Aug 2023 Workfront Opening Keynote

Transcript

Welcome everyone to Experience Maker Skill Exchange. My name is Richard Whitehead. I’m the Director of Product Marketing for Workfront. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for you to be here virtually today. You’re going to hear a lot of amazing things from some great experts about Workfront. Today, I’m going to specifically talk about Workfront’s evolution, how we’re connecting collaborative work to the rest of the value chain. Then we’ll go into some Workfront highlights, showing you some new and available capabilities that we have in Workfront. And then finally, product innovation. Many of the things that you want to hear about. What are we cooking up in the back room? And how are we going to be providing these things for you in the future? So let’s get started. Let’s first talk about Workfront’s evolution. As you think about the evolution of Workfront, the first thing that I want to talk about is a brand new work report that we just put out. You can see some of the statistics here where 70% of employees are saying that they don’t have the technologies to support their day-to-day work. 48% of employees are struggling to effectively work in cross-functional roles. And 88% of employees are experiencing difficulty when it comes to collaborative work. As you can see from the quote there, you’re not alone. Many people are experiencing this, and how can you possibly be creative when you’re having to manage email and spreadsheets and all the crazy things that you work with every single day? Workfront has evolved from a small cub to a great lion. When we were first created as At-Task, we were project and task management software. Some of you may have used us back in the At-Task days. Then as we evolved, we turned into more collaborative work management, helping organizations to manage work across the ecosystem. And today with Adobe, we talk about the operational system of record. So what does an operational system of record look like? Work can be chaotic. Much like you see here, it’s a soup of spaghetti where everybody’s trying to get work done, but they don’t know where to go. They don’t want the technologies to use. As I said earlier, they’re using spreadsheets, they’re using email. In the case of being in the office, maybe there’s a drive by where they’re trying to come find you. This leads to poor business outcomes and poor employee experience. With Workfront and Adobe, we’re able to connect strategy all the way through to execution, starting with analyzing the opportunity, understanding and building the plan, prioritizing and assigning work, building the content or the capabilities that you need in the project, and then approving that all along the way. Finally, from a personalized standpoint, delivering those experiences that allow your customers to feel and experience the way that you want your brand to feel. If that’s not all, being able to measure and optimize that to ensure that you have a better plan moving forward. Workfront looks at the entire life cycle of work. We power the content supply chain. We enable cross application collaboration and agility, and we are unlocking that system of record. When we think about building the product, these are the three areas that we consider. And of course we do that at enterprise scale. Let’s now talk about some of the highlights of Workfront and what we’ve released over the last year. There’s been a lot of amazing capabilities that the engineering team and product management have been building for you, including streamlining Workfront and assets integration, creative cloud and document cloud integrations to allow you to better integrate between your creative teams and the rest of the organization. A new form designer, and finally blueprints, that ability to be able to take out of the box capabilities and be able to build your system on the fly. Other capabilities that we’ve provided in enhancements with integration are an enhanced agile experience. People want to work in both agile and waterfall. Financial management to ensure that the budgets that you have, you’re tracking what’s happening with your project all along the way, and it’s tied directly to your system of record for finance. Workfront boards and scrum functionality, and finally integration with Adobe analytics. Let’s talk about innovation that we’ve been doing and things that will be coming out later this year and early next year. One of those is around the content supply chain. With the content supply chain, we know the digital economy needs fuel to work, and the fuel for the digital economy is content. As you look at how that’s put together, all the way from planning to deliver and analyzing, Workfront plays a pivotal role in providing this capability across all of the life cycle of work. Additionally, tying into AAM assets and Creative Cloud and all the capabilities that you see there in the solutions. Let’s dive into this a little bit further. As you think about content supply chain, it also requires additional integrations. So we will be delivering other capabilities to deeper integrate with Adobe Experience Manager assets and provide additional enhancements for tighter unification of creative work and asset management. Workfront Fusion, of course, plays a pivotal role in automating and providing templates where you can actually get, just like a blueprint, a template of Fusion to be able to start as a basis for your workflow. A unified approvals experience. Some of this, in fact, was released in the 23.3 release just earlier in July. And then finally, substance integration. As you think about all the types of content that you have to produce, obviously 3D plays an important role. Additionally, resource management. So understanding global role rates. If you’re an agency, being able to then tie that to a specific location. Also, management of non-human resources. Things like cameras or studios and those type of things can be all part of your resource management plan. And then last but not least, additional Workfront Board enhancements to be able to provide you flexible work views for hybrid work management. Let’s now talk about that cross app collaboration and agility. Here we see things like enhanced sharing capabilities, being able to work with others across your organization and within your team. A brand new Workfront home experience. Some of that was released in 23.3 so that you actually can customize with widgets exactly what you want to see when you come into Workfront and present you with the work that needs to be done. That connected commenting stream so that comments can be shared across multiple Adobe applications. And then of course, the thing that you’ve all been asking for is Canvas dashboards and our new reporting capabilities. What about the system of record? How are we unlocking that? It all comes down to the base of the data. And so the common data model creates a common language for teams and technologies to work across the entire life cycle. In this example, I’ve showed a campaign so that you can see how flexible this data model is. So as you look at that common data model, it can then roll into additional taxonomies and information to then tie into the rest of the organization so that you can very quickly model the information, report on the information and have common views across your organization. One example of that is the new marketing calendar. So the marketing campaign calendar that you see on the bottom there will be delivered later this year. That operational data model that I mentioned before so that you have the flexibility to record the model which allows you to then have more control and flexibility with your data structure. And then finally that graphing ability, much like the marketing calendar, to be able to link records to begin to create your operational graph. All of that of course is tied to enterprise readiness. With enterprise readiness, it’s important that we provide you capabilities like the promotion of sandboxes. So as you’re working in a sandbox in preview, you’ll be able to quickly promote that into the rest of your organization for production. This is a common request that’s been asked for and we’ve delivered part of that in the 23.3 release even. And then the last part of that is work front fusion. Being able to tie that into the developer community so that now you have a cohesive view across all of the Adobe Stack for your developer integration. Now, no presentation at Adobe or anywhere these days would be complete unless we talked about Gen AI. So let’s talk a little bit about how Gen AI ties in with Adobe and with Workfront. It’s no surprise that demand for content continues to explode. We see needs for personalization and costs are of course skyrocketing. So with Gen AI, you can have it work as your co-pilot in that creative process, enabling significant savings and being almost like a sous chef to your creative process. Enterprises of course need assurance that that AI is in fact protected, that it’s part of their intellectual property. And so Adobe will continue to work to protect your valuable intellectual property as you create content with AI. We’ve been building AI for many decades, for over a decade actually. We’ve natively integrated AI early on with Experience Cloud. We have AI as a service with Adobe Sensei and Sensei Gen AI was released more recently, which then led to Adobe Firefly. So Adobe has been in this business for a very long time and we’re excited to be introducing new capabilities throughout the year. We are revolutionizing scaled content creation while ensuring the costs remain low. Creating quality content at hyper speed becomes more important than ever. Last I checked, most of us are not getting additional resources to do this. So you can create content beyond human scale. Of course, democratizing and providing on-brand content that is designed to be safe and easy to use for commercial use. Like I said, I am thrilled that you joined us today to be able to be part of this skill exchange. Hopefully you’ve found some interesting things about Workfront’s evolution, the highlights of what you have available today, and of course, upcoming product innovation. As always, please check out Experience League to be able to see things like roadmaps, training, and additional resources that will help you be successful with Adobe Workfront. Thank you.