Deep AI and Machine Learning Used to Uncover Powerful Insights Buried Deep in Data

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sept. 24, 2018 — Brands are struggling to make sense of an endless firehose of data coming from everywhere, including websites and apps, but also quickly emerging areas like voice and streaming audio. It is impossible to hire enough human talent to take on this task, leaving heaps of data un-accessed and unanalyzed across an organization. With the complexity of how consumers engage across different touchpoints, not having deep insights means that brands are forfeiting the chance to improve the user experience and drive competitive advantage.

Adobe today unveiled a new virtual analyst in Adobe Analytics that builds on existing technologies to now automatically uncover insights without the user having to ask. By leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework, it will empower brands to drive more value from analytics by surfacing signals that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. This can include valuable insights around what drove unexpected spikes or drops in key metrics, such as online orders and web traffic, critical to addressing escalations in real-time and finding new opportunities to grow revenue.

“We took our time to build the new virtual analyst, spending years rigorously validating the technology with real customer data and training the AI model to make sure the outputs solved real problems,” said John Bates, director of product management, Adobe Analytics. “A major global brand in the early testing program told us the insights were comparable to adding over one hundred data scientists to their team. We are happy with the feedback thus far and look forward to rolling this technology out more broadly.”

Capabilities of the new virtual analyst include:

• Uncovers the “Unknown-Unknowns”: The virtual analyst will always search and analyze a company’s data, prioritizing changes that it finds interesting. Deep learning models allow it to assess every possible data point across all customer interactions, from how long consumers spend on a website, to movements between app and web. These “unknown-unknowns” contain insights that brands not only didn’t know, but also had no idea to look for. There simply is not enough time or resources to uncover these secret lottery ticket insights buried deep in data. A retailer, for instance, could begin to see critical nuances in how different demographics buy clothes online, or fix broken experiences that bleed money.

• Maximizes Relevance: The virtual analyst proactively prioritizes data analysis based on business and user context (accounting for both real-time activity and historical data) without the user having to prompt the system. These nuances are key: Consider an airline which has a major sale every year on the first Monday of June. When insights are surfaced that day, they will be benchmarked against the same day in previous years. Machine learning algorithms will also de-duplicate recommendations. A spike in revenue, orders and conversion, for instance, all relate to the same event and will be bundled as one meaningful insight. 

• Adaptive Learning: Over time, virtual analyst will take into consideration the preferences and consumption patterns of users to provide more intuitive, relevant insights. It will also analyze the behaviors of all other users within a company to find similar people and use that to inform better personalization. The system will provide a means to “like” or “not like” recommendations, which reinforce the machine learning model and makes virtual analyst more intelligent over time.

The new virtual analyst is built on an umbrella set of solutions in Adobe Analytics. Powered by Adobe Sensei, this includes Anomaly Detection (where the system looks for statistically significant deviances in data), as well as Contribution Analysis (identifying factors that contribute to anomalies). Today’s unveil builds on top of Intelligent Alerts with new advanced AI capabilities.

About Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe offers the industry’s only end-to-end solution for content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and commerce. Unlike legacy enterprise platforms with static, siloed customer profiles, Adobe Experience Cloud helps companies deliver consistent, continuous and compelling experiences across customer touch points and channels – all while accelerating business growth.

The world’s most popular brands rely on Adobe Experience Cloud to run their businesses, including the ten largest corporations and financial services companies in the U.S., nine of the ten largest media companies and nine of the ten most valuable telecom companies. Adobe Experience Cloud manages more than 233 trillion data transactions annually, including 41 trillion rich media requests, over 150 billion emails and $3 billion in ad spend. Industry analysts have named Adobe a clear leader in over 20 major reports focused on experience – more than any other technology company.

About Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

###

© 2018 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts
Kevin Fu
Adobe
415-832-2266
kfu@adobe.com

Stefan Offermann
Adobe
408-536-4023
sofferma@adobe.com