Strategic Benefits of AEM Cloud Service

Transcript

All right, everyone, thanks for joining. We will be getting started in the next couple of minutes. Today’s session will be focused on the strategic value of moving to AEM as a cloud service.

And welcome to new attendees. We will be starting in just one minute. Just leaving a bit more time for people to attend.

All right, conscious of time.

I think we will kick off now. My name is Martin and I’m going to go ahead and kick off the session today. So first and foremost, thank you for your time and attendance. Just to note that this session is being recorded and the link of the recording will be sent out to everyone who registered.

This is a live webinar and it’s a listen only format. But feel free to share any questions you have in the chat. Our team will answer it as possible.

Otherwise, we will get back to you on your questions post the session. I’m running this session today on my own. So we might not have time for Q&A at the end and I might not be able to see the questions that you’re posting. But rest assured, your answers will get, sorry, your questions will get answered post the session. Before we drill down on today’s topics, let me just quickly remind you of some of the other webinars that we have coming up and on demand.

So you can actually explore a wide range of our upcoming live sessions and on demand content on Adobe Experience League. These are meant to deepen your knowledge and stay up to date on the latest Adobe innovations. Sessions are led by Adobe experts and partners and cover best practices, product updates and real world use cases across Experience Cloud, allowing you to learn at your own pace and engage live with our community.

All right. So today’s session has been prepared for you by me and I sit in Adobe’s Ultimate Success team. Adobe Ultimate Success is our curated engagement model focused on ensuring customers that you achieve the most important business outcomes through Adobe solutions. We partner closely with clients all the way from onboarding to value realization, aligning strategy, resources and technology to drive long term impact and measurable results. Accelerators are specialized services designed to jumpstart and speed up customers’ progress towards specific goals. Together, Ultimate Success and Accelerators combine proactive partnership with practical high impact solutions, helping our customers unlock the full potential of Adobe technologies and maximize investment. All right. With that done and dusted and out of the way, let’s dive into today’s session, which will be focusing on the strategic value of moving to AAM as a cloud service.

And here’s how we’re going to structure the conversation today. So first, we’ll have a look at the current landscape and why so many organizations are rethinking their digital platforms. Then we’ll talk about the vision and strategy.

From there, we’ll introduce the Adobe solutions, walk through the core capabilities and finally validate it with a few real customer impact stories before closing up with some next steps.

So let’s have a look at the current landscape. So while personalization is a top priority for most organizations today, delivering at a scale is still proving difficult. On one hand, customer expectations are very clear. The majority want tailored and want seamless experiences across every channel and interaction. That expectation is now the baseline. At the same time, leaders fully understand the importance of delivering the right content at the right moment and the customer journey. Yet, many still say personalization remains prohibitively complex, driven by fragmented content, disconnected systems and limited operational scale. What’s changing is the emergence of a modern content supply chain powered by cloud scale and the latest AI driven innovations. By unifying content, data and activation on a cloud native foundation, organizations finally have a practical path to making personalization not just possible, but repeatable and scalable.

When we talk about personalization at scale, it really comes down to three things working together. Content, cloud and AI.

First, the content supply chain. Personalization only works if teams can assemble high quality experiences from reusable, well managed content. Cloud modernization makes it possible to generate variations, target segments and automate delivery without slowing teams down.

Second, Gen AI and cloud innovations. This is where the step changes happens. By unifying content, data, orchestration and AI in a modern cloud foundation, organizations can analyze signals faster. They can make better decisions and activate personalization in near real time.

And finally, rapid scale and deployment. Personalization isn’t a one off campaign. It’s continuous.

Cloud native CI and CD. Testing and scalability allow together, excuse me, allow together cloud and AI don’t just enable personalization. They make it sustainable, scalable and measurable.

What’s become very clear is that AI is no longer a future consideration. It’s a primary driver of cloud modernization today. Even in the early stages of adoption, organizations are already seeing tangible benefits. A growing share of teams report that Gen AI is saving their time on their day to day work, helping them scale content creation and accelerating innovation across products and services.

