing analytics tools that use technology from Datorama, a startup it bought in 2018 for a reported $800 million. 

Photo: Adobe