I attended the Adobe Summit last week — one year on from the release of Firefly — and one of my big takeaways was how clear it is that B2B content workflows will undergo major change in the relatively near future. While generative AI’s power to enhance productivity and creative work is well acknowledged, there was renewed evidence and promise at the Summit about how enterprises will use genAI to ensure brand safety and enable more employees to personalize content for different audiences, markets, and channels.
As it relates to B2B content, some of Adobe’s announcements highlighted the importance of:
- Accelerating content creation and production with brand consistency. Creative teams have eagerly adopted Firefly, Adobe’s family of genAI models initially focused on image and text effect generation, tapping into a library of licensed content from Adobe Stock and public domain content where copyright has expired, providing creatives commercially safe images for use in their creations. Now, Firefly Services and Custom Models allow organizations to train and fine-tune Firefly on their own branded content, IP, style guides, and existing assets. This means you can generate content that’s specific to your products and brand, using your campaign or event styles and backgrounds, to ensure consistency. Teams with API access can edit and assemble content from years of your creative innovations in Creative Cloud and move faster in high-volume derivative work such as resizing, reformatting, and localizing content.
- Customizing content at the last mile. Adobe announced GenStudio, a solution first previewed last fall, as a new application to help marketers personalize their content for different channels and audience segments. Although it was first perceived as a solution integrating Adobe’s products across the content supply chain with the addition of Firefly (e.g., Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Creative Cloud), there are also benefits for organizations that don’t have an existing Adobe footprint. B2B organizations can use GenStudio to set up brand guidelines and templates, then generate variants of a primary asset with Firefly and maintain variants within a content hub. This puts powerful capabilities in the hands of frontline marketers who need to get campaigns and content in market quickly, experiment with different treatments and iterate, and then reuse elements that are working with audiences.
- Increasing workflow efficiency. Adobe and Microsoft announced plans to bring Adobe Experience Cloud workflows and insights to Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. This means that marketers who work in Microsoft tools to develop content or campaign briefs, emails, and updated web copy can manage content approvals, stay on top of notifications, and take actions in the flow of their work instead of moving between different applications (e.g., moving between Microsoft tools and Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Workfront). Marketers can also create imagery with Adobe Firefly or copy directly in Word and publish to the web.
Act Now — And Use Marketers’ Existing Expertise — To Evolve Future Content Workflows
This progress signals a shift from organizations experimenting with genAI to using it for increased performance during the next year. B2B marketing organizations can learn from these announcements and begin to:
- Audit. Understand baseline content workflows and how brand guidelines and templates can be used at scale. Identify not only where most bottlenecks occur but also where there are multiple repositories with existing assets, images, or other components that can be used to train or fine-tune custom models.
- Assess. Evaluate the impact of automating manual activities and derivative content. Marketers spend an outsized amount of time resizing, reformatting, customizing, and assembling assets for campaigns and initiatives. Look for ways to instill brand guardrails with genAI and shift the workflow to content and creative teams focusing on primary assets and templates. Frontline marketers can then create variants they need in a range of brand-compliant styles and sizes, allowing more participation in the creative process.
- Act. Determine where integrations and partnerships deliver value for your teams. Moving between siloed applications has long been part of marketers’ daily work life. Your existing solutions may start offering ways to become efficient for quick website updates, tracking status notifications, or managing content reviews and approvals. Work with your content, creative, and frontline teams to determine which options deliver the most value — and allow for plenty of training, communication, and change management time to evolve how teams work.
If you’re a Forrester client and have questions about how genAI will change your content workflows, please reach out through your account team or schedule a guidance session.
