Opening Keynote

Transcript

Welcome everybody to Experience Makers The Skill Exchange. I’m Paul Vaughn. I’m the Senior Director of Product over Workfront. And here to talk to you about the direction and some great things that are coming up with Workfront. Now they asked me to do a little bit of introduction about me and who I am. I’m just going to tell you a quick little story. When I became a grandfather for the first time I thought I’m going to grow my beard out and see how that works. And when I did I thought, hey I recognize that guy. I bet you I could do something here. And so I got to be Santa Claus for my grandson which was really fun. The key takeaway here just about me though is that Santa Claus uses Workfront for all of his campaign planning. So just a little bit about me before we get in. Now I’m going to bring this slide up. This is standard operating procedure here. What we’re going to show you is for informational purposes only and not necessarily a guarantee of future feature functionalities and our subject to change. So with that out of the way let’s dive in. Now before we start I want to level set and really about why you’re all here. What you’re doing. Why you’re a customer of Workfront and what we’re all about. What we’re talking about today is creating a marketing system of record. And what that means by definition is the centralized structured foundation for how marketing work is planned, executed, delivered and measured. So it connects campaign planning with content production, aligns execution with performance data and ensures consistency through standardized processes and taxonomies. Hopefully that’s the journey that you are on. When we talk about Workfront this is what we mean. That Adobe Workfront is the gold standard marketing system of record for enterprises and agencies.

That is what we are. That is what we do. No one does it like we do. So let’s talk a little bit about what that means.

What does it mean to be a gold standard marketing system of record for enterprises and their agencies? And that’s really the structure of what I want to talk about today. First it means the system has to be intelligent. How do we define that? We define it as providing a frictionless experience for marketing and creative personas with intelligent features to help them move from unstructured work, the chaos, to context aware structured workflows to deliver against their goals. Now I’ve enlisted the help in the spirit of being concise of one of my UX partners, Brooke. And I’ve had her record just a couple of little videos I want to show you throughout this to illustrate what I mean by adding intelligence to Workfront. Going to give a few examples of how AI will make Workfront more intelligent and how that will streamline workflows. Starting with creating a campaign from a document. To create a new campaign we simply select create from file and bring on a campaign brief.

The content from that document will then be mapped to the fields of the campaign and at the same time an intake QA QC process is running to verify the data quality and make sure nothing is missing.

Once that completes we see the new campaign and which fields are populated by AI. The objective field has been flagged but it’s giving suggestions of how to make that feel more valuable. For additional help we can access AI assisted writing.

And once that generates a new option I can keep it and then my campaign has been created. We can also see the content and assets has been populated and clicking here we can see suggested high performing and approved assets that are coming from the content advisor in AEM. This campaign looks ready to go.

Next we’re going to turn that campaign into a project that can be actioned on. So here I click on that campaign and when I click create project I’m given suggested templates based on the content of the campaign. By clicking a template we can see that a similar process is kicked off. This time mapping the content from the campaign to the fields that are needed for a project and that same QA QC process is running. Once that completes we have our new project and we can see here that a couple other areas have also been populated with AI.

Once again the AEM content advisor is suggesting the right content to use based on that campaign. And I can also see that my list of tasks has been planned out as well as due dates and intelligent assignments based on availability. Looks like this project is ready to start.

So thanks Brooke. That’s what we mean by adding intelligence to Workfront. It’s taking those mundane tasks those tasks that are happening all the time but also taking the intelligence from a brief and bringing it right into Workfront and really adding that structure that you need to begin to get your work done. So let’s move to the next thing that creates a gold standard marketing system of record and that’s really about being visible. What do we mean? So what we mean by that is it provides end to end visibility from ideation and planning to execution and measurement resulting in a standardized marketing system of record that delivers real time insights. That’s really what this is about. Real time insights into the status, priorities and performance of all marketing creative work. So again, listen Brooke to show that and take it away Brooke. I’m going to give a few examples of how AI will improve visibility within Workfront. Starting with intelligent answers with the AI assistant. Here we have a new conversational interface which allows for a more robust interaction with the assistant. We see some suggested prompts, one of which requests an executive summary of project health. By continuing this conversation, a report is generated with visualizations to quickly answer the question of how healthy are this quarter’s projects. And the assistant also prompts the user to drill into which tasks are currently overdue.

This allows for easy visibility into what might be going wrong so that any issues can be addressed quickly. This conversation could easily be continued or a new conversation could be started. Next I’m going to talk about accelerating review and approval with AI collaboration. Brand guidelines can be managed inside of Gen Studio which the AI reviewers will use to assess marketing content. And over in Workfront setup, a marketing ops user can create AI reviewers and link them to those brand guidelines.

Now, when a designer wants to send a review off for approval, AI analyzes the project context and prior patterns to suggest relevant approvers and AI reviewers. If this looks good to her, she can send this off for approval.

She sees right away that the AI reviewer has generated a score, flagged five issues, and identified which brand guidelines were met. She can review a summary of these issues along with specific details and suggestions. And over in Frame, the approver can also see the AI reviewer’s feedback. He can engage with the AI to refine its suggestions and make sure that the designer knows just what to change.

After the designer makes the suggested changes and uploads her new version, and after the AI reviewer and the approver only have good feedback, this asset can be approved in Frame.

The asset has now successfully passed both the AI reviewer and human approvals and is ready for use.