More importantly though, at an enterprise level, AI is now shaping cloud strategy itself.

The vast majority of leaders say AI is a core reason they are modernizing applications and data. And many acknowledge that without cloud modernization, they simply won’t be able to capture AI’s full value.

So looking ahead, this momentum isn’t slowing down. Most enterprises expect the majority of their systems to move to the cloud over the next few years. Reinforcing that cloud modernization is a foundation for AI driven growth. Not a parallel initiative, but a prerequisite.

What we constantly see is that cloud modernization delivers real returns.

Especially when it comes to scale, resilience and security.

Across Europe, the vast majority of organizations are already capturing value from cloud with measurable improvements in operational quality, security posture and IT productivity. In some cases, that translates directly into business outcomes, faster time to market and meaningful growth in digital sales.

However, there’s an important counterbalance. The cost and complexity of migration remains a real obstacle. Many organizations have spent decades building and maintaining on-premise environments, which makes modernization both technical and organizationally challenging.

When migrations aren’t executed well, the results is often higher costs, delays and lost value. Sometimes paying more year over year, while timelines continue to slip. So while the upside of cloud modernization is clear, the difference between success and disappointment comes down to how deliberately and strategically the migration is approached.

Let’s jump into the ambition and approach.

When organizations look at cloud modernization, these are the common challenges that we constantly hear at Adobe.

First, many are still running self-hosted or heavily managed content platforms, which naturally limit performance, availability and the ability to scale. And that directly impacts customer experience. Second, there’s often a real difficulty in offloading application management and security. Because teams have already invested so much in existing workflows and operating models.

We also see outdated collaboration tools, creating silos between teams, slowing down content creation and making it harder to respond quickly when the market changes. And finally, without modern cloud foundations, organizations simply can’t access the latest content innovations and Gen AI capabilities, which make personalization at scale complex, expensive and sometimes even impossible.

These challenges are exactly why cloud modernization becomes a strategic priority, not just an IT upgrade.

When organizations talk about cloud modernization, what they really are trying to align are business and technical objectives.

On the business side, the goal is clear. Deliver exceptional customer experiences, ensure performance, availability and security and create more personalized, high impact journeys powered by unified data and commerce. At the same time, teams need the ability to respond quickly as market conditions change.

Underneath that sits the technical objectives.

That means adopting cloud native, scalable and secure content applications, offloading operational maintenance and continuously accessing the latest innovations and Gen AI capabilities.

When these two things are aligned, developers can iterate faster, marketeers can create and personalize experiences more easily and cloud modernization becomes a direct enabler of speed, scale and growth, not just a platform upgrade.

Gen AI fundamentally changes how we think about the value of cloud modernization. It’s no longer just about infrastructure efficiency or cost reduction. It’s about unlocking entirely new business outcomes.

When organizations build Gen AI into the cloud strategy, we see a step change in ROI. Gen AI driven use cases can increase incremental cloud ROI by 75 to over 100%. By both creating new revenue opportunities and reducing the time and cost of migration.

And this is especially powerful in DX cloud platforms where Gen AI enables things like auto generating on brand content variations, automatically tagging and repurposing assets and continuously optimizing experiences through intelligent testing. The result is that cloud modernization becomes a growth lever, not just a technical upgrade. And organizations that do this well can significantly outperform peers in the realized ROI.

What we see across successful customers is that there’s a clear blueprint for unlocking outsized ROI from cloud modernization. Number one, it starts by working closely with leadership and the right partners to identify the business cases and workflows that actually matters. Not just what’s easiest to move, but what drives the most value. Secondly, it’s critical to map cloud and Gen AI initiatives directly to business objectives at a division, product or organizational level.

When cloud is tied to measurable outcomes, the ROI conversations becomes much clearer.

And finally, success comes down to strong execution with detailed plans for risk mitigation, adoption and enablement.

That’s what minimizes disruption, accelerates adoption and ensures that value promised upfront is fully realized.

