Personalization at scale ‘needs a ton more creative assets, stuff that humans can’t develop in time to do what’s needed,’ says Ross Monaghan, a principal with Perficient’s Adobe practice.
As Adobe invests in more artificial intelligence products and features across its suite, solution providers such as Perficient are ready to work with customers to understand the new technology and apply it to their particular industries.
Ross Monaghan, a principal with St. Louis-based Perficient’s Adobe practice, told CRN in an interview that the company, No. 56 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, is differentiating itself through providing customers with more holistic solutions that incorporate Adobe technology rather than matching specific Adobe products to specific use cases.
The solution provider is also leveraging expertise in a variety of industries, including health care and manufacturing, to stand up Adobe AI offers within customers in areas where AI can increase efficiency and automate once-manual processes.
“No one’s actually trying to solve the main gap, which is changing folks from campaign-based execution to personalization at scale,” Monaghan said. Personalization at scale “needs a ton more creative assets, stuff that humans can’t develop in time to do what’s needed based on different personas, reach, devices, people and so forth.”
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Perficient And Adobe
Perficient representatives have been on site this week at Adobe Summit, the San Jose, Calif.-based vendor’s annual event, which runs through Thursday in Las Vegas.
The solution provider has held events at the summit around leveraging Adobe AI to help health- care providers improve access to care, using Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) to analyze data and meet customer experience objectives and taking Adobe GenStudio and modernizing content supply chains.
Perficient’s other vendor partners include Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Google.
“We’re just getting far more end to end in our ability to support our customers, which to me is the most exciting,” Monaghan said. “You can’t just be a one-trick pony.”
During the summit, Adobe showed that its AI investment isn’t winding down. The vendor revealed a new agent orchestrator capability in the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) as well as deeper collaborations with Microsoft and AWS, among other news.
As with other AI vendors, Adobe is changing entire job roles for a new era, Monaghan said.
“It’s probably the most exciting time to be a marketer,” he said. “Finally, we’ve got tools that have caught up to the ideas of, ‘I wish we could.’ Now it’s a matter of, ‘How quick can we actually activate on these things?’”
Perficient now has more than 300 Adobe technologists and business practitioners worldwide, with more than twice that number of employees supporting enterprise Adobe engagements, Matt Shields, Perficient’s managing director for the Adobe practice, told CRN in an interview.
In the AI era, customer content needs will actually quintuple in the next five years, Shields estimated. Adobe technology now empowers customers to make content fit individual personas.
“Technology is almost secondary,” Shields said. “Adobe is best in class in many areas. But the reality is, the exciting part is having conversations with customers around the larger problems that they’re facing.”
As a partner, Adobe provides plenty of enablement, marketing and co-sponsorship, product support and betas for Perficient, Shields said. And likewise, Perficient prides itself on offering Adobe feedback on products before they become generally available and on focusing feedback from a variety of customers for future Adobe product enhancements.
“Our value in the Adobe partner program as a Platinum Partner is very high,” he said.
