Analytics: the Rise of Customer Intelligence

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Adobe Analytics Partner Café in Chicago. This awesome event was a gathering of fellow Adobe Analytics practitioners and partners to hear directly from Adobe about the roadmap of the Adobe Analytics Cloud, get insights into Adobe.io and network with other experts.

2018: The Year of Customer Intelligence

The primary trend from the Café is the convergence of Digital Analytics and Business Intelligence. This convergence centers around Customer Intelligence which combines the insights and business value of Business Intelligence with the speed of Digital Analytics.

In 2018, Adobe is focusing on building capabilities in the Adobe Analytics Cloud to enable users to develop Customer Intelligence. This will drive significantly more value for Adobe customers from the same data they already capture in the Adobe Analytics Cloud.

Digital Analytics + Business Intelligence

To make Customer Intelligence a reality for its customers, Adobe will bring together Digital Analytics and Business Intelligence. This means reducing silos and opening the data model for Adobe Analytics. This new data model is tremendously exciting as it opens new possibilities for tracking and insights gleaned from Adobe Analytics, but coupling that with the power of Business Intelligence brings the real magic.

Adobe's partnership with Microsoft has come with a deep integration between Adobe Analytics and PowerBI. This is the first step in unleashing the power of Customer Intelligence by enabling