When we’re talking about getting leadership approval for cloud modernization, it’s really about shifting the conversation from technical to business value. It’s important to expand the stakeholder group beyond IT and include business and marketing leaders.

That’s where revenue impact, customer experience and competitive advantage becomes clear.

Also, modernization doesn’t have to become a one-size-fits-all journey. It simply cannot. By considering different paths, whether that’s a lift and shift, optimize or an iterative approach, organizations can move at the right pace and reduce disruption. And then finally, when cloud is approached as a long-term business strategy, it lowers risks, reduces total cost over time and gives leadership confidence that today’s decisions support future growth.

Cloud modernization isn’t just about the technology. It used to be, not anymore. It’s about having the right support around you. Adobe brings that through advanced tooling that helps assess, migrate and automate best practices. We have our professional services that guide and transition to reduce risk and a strong partner ecosystem that can scale delivery. Together, these resources help customers modernize faster, lower TCO and actually realize the value of the cloud.

Let’s then dive into our solutions.

Alright, this is really the core message. AM as a cloud service gives you the scale and performance you need today while unlocking the latest Gen AI innovations to deliver personalization at scale. In short, the cloud is what turns personalization from ambition into something you can actually operationalize.

And this is why cloud modernization really matters.

On the left side on a slide, with on-prem and VM-based setups, teams are limited. Innovation is generally slower, scaling is harder and advanced AI capabilities are difficult to operationalize.

As you move to AM as a cloud service, everything changes. The platform becomes containerized, you have edge delivery and connected to Adobe’s broader ecosystem. That’s what unlocks the Gen AI and personalization at scale. Integrating AM sites, assets and forms with tooling like the Creative Cloud, Firefly, Express and custom AI models.

The takeaway is simple. The cloud isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s what’s enabled teams to create smarter content, personalize faster and scale experiences confidently.

At the foundation, AM is cloud native by design, delivering speed, resilience and availability through edge delivery and global scale.

On top of that, Adobe contributes to invest in content innovation, using AI to help teams create more personalized, high-impact experiences on a modern platform. And finally, rapid experience delivery means marketers and developers can move faster together, launching, testing and evolving experiences without operational friction.

The proof is in the outcomes. Higher peak performance, faster site creations and measurable revenue impact for customers like Spark, Breville and Telegraph Media Group. AM cloud helps customers move faster, perform better and innovate continuously without managing the platform.

Here we talk about the performance you don’t have to think about. AM cloud is built cloud native from the ground up, with auto scaling and microservices that handle traffic spikes, assets processing and publishing automatically. Without impacting the author experience. Edge delivery services and global managed CDN make sure your content loads fast everywhere, even during peak traffic. And because the platform is always current, customers get new capabilities without upgrades, downtime or retesting cycles. The result is consistent, secure performance at global scale, which is why customers can handle multiple times their normal traffic without issues.

This slide shows how Adobe continues to innovate around content speed quality and insights in AM cloud. On the creation side, things like Quick Site creation, document based authoring and the Universal Editor remove friction so more people can create and update content without waiting on developers.

With Gen Studio and AI powered tagging, teams can now move faster across the entire content supply chain, from creating to activation to optimization. Quality and performance are built in with experience audit and one-flake analytics integrations.

So teams now, what’s working can improve continuously.

And all of this is delivered securely in a cloud, helping customers to turn content insights into real revenue impact.

But let’s have a look at how AM cloud help teams move faster safely.

AM cloud comes natively with CI CDs, containers and headless capabilities built in so teams can stand up environments quickly and deploy changes without heavy setup or manual efforts. On top of that, developers get flexibility, modern APIs, multiple deployment options and automated rollbacks, while the platform handles scaling, updates and stability in the background.

On top of that, things like security, monitoring, backups and recovery are all a part of the service, not a separate project. The end result is kind of simple. Teams launch new sites and experiences up to twice as fast without making on more operational risk.

This slide really simplifies AM into three core use cases that most organizations care about. The first one is creating and delivering digital experiences. That’s AM sites. Helping teams increase traffic and conversions by removing bottlenecks and letting content design and development move in parallel.

