Adobe Summit 2018 Concl. - Final Takeaways

So here it is - My final list of key takeaways from the past Adobe Summit 2018. From the first list I posted here in this post, a few things are still there at the top, but a few more interesting takes have made their way in.

I've separated them across key themes. Let me know what you think.

Note: If you'd like to check out my previous posts on Summit, they are Day 4 Industry Super Sessions,  Day 3 Part 2 here, Day 3 part 1 here, Day 1 Partner Day Coverage here.

Digital Transformation and Customer Experience Management

1. Become an Experience Business – Align your enterprise to the customer journeys and the touch points. While deceptively simple, I cannot stress this enough! This was the number one common factor in all major companies that were taking center stage in the keynote or during the breakout sessions, talking about their successful milestones in their digital transformation 
2.  While digital transformation may seem daunting at the sheer scope, the most difficult aspect is infact transformation of the mindset and vision– the people and processes - breaking down silos, re-wiring the enterprise and learning new ways of working – the rest is ‘just’ tech and tools that are meant to serve your vision
3. Top brands really listen to their customers right from prospects to conversion and beyond, in terms of life signals, unstated requirements and create relevance with increasing accuracy -
4. Organisations must ensure that the experiences they deliver is aligned with what they want their brands to stand for.
5. For B2B, search / SEO is becoming less and less reliable for discovery of services. Building and/or promoting a community & support network around services and offerings is the way to go. Final conversion in B2B still relies on people to people interactions.

Technology , Implementation & Execution

1. Machine Learning and AI are going to be absolutely key for achieving scale and helping digital marketing , and personalisations to evolve and break free of being mostly reactive. It is going to be key in us being able to truly respond to our customer's needs in real-time.
2. The rise of Voice as a means of engagement will provide new opportunities and unique challenges that if met can reap significant rewards. We're at the cusp of a new user interaction revolution. Voice has the means to strip away the interface and make computers and tech more accessible than ever before to more people than ever before. Interestingly - this theme was echoed in the recent Amazon Web Services - Summit - Sydney - watch for my post on that soon.
3. The time for large program projects - big bang implementations - is well and truly way behind us. Agile , and its various forms are the method of choice for most if not all major transformation programs.
4. Running campaigns on-demand is nowhere near enough anymore -. Think Always On campaigns Always On Personalisation, executing , learning, correcting - rinse and repeat
5. Don't underestimate the power of sending insight ( even if not 100% sure ) - back to assisted channels - use this with always on campaigns to drive value based conversations with your customers
6.  There are still significant challenges in bringing together various data streams from across channels , organisations and systems, but , much progress has been made. Still Form drop-out , cart abandonment and nudge communications are still the most common use cases for digital marketing of seeing all this tech work together in practice

The Adobe Experience Cloud

1. The Adobe Experience Cloud is positioned as a possible central system of record for experiences. It brings together its various offering in a more holistic vision than Adobe has presented than ever before
2.  The vision from Adobe having a unified store of data and providing a unified customer profile provides a compelling vision but will still face significant challenges to implementation by way of low agility legacy data sources, data protection and data sovereignty requirements and data privacy issues. Adobe is not going to solve the problem , but can help and will require bespoke consideration by the enterprises themselves
3. Adobe Sensei is the generational bet for Adobe – Machine Learning and AI via Sensei have been featured in almost all of the sessions throughout the summit so far – They’re betting big on this one and a lot of integration work will need to happen before it can manifest. Some very impressive demonstrations where on display at the Summit.
4. There is a lot more integration in the Adobe Ecosystem, e.g. Analytics to AAM and back again, or Analytics Cloud, AEM and Creative Cloud - this is a very welcome thing
5. The immediate practical challenge for Adobe customers is reconciling all the new names and licensing models of its offerings. This may seem trivial, but I kid you not. Adobe's account reps will have their work cut out for them in helping their customers navigate these new names, terms and potentially licensing

Major new Stuff announced

List repost in case you missed the first blog post.

1.    Adobe Auditor – Sneak Peek announced 2017 , now available for free to all existing customers

2.    Attribution IQ – being able to tweak attribution models and experiment with different use cases

3.    Adobe Creative Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Experience Manager integration

4.    Heap of Adobe Sensei Capabilities , including smart tagging, auto content variation creation, auto experience generation, Data Workspace

5.    Adobe Sensei Agents and Sensei Graphs

6.    Adobe Experience Data Model ( 50 odd base models being made available on github )