Opening Keynote

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Experience Makers Skill Exchange. My name is Richard Whitehead. I’m the director of Adobe Workfront here at Adobe, and I’m so excited to be sharing with you all of the exciting things that we’re going to be talking about throughout the whole Skill Exchange, but also throughout the year. We know that work is chaotic. It’s a lot like this spaghetti slide that you see here. All of us experienced this, whether we’re at our existing companies or we’re at a new company and trying to navigate how to get work done is just a crazy mess. It’s disconnected, and we don’t know who to talk to at the right time and the right place. Documents contain strategic work that’s on somebody’s hard drive, and we have limited insights into what the work is happening in our organization. This is resulting in 75% of people saying that cross-functional teams are actually dysfunctional. And I find that ironic because we think that we’re doing our best work, but we don’t do our best work unless we know our role. We know that it matters, and we’re proud of our work. This cross-functional challenge or this dysfunctional challenge, I should say, is costing the world $8.9 trillion in 2023 alone. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly 9% of global GDP. So you can imagine what that’s costing your own organization to be able to get your work done. As we look at how people are solving this today, there’s a variety of ways that they’re doing it. And I wanted to show you this because quite often I’m asked, where does Workfront fit in the work management framework? You have solutions that are on that low breadth of work and the low sophistication of work. We typically refer to those as task management products. Marketing resource management is kind of that next level. Whereas a marketing organization, you may choose a solution that helps you get your marketing work done. PPM or project and portfolio management is that next step. And enterprise work management is where Workfront fits in to be able to manage the work across the entire lifecycle and across the enterprise of your organization. And that’s where Workfront really shines. Landing and marketing, but expanding into the rest of your organization. Workfront is three distinct but connected capabilities. Planning to unlock comprehensive visibility and create your plans and drive execution. Answering those business critical questions at every stage. Workflow or execution of that work so that you can elevate your work to a strategic priority and cross team collaboration. Really building on those enterprise workflows. And then that automation and integration is so critical to connect your work across your technology stack and really accelerate the time to market of those automation processes. When you connect these three distinct but connected capabilities, you now have an operational system of record. No other vendor can do that. What I wanted to introduce to you today and you’ll hear more about throughout this skill exchange is Workfront planning. Workfront planning is a brand new module and capability of Workfront. It allows you to achieve comprehensive visibility by uniting operational data and taxonomies into those systems and creating those connections. But most importantly, to be able to create views that you can have of your plans that are connected to that execution. With Workfront planning, there’s really kind of three core use cases. The first one that you see here is centralized plan management. Now plans today are typically created in silos. Those silos are typically documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, or meetings themselves can be a way of siloed planning that happens today. Those plans need to be visible to the rest of the organization and those plans need to be tied to the execution of work. So with Workfront planning, you really can create that consistency and alignment across all of your plans in the organization. Connecting those plans to your campaigns or connecting campaign planning. Campaigns, as we know as marketers, are very complex, require a lot of orchestration across the organization. Now I’m giving an example of a campaign, but this could also be any sort of work that’s happening in your organization, whether that be marketing, IT, new product development, HR, all across your organization, you have these type of orchestrated plans that you need to build. And then finally, marketing or the metadata of work. Isn’t it interesting that as you talk to people across the organization, they have a different term or different understanding of those work processes and they use different words to describe it. With Workfront planning, you’re able to take that entire lifecycle of work and manage it from a central location so that now you’re able to have a common language, driving that system of record into unified and governed ways of managing and planning your work. Let me show you some examples of that. When you’ve connected your entire department, you now have end to end visibility in those visualizations. So think about this, for example, you have a timeline view or a calendar view, and that timeline view allows you to see everything that’s happening in this case with a campaign. That campaign, when are things happening? What is the progress that we’re making in that? That progress indicator that you see there is coming from the Workfront execution portion. So as I animate this across this presentation, you can see that calendar in a variety of different ways, drag and drop it to a new location, or even go in and look at it from a table view. So you have a simple way of filtering that information, just like you would in a traditional view. Here I have a view of it in a brief, and so that brief can be dynamic instead of static that we see today in many organizations. So with Workfront planning now you have a centralized way to visualize all of that information. As you’re creating those records, again, providing that customization, you have a common taxonomy and a way to talk about your Workfront plans. Here we see, for example, that we have different record types, whether they be products or personas, projects and objectives, geographies or channels. And this is infinitely scalable to your operating model. And so with the records view, you can go in and create and manage those records from a single location. With Workfront planning, you now have visibility across the entire operating lifecycle. Again, to create collaborative calendars, a single source of truth, a flexible model, all of it being connected and then connected to the work that’s happening. And that will be available later in August, on August 28th. Now let’s talk about the users. Users need a modern, simplified and really delightful Workfront user experience. I tell people I want them to work. I don’t want them to work front. And so with this new way and the single view, users will have a flexible and intuitive way to interface with Workfront to provide them a better understanding of the things that they need to accomplish. So here in this view, and it’s going to loop a little bit, so I apologize for that, but you can see we use colors now as a way to distinguish