Secondly, managing and activating assets at scale with AM assets. One platform to source, adapt and deliver content across every channel fast. And then thirdly, forms that customers actually complete. Using AM forms to reduce abandonment, personalized communication and securely capture data without heavy deployment.

Together, these three use cases show how AM supports the full journey from experience creation to content activation to customer conversation.

AM sites is all about helping teams move faster while they’re delivering better digital experiences.

With edge delivery services, sites load extremely fast with directly improved CEO, traffic and conversions. At the same time, teams can personalize experiences more easily while governance stays firmly in place. The impact is very real. Customers see faster page creation, higher engagement and measurable lift in revenue like double digit increase in customer spends.

AM assets is really about helping teams get more value out of their content faster. It gives the organizations a single cloud-based place to manage millions of assets while making it easy to create and deliver endless variations across channels and devices.

Behind the scenes, workflows are automated by and AI helps with things like tagging and renditions. So work that used to take hours happens in minutes or even seconds. For creative teams, assets are easy to find and edit directly in Adobe tools they already use.

Customers like T-Mobile, as you see on the slide, have saved a million of dollars by streamlining workflows and brands like Orvis has reporting times by 75%.

AM forms is about turning forms from a necessary evil into a real driver of customer experience and revenue.

It lets teams create personalized digital-first forms across channels using AI and business-friendly UI so you don’t need developers for every change. What customers really see is speed and simplicity. Legacy PDFs can be converted into smart digital forms in minutes, integrated with existing systems and published securely at scale.

Again, the business impact is really tangible. What we see across a wide range of customers is faster onboarding, higher completion rates on forms, lower costs and fewer point solutions.

AM as a cloud service, looking at the service infrastructure. This shows the end-to-end architecture of AM as a cloud service and how Adobe separates content management from experience delivery to drive scale performance and resilience.

At the bottom is content management. This is where teams author and manage content in AM, working in sites, assets and forms as well, using modern editors like the Universal Editor and Content Fragment Editor. Background processing and maintenance run independently, so authoring performance is never impacted.

Content is stored centrally and promoted through environments using a replication service, ensuring that governance is consistent.

At the top is the experience delivery. All traffic is fronted by a CDN, either Adobe managed or customer managed, and delivered through containerized preview and published tiers. These environments auto-scale and are immutable and require no manual patching. For performance at global scale, Edge Delivery Service push content, images and videos closer to end users, dramatically improving load times.

Surrounding all of this are built-in platform services, identity management, security, monitoring and CI-CD, enabling continuous delivery and enterprise-grade protection by default. The key takeaway is that AM as a cloud service lets teams focus on creating and delivering experiences, while Adobe fully manages scalability, security and operations.

AM cloud continues to innovate across authoring, performance and security. We now support content variation, generation and sites, and authoring directly in Edge Delivery Services, helping teams move faster, even faster, and optimize experiences closer to the customer.

AM cloud also delivers a 99.99% SLA with built-in multi-region resilience. Native integrations with Adobe Express and Firefly, combined with the Universal Editors for Headless, gives authors a consistent, modern editing experience.

All of this is secured by enterprise-grade WAF and DDoS protection. By default, AM cloud accelerates delivery, improves performance and reduces operational risks, without added complexity.

This slide illustrates both the pace and breadth of innovations available in AM as a cloud service. New capabilities across sites, assets, forms and the cloud foundations are delivered continuously. This is a fundamental shift from upgrade-driven releases to always current cloud-native innovations. What we see across a wide span of legacy customers is that they struggle to benefit from all the new innovations that Adobe has brought forth the past five years, even the last decade. But while being on a cloud-native solution, AM as a cloud service, those customers now always have the ability to utilize the latest innovation, and they are always on the most current version.

There are three core reasons why Adobe Experience Manager cloud service stands apart in the market.

First, it’s cloud-native by design. AM cloud isn’t a hosted legacy platform, it’s built for the cloud. That means automatic scaling, high performance, continuous updates and exceptional availability without customers managing infrastructure or upgrades.

