Getty Images/iStockphoto
Adobe rolls out B2B generative AI app for CRM, marketing
As enterprises determine where the value is in deploying and paying for generative AI in their marketing and sales operations, Adobe releases its own entrant.
Adobe, long a stronghold on the consumer marketing side, released a B2B cloud app that taps generative AI to connect selling teams with buying teams and creates content for different personas.
Journey Optimizer B2B Edition combines data from marketing, CRM and customer data platform (CDP) to personalize enterprise sales pitch content. For example, the vice president at a prospective sales lead's company will be concerned with different aspects of a product or service than an end user, IT person or finance executive. It also includes marketing performance analytics, dashboards and optimization tools.
Adobe partnered with Microsoft earlier this year to develop an AI assistant for the Adobe Experience Platform, which its bundles customer analytics, CDP and customer journey tools and is a subset of Adobe Experience Cloud, its overall marketing platform. The assistant can identify audiences from marketing and CDP data and then deliver marketing messages across different channels, such as email, calendar and SMS text.
The concern for many enterprises as they evaluate generative AI tools for functions such as these is predicting their costs, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, a tech advisory firm. That formula gets more complicated when factoring in large language model consumption fees.
"The content generation piece is a real pain point for marketers today," Wettemann said. "The ability to point an intelligent engine at something and say, 'Create all these different bits of content,' makes a lot of sense. Do I need Adobe to do that? They're not the only ones doing it."
The generative AI tech sector for marketing includes large vendors, such as Salesforce, Google and SAP, but also smaller companies, such as Klaviyo and Jasper. Many of the tools focus on assisting individual marketers with identifying market segments or creating emails, storyboards and other marketing campaign collateral.
Specifically, Salesforce has invested heavily to commingle AI-generated marketing content and B2B CRM data, as has SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Users of those products have access to many, or at least some, of the features in Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition.
But Wettemann added that Journey Optimizer B2B Edition will appeal to current Adobe users because it could ease the integration of generative AI and Adobe Marketo inbound lead data into their CRM workflows.
Sundeep Parsa, vice president of product for Adobe Experience Cloud, showed the B2B app running inside of Salesforce's interface and said the company also is targeting users of other CRM apps.
B2B requires many-to-many marketing campaigns as opposed to the one-to-one efforts for consumer products. That's where generative AI can cut the time to merge customer data from both marketing and CRM systems, Parsa said.
On top of that, CDP data can further personalize campaigns to longtime users of a company's product because it holds information about product usage, adoption and other data points that aren't contained in the CRM or marketing systems. Parsa said the typical Adobe CDP user is a large enterprise that deploys multiple CRMs as well as collects data from applications and services outside of CRM or marketing for a more complete customer picture.
Manufacturing and financial services customers will be the most likely early adopters of Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, Parsa said. Those verticals typically have the most advanced data strategies. That's what it will take to push generative AI into the B2B realm, because it's far more complicated than B2C.
"We've seen some [progress], but by industries: high tech, manufacturing and financial services," Parsa said. "[That's] why I believe they are ready to now adopt this new way of nurturing those buying groups."
Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is a new product that carries its own license and is priced according to the size of the user's marketing operations.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