the types of things that you need to work on. What tasks do I need to do? What’s available for me in a particular timeframe? Is it an issue or a task or a sub task? It depends that as a user, I don’t want to have all the complexity of Workfront. I just want to get into my task list and actually start doing some work. Here in this details view that you’ve seen a couple of times, that details view pulls it all together so that I can get that overview of everything that’s happening on that particular task, providing instant value for you and for your administrators. Next is integrations and automations. This work happens across your organization in different tools and in different systems. Being able to accelerate the time to market by integrating those solutions and automating them is super, super important. So we continue to create and build out our native integration with experience manager assets. Content is kind of the core to a lot of the work that happens in a marketing team, but marketing teams aren’t the only ones that create content. Content can come in the form of a mortgage application if you work in the financial industry. Content can come in the form of a different form that you’re building out for healthcare. And so forms that you have there are also assets or content. And so being able to drive in and see the asset folders and do the dynamic metadata linking is very important for you in this native integration. Now native integration is just one example of how you can integrate with Workfront into other systems like you see here. Another way to integrate with Workfront is through Fusion. Many of you are aware of Fusion and using it today. It’s a great way to provide a flexible and more scalable infrastructure for you to integrate modern SaaS applications, whether you’re automating that from Workfront to Workfront or into other applications from Adobe or even integrating that with applications like SharePoint or other Microsoft products or Google Suite applications. All of that can be orchestrated and integrated with Workfront Fusion. Personalization of scale is so important and AI is revolutionizing the way that people will work and are working today. So let’s talk a little bit about Adobe’s vision for AI. It’s first important to point out that AI comes in a variety of ways. AI comes in the sense of helping me in being able to assist me or summarize things, whether that be information that’s coming from Workfront or from other systems. AI generates content for me. So think about how would I be able to generate content inside of a document or create something that’s in a brief. That’s another approach for AI. And then finally, the third one is AI is actually going to help me to get insights and analytics. And so there’s capabilities that I’ll talk about here in a second that we’re bringing to market with Workfront. What’s unique about Adobe is our AI, we very much focus on scale, trust and enterprise readiness. You can be assured that when you use AI within any Adobe application, it can be trusted, it’s scalable and it’s enterprise ready. Within Workfront, there’s some exciting things that we’re bringing to market. Again, on that August 28th timeframe, that summary assistant is going to be available for AI. That AI summary assistant will take information from experience league, from within your projects and tasks and your formulas to be able to help you along the way with AI assisting. Later in the year and into early next year, we’re going to be bringing out capabilities for requests. So improving that request experience, think about how that is today and kind of how clunky it can be when you have to make a request, you have to search through a list and AI can actually help you to make that request, including curating assets or generating new assets for you in your brief. Same thing with brief assistant. So being able to pull in the right information and make briefs dynamic instead of static. This one, the last, the third one on this list is the approvals assistant. And I’m most excited about this one because many times some of the approvals that we’re looking for on a document can be done with AI in a very simple way. Maybe it’s a footer on a document that always has to be the same. Maybe it’s language. Maybe it’s the year. How many times do we get a PowerPoint and it’s got 2022 instead of 2024? That can all be automated through the AI approvals assistant and either approve the asset or reject it and request changes. Firefly proofing. So anything generated with Firefly could be automatically proofed and reviewed. Smart assignment. So knowing exactly the type of person that you may want to assign to a particular task or issue. Many times organizations, we hire people for their skills and then we forget about their skills. With the AI smart assistant, you can know all the skills across your organization and be able to assign them right through the AI assistant. Later this year, we’ll be coming out with Gen Studio. And of course, Workfront is a critical component of the Gen Studio app. Workfront is providing key capabilities and services to be able to provide you with the variations of the content that you’re creating to ensure that they’re on brand and that they’re approved. Let me show you a few examples of what I’m talking about with AI. This first one here is the approvals assistant. So here you can see I’ve got an asset and the approver that I’m going to use is actually the AI assistant is going to be the approver. So when I send that request, it goes through and it looks at my brand document and it tells me that for this particular ad, I need to do some work. So just like that, the AI assistant, in this case, the approval assistant has streamlined that brand compliance so that I can ensure I have brand compliance across all of my different assets. This one is the brief assistant. This should look familiar because this is Workfront planning. Here in Workfront planning with the brief assistant, I can go in and I can see exactly if I’m creating a new campaign, for example, and connect that to the different parts of the execution work and simply drag and drop a file and that file gets summarized and I can import the different objects and the fields that are related to that. So if I have a brief already, it’s a simple drag and drop and it will create that taxonomy for me automatically, including all the different capabilities for that brief that I need to do to submit that either to the creative team or some other content creator in the organization. This next one is Gen Studio. And so with Gen Studio, you’ll see some familiar capabilities. With the Gen Studio app, I can go in and I can see the content, campaigns and insights is all driven by the Workfront services. And so here AI pulls me in to a particular asset or campaign and I can see that campaign and I can take actions right from within Gen Studio to create those variations and ensure that content stays on brand. We are so excited about the capabilities that we’ll be releasing in H2 2024 and beyond in fiscal year 25. You’re going to hear more about these exciting capabilities in the sessions throughout this week. We hope you have a great skill exchange and we look forward to your questions.