Second, best-in-class DXP. AM brings together sites, assets, forms, screens, guides and AM Learning Manager into a single experience platform. This allows organizations to deliver and measure personalized experiences consistently across devices and channels. And third, Gen AI leadership. Adobe delivers personalization at scale with generative AI embedded across the content supply chain. From creation to activation, combined with intelligent automation and dramatically reduced time to market.

Taken together, AM cloud offers not just CMS, but a modern cloud-native AI-powered digital experience platform.

This slide really illustrates the evolution of AM deployments over time. On the left, you have on-premise, which gives you full control, but it also means that you own everything. Your own upgrades, planning for that. Your own scaling, your own security, your own all day-to-day operations. In the middle, you have the managed services option, which we have offered for many, many years. Which takes off some of the burden, but it’s still VM-based with scheduled upgrades and limited innovation velocity.

We see many of the customers that are on a managed services setup. It works perfectly well and it’s a strong setup.

And many customers are really pleased about not being responsible for all the hosting. But they still have to be in charge of the upgrade cycle. One of the most expensive pieces by owning your own upgrades is really the challenges of getting everything up to scale and ready in a manner where you can benefit off the newest integrations, the newest available features and the solutions that we offer. And then on the far right side, you have AM as a cloud service, which is a fundamentally different model, really. It’s fully containerized, as mentioned previously. It’s continuously updated. It auto-scales both author and publish. And it includes things like CDN, monitoring, security and CI-CD out of the box. So the real shift here is that moving from managing a platform to simply using a service with Adobe taking the responsibility for availability, performance and security.

All right. Validation and ROI. So organizations across industries are really achieving measurable business outcomes by modernizing how they plan, how they deliver and how they optimize their customer experiences.

These results demonstrate what is possible when teams align around clear use cases, shared KPIs and scalable execution model. Customers have realized significant gains in engagement, speed and performance, accelerating time to market, dramatically reducing content and page creation efforts, unlocking new revenue through better customer insights and improving experience quality through faster, more reliable delivery.

The outcomes highlighted here illustrates the type of impact that can be achieved when strategy, execution and measurement are connected. This engagement is designed to help customers define the right use cases, establish success metrics and build a value framework that enables similar repeatable results aligned to their own business priorities.

Here we look at the total cost of ownership over three years, and the key message is simple. AM as a cloud service is about 38% lower on average. On the left, you can see how on-premise and managed services started off cheaper.

But costs climb quickly as you factor in factors like the upgrades, you have your scaling, security and ongoing maintenance. With AM cloud, costs grow much more gradually because things like infrastructure, scaling, monitoring, security and upgrades are built into the service already from the get-go.

On the right, this table explains why. You have fewer infrastructure costs, you have fewer FTE hours spent on upgrades and testing and no major upgrade projects.

So the real saving isn’t just the license part, it’s less operational effort, it’s fewer surprises and it’s lower long-term risks.

On this slide, we try to translate AM cloud benefits into real tangible business value. On the asset side, teams upload and process assets much faster. They spend far less time on manual metadata tagging, thanks to AI, and they can find the right assets much more quickly.

When you add that up, it translates into tens of thousands of dollars spent every year in pure productivity.

On the side side, the big win is eliminating downtime during upgrades. Instead of losing weeks of publishing time each year, teams stay productive and a large part of that lost time can then be relocated to higher value work. The key takeaway here is that AM cloud doesn’t just reduce IT efforts, it gives back time to marketing teams and that time turns directly into measurable ROI.

And obviously it wouldn’t be a proper Adobe presentation without some self-embracement, but it’s with good reason. This slide brings in independent validation from analysts we all know and trust.

Across Forrester, IDC, and Gartner, the consistent message is that Adobe leads with a truly cloud-native strategy, not just a hosted version of legacy technology.

Analysts also call out Adobe’s AI-driven content intelligence, helping customers to automate manual work and move faster across the content lifecycle. And then finally, Adobe has been recognized for its deep integrations, broad partner ecosystem, and ongoing innovation, especially when it comes to delivering a modern, digital experience at scale.

