Text of Shantanu Narayen’s Keynote At Adobe Summit 2018
Videos are always a great way to convey a message and it’s more exciting if the speaker shows passion in his talk and engages his/her audience. Shantanu Narayen is not new and like Adobe’s products he is very great at story telling. He delivered a fantastic introductory keynote speech at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas on March 27, 2018.
Like many of you i could not attend the conference, but fortunate enough to watch it Live on Adobe TV (employees only). There were some great points i noted but thought if all of us can have a copy of the TEXT of his entire talk, it would be a great document for learning and future reference.. and i started to explore the options to transcribe his speech t text. Wanted to share the complete text of this talk in this post.
Thank you. Welcome to Las Vegas. On behalf of the over 18,000 employees at Adobe. Thank you. Thank you to the 13,000 people who have joined us here today in Vegas and the thousands more who are watching us online. We have a fantastic week plan you’ll hear from some of the world’s leading Brands and thinkers you’ll get exposed to a numerous amount of innovations that we have in store with the experience Cloud, but I think most important we hope you leave.
With a much better understanding of what you and your organization’s need to do to be experience makers knowing that adobe is here all along with you during that Journey as we kick things off. I wanted to ask just a simple question. Do you remember the last vacation that you took my last vacation was a spur-of-the-moment our eldest son?
Who grew up in California has just moved to the east coast and my wife reminded me that his he turns 27. It’s the first birthday that we haven’t celebrated together, so we flew to New York and we came out we saw Hamilton with tickets from StubHub. We had a great meal together as well as we went and visited a number of sites in New York everything done.
Digitally. It was only 48 hour. But when I think about that experience it still brings a smile to my face, and I have happiness at home with my wife when you look at the law moments in your life all the experiences that really stand out your favorite trip your make or break product launch the birth of your first child you might remember over time some of the details, but it’s the overall experience that stays with.
Evoking feelings that create these lasting memories build affinity and keeps us chasing that experience over and over again these feelings influence the choices. We make where we spend our money where we spend our time, and who we give our loyalty to think about it and everything that we do we choose music that might remember us of what we were when we were young we pick clothes that make us confident we buy.
That may make us feel safe and secure or fast and free and I think we’re all seeking these phenomenal experiences and many successful companies recognize that Trend they recognize the reality of today is that experiences rise above everything else and they built their incredibly successful businesses on this simple idea look at some of the brands that are going to be here with us this week, Coca-Cola.
Koch has known that for more than a century that it fails far more than just an iconic beverage. They recent marketing campaigns taste the feeling and open happiness says at all the NFL in sports and entertainment it appeals to fans who may never buy a ticket, but who consume everything that they know about their favorite player who wake up on Sunday mornings thinking about their fantasy lineup.
And are as loyal to the team as they might be to their family or a company like Tourism Australia who knows that travel is the absolutely Ultimate Experience, it’s finding new ways to connect with their Adventure Seekers and persuade them to book their next experience Down Under. We think that the fundamental truth and challenge facing every business today is.
People buy experiences not products it used to be that products was the basis of differentiation, but not anymore because businesses must now deliver great experiences to win in this increasingly competitive World competing for the hearts and minds of all their customers and exceeding the ever increasing expectations that consumers have during every point in the.
It involves every business thinking of themselves as a subscription model knowing that consumers can choose to renew cancel or grow at every instance with every click. I think it means transforming how every one of us as a business operates always on knowing everything about the customer anticipating the future across every device every.
And every moment I think we all know this to be true of our own experiences whether it’s with shopping whether it’s with banking or just enjoying your favorite cup of coffee, but it’s as true right now. Not just in business to Consumers, but in business to businesses companies that operate in construction and heavy equipment and office furniture as well as Financial serve.
Says because people’s expectation of this experience doesn’t change the moment when they go into their office and so every organization needs to get up and wake break through this noise and speak to the customer in this unique Genuine Voice to leave this Lasting Impression, and so we think about it Adobe.
What does it take what does it take to make? This great experience we believe that first to deliver a great experience you must design for Brilliance because design is not just the way something looks. It’s about the absolute engagement that you have with your customers, and we think that all great experiences start with great design that spark of creativity that was combined with a clear purpose to bring this great experience, too.
And creativity and design of always been at the heart of adobe from ideation to storyboarding from prototype to experience delivery. We are at the Leading Edge of design Innovation and creative collaboration delivering brand new tools like Adobe XD to support the new. And the new places that people create this content because it’s a far more complex world than when Adobe was first started.
It isn’t just about that webpage or the mobile app. It’s actually now anything that has a surface or a screen or a digital interface and with augmented reality and virtual reality and voice and touch being a reality of this new engagement experience and there a number. Technological advancements and many possibilities, but we had Adobe will work hard to make all of those happen for you.
It’s all very exciting, but only if it’s well-designed if we believe it Adobe that focusing on this experience design is absolutely worth the effort because we know that compelling and intuitive experiences are an absolutely proven. Competitive Advantage second to build these great experiences you must rewire the entire Enterprise for intelligence and it starts with data data.