Awesome. Super exciting things. I don’t know if you quite caught it there, but we’re really talking about what a conversational AI or conversational front end to Workfront really can do to power getting all of those insights out when you need them where you need them. We’re really excited about that. Now last, let’s talk about Connected. What does Connected really mean and how does Workfront fill that role? So Workfront serves as the workflow engine for all Adobe Gen Studio to optimize customers’ content supply chains. We do this by ensuring that workflows and data are seamlessly connected, readily accessible, and easily managed across applications. So once again, I’ve had Brooke record a little demo for me to have her show you again what we mean with some real-time examples. A few examples of how we’re making Workfront more connected across workflows and applications, starting with seamless content from ESM. Here we have a designer working in Photoshop to complete a task she was assigned in Workfront. When she goes to save this finished asset, she can select a Workfront project to save directly to the Creative Cloud. She can even select the right folder within the project. And over in Workfront, we can see that the asset has been uploaded. The project name and file structure mirror what we saw in Photoshop, and this is a clear indication that the systems are connected and sharing data seamlessly. The project owner can now easily view details of this asset and kick off the approval process. The approver receives an email with a link that will take her to that very same asset in Frame.io. And once she approves the asset, that change in status will be reflected across products Next, I’ll show the accelerated performance marketing with connected campaign metadata.

Here in Workfront, we can see that a campaign manager has planned the campaigns, programs, and deliverables for the Winter X Games 2025.

Each field and connection they add becomes rich metadata that will be leveraged throughout the content supply chain lifecycle.

A marketer has been tasked with generating awareness for the Winter X Games. In the performance marketing app, he can see that the campaign has already been intelligently populated with personas and products. He can click over to the content tab to see that assets have already been linked that he can use for generating his new social post. Clicking into an asset reveals the same metadata panel that is shown in other content hub experiences. The marketer selects a few assets and clicks create.

The create workflow is now automatically preloaded with the right metadata and referenced assets in the campaign. The same metadata connection will help him in activation also, allowing him to automate the form fields in his paid channel launches. And after these experiences are launched, insights also become aligned to the organization’s shared taxonomies, enabling better decision making in the future. Awesome, thank you Brooke. Again, super excited about how we’re connecting, how Workfront acts as that workflow engine for all metadata and all connection out into Gen Studio. So very exciting things. I know you’re excited about what you’re seeing there. I do have one more thing that I think might be interesting. Not everything that we’re doing is around AI. We’ve got a really powerful enterprise system. And we also know that there’s some depth in that click path. How are people getting to what they need? So we’ve recognized that and we’re looking at how do we fix some of the basic navigation and areas in Workfront. So here’s one more thing to take a look at. I’m going to give a quick overview of our work to streamline navigation and improve the user experience. This would not only bring Workfront more in line with wider Adobe patterns, but make navigating Workfront simpler and more predictable. Here I am on Workfront homepage and you can see that all the navigation has now been consolidated into a single left nav panel. My shortcuts such as pins and recents are still available at the top of the panel, along with all of the functions in Workfront that I have access to. By grouping these into collapsible categories, we allow users to clean up this space if there’s things they don’t use as often. And we also hope to include customization to allow users to reorder or even hide navigation items. In addition, the entire nav panel can be collapsed to save space.

Now if I navigate to my list of projects and then into a specific project, we can see that the navigation has become contextual.

I still have quick access to home, my pins and recents at the top, but the main part of the navigation is now allowing me to navigate within a project. And if I drill further by going into a specific, into a list of tasks and into a task within that project, you can see the navigation again has become contextual to the task while maintaining my shortcuts.

From here, if I would like to access another area of Workfront, I could jump back to home and reuse my shortcuts or even the new breadcrumb pattern that we’re working on currently. Or I could just simply back out until I have my full navigation again.

This allows for navigation to always be in the same place for the user, no matter what they’re looking at in Workfront, what type of object their navigation is going to be in that left panel. We are currently setting up user testing to validate this new approach and make sure that any changes we make do improve the experience for our users.

Awesome. So you heard her. This is something that we heard from customer feedback that we needed to help fix that navigation and streamline. So we’re really excited about it. And in conjunction with the work we’re doing with intelligence, making things more invisible and make them more connected. So just to recap, let’s talk about those key takeaways. Workfront is the gold standard marketing system of record. No one does what we do. You know that because you’re customers and you are working and striving towards making your own marketing system of record. We’ve talked about intelligent. We showed you what creative brief ingestion in Workfront planning looks like. We talked about the content advisor and how that’s serving up the relevant content for the project that you’re in. We talked to show a little bit about intake and that project creation and how those connect from planning over to workflow. We talked about some visible principles about the conversational interface for answers. We’re super excited about that. It’s really the way we are going and the way most enterprise software is going. We talked about the AI reviewer and showed that. We talked about data visualization and how to get those insights right when you need them. Now finally, we talked about connected. We showed the work in progress flow with ESM for that long term storage. We showed you review and approval across Gen Studio and how exciting that is and how it cuts across the entire Gen Studio solution. Finally, we showed you the power of metadata and what that looks like when you have a well-formed metadata and taxonomy plan inside of planning. It can propagate throughout all of your work and inform everything you’re doing in Gen Studio. Then finally, we showed the navigation improvements that we’re enhancing for that overall user experience. We’re super excited about it. We’re super excited about the skills exchange. We’ve got a ton of great sessions, sessions around AI, sessions around user management, sessions around review and approval, and many other things. Participate in those and learn, whether it’s in that learn path or the grow path. We’re just super excited that you’re here and you’re learning and you’re on this journey with us. Thank you very much for your time and have a great skill exchange.