So this is not just something we’re trying to push from Adobe, the analyst community is seeing this in the market as well.

To end things off, I have a few customer stories that I just quickly want to show. And this is a great example of how customers are using AM cloud to drive real measurable outcomes.

Spark New Zealand moved to the cloud to support AI-driven personalization at scale without increasing the operational complexity. By modernizing their content platform, they were able to improve engagement, speed up experimentation, and deliver more relevant experiences across their different channels. The result was not just a better performance, but a clear business impact. They had higher conversions, improved customer experience, and meaningful revenue uplift. It’s a strong example of how cloud enables teams to move faster while still delivering at enterprise scale.

The second and last customer reference story is around Prudential, which is a great example of what end-to-end transformation looks like in practice. They wanted to modernize how a 148-year-old brand creates content.

We’re dealing with an overwhelming volume of creative work and disconnected processes.

By moving to the cloud and modernizing on AM assets, Workfront, and Adobe Express, Prudential centralized workflows make content easier to find and reuse, and they free creative teams to focus on higher value work. The results were very tangible. A 365% year-over-year increase in digital engagement, a 1.2x ROI on their first major campaign, and a 11% lift in customer consideration. It’s a strong example of how Adobe helps organizations connect creativity, content, and operations to drive real business impact.

To end off this webinar, I brought forth an example of one of our Ultimate Success Offerings, which is a success accelerator called Strategic Roadmap and Cycle Planning. If you find yourself to be in a situation where you recognize some of the things that we talked about today, you might be considering moving to cloud in the future. You might be in a situation where you’ve already made a decision that you want to make the move, but are uncertain on what would be a good next step. Then talking to your closest Adobe contact would be a good next step, whether that would be the sales specialist in question, professional services, or if you have a CSM, customer success manager attached. Those would be very good contacts to reach out to. What we can do then is set up a series of sessions where we talk a bit more in-depth about what a cloud migration could look like for you. We could make an initial assessment of your current environment, how things are looking, how to make assessments compared to your business objectives in the near and far future to ensure that we create a migration path that is suitable to the journey that you’re on. Again, I mentioned before, there’s no one size fits all when it comes to moving into a fully cloud native environment.

Sometimes a lift and shift would be the best way to do things so that you could pretty much replicate everything you’re doing today, but in a cloud native environment. Sometimes maybe it makes sense to make some rebuilds depending on how complex or customized your current setup is.

In accelerators like this, these are some of the tasks, these are some of the challenges that we try to address, bringing in architects to come with best recommendations and best practices around how to progress your migration journey.

With that said, I want to move on to some Q&A if there’s any.

I was supposed to launch a poll as well. I’ll try to see if I can get that going. But if not, then that’s perfectly fine as well. I’ll try to see if I can capture some of the questions that have been posed. I had a few pre-session questions as well, so I’ll try to address them.

I do see a question here by Laura about some of the embedded A-B testing within AEM sites and how it’s optimized the site’s design and content quickly.

It’s a very good question. Normally that would actually not be a topic for this session as we talk more about the cloud migration strategy. Although this is a very good question, Laura, I would like to take that with you offline and come back with a good question for you, both to explain the content and context around it and provide you with some good documentation to explain what would be the best approach to this specifically.

If there’s any other questions, please come up with them. I’ll try to launch a quick poll.

All right. It’s not functioning the way that it should be. Anyway, we’ll leave the poll be for now.

I haven’t seen any additional questions come in. If anything will come up, if you have any questions coming up, please don’t hesitate to reach out either to me directly or you can contact your closest Adobe representative. They will be happy to assist you going forward.

With that said, let’s go ahead and give you guys 10 minutes back. I hope you enjoyed the session. I did. It was fun preparing.

I hope to have conversations with some of you going forward. That would be the main objective for me or assist in any way possible. I wish you a very happy holidays going forward and a great rest of the day. Bye for now.