That’s required to understand every person’s context in every moment that is real time that is refreshed in milliseconds not in hours, or days a week, but then data alone is not enough. Because to ensure that every individual gets the experience that they demand you need intelligence and intelligence will speed up the learning process for an Enterprise it will notice anomalies it lied enta fi customer pain points and it will infer their intent and desires, and we believe that intelligence is going to turn data into insights so that you can take the right action quickly and that’s when the real magic.
Content intelligence is just a ski to generate the massive amounts of content. That’s required for personalization at scale a deep understanding of this content, and how it’s composed and how it’s delivered is absolutely critical and no one knows this better than Adobe when you wire your Enterprises for intelligence.
You’re putting content and data to work. Scale allowing you to deliver this consistent and exceptional experience every time and everywhere and these experiences will produce Real Results in real-time the final ingredient for great experiences is having the right Enterprise architecture one. That’s built for action on behalf of the customer.
We’ve all experienced the frustration. Of not getting the Innovation that we want as fast as we need personalization projects can take months if not years and the problem today is this that Enterprise it systems would design for a different time and a different world and the move to the cloud was a major disruption, but it’s still has fallen short.
We think a new architecture for Enterprise business is required. It’s to make this vision. Of delivering a customer experience across every channel manageable is to break down the silos in your organization so that you can align around the customer journey, and it’s to rip out costly and frustrating digital duct tape that might exist in the Enterprise.
That’s being used as a stopgap measure today. It’s an extremely tough challenge to solve one that requires platform thinking and multi. Years of deep investment, but it Adobe we believe it’s the toughest challenge that are worth. Solving as a product and Innovation focused company Adobe has always invested in building platforms that have a long lasting Legacy and impact we set the standard with Creative Suite bringing together the suite of applications, and then we completely reimagine that with creative.
Our success game from not only having the best products in the world like Photoshop or illustrator or InDesign, but in insisting at Adobe that they work together seamlessly with the quality and precision that professionals expected and consumers wanted all around the world with how colors and fonts and the user experience and digital assets were handed with collaboration fundamentally built.
To users we document cloud and PDF we establish the global standard for digital documents and transformed, how businesses and people interact with information. We’ve expanded to Services now like electronic signatures that support moving inefficient paper-based processes to digital and we continue to innovate of making PDF work incredibly well across multiple platforms and every day.
But with experience Cloud our aspirations are equally if not more ambitious our vision for the experience Cloud does not stop at making the most complete set of solutions enabling Enterprises to deliver personalized consistent results producing experiences our vision is to actually create. A platform that is the heart of this modern Enterprise architecture the platform needs to deliver unified experiences across all touch points and all channels whether that be the web mobile social online offline anything that has a stream.
It has to streamline the integration of any system that you might have at the back end and the front office and the back. With this focus on the customer Journey, but at the core our investments in the experience Cloud are focused on the innovations that will make this a platform that will grow with our customers.
In addition to delivering great solutions that you’re going to hear about from Brad. We’re focused on four things the fundamental issue of taxonomy. What is the language in the Enterprise? Around the customer Journey that we can all standardized on and we’re working to define a unified customer profile and more broadly this common taxonomy that can make the seamless not just across our Solutions, but every other system that you have in the Enterprise.
We’re focused on delivering a common Adobe Cloud platform that brings all this content and data together in a unified way. We’re focused on Adobe sensei. Our framework for artificial intelligence, and we spoke earlier about how critical intelligence has become we have to leverage the hundreds and trillions of data transactions that we process every year, and we will advance how Sensei understands this customer Journey smarter searches better recommendations, and the Holy Grail for all of us as marketers hyper personalization at scale and because no platform is an eye.
But working hard at further opening all of this platform to our partners systems integrators and media agencies so we can have an ever-expanding ecosystem put simply for us the Adobe experience cloud is an engine to get the right data and the right content to the right places at the right time. It sounds really simple, but it’s hard work, and it’s something that we believe at Adobe.
We’re uniquely positioned to. Because no one else has the breadth of assets the quality of data, and the targeted artificial intelligence capabilities that we have to make this a reality for you. This is our strategy. We’re excited to be able to deliver it to you with rule that many of the most successful most beloved brands in the world are here with us this week companies across all types of Industry.
That are embracing the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation, and we’re proud and we’re grateful to count all of you as well as many more as customers as we partner along with you on this journey to become an experienced business, but behind all the brands are all of you the digital marketers the brand leaders.
The technologists the data scientists the chief Revenue officers The Experience makers our mission is to change the world through digital experiences, but in truth as we think about it. It’s a shared Mission between Adobe and every one of our customers because it’s the experience makers in this room and those who are attending that are actually changing the world.
Let’s continue to change. Together thank you and now to hear a lot more. I’d like to introduce the host for the summit our Executive Vice President of the digital experience business Brad Rancher enjoy the summit.
You may also see the recording at https://summit.adobe.com/na/sessions/summit-online/online-2018/?faas_unique_submission_id=7796B27F-5FF8-5EF9-5278-8074B8C0CBE2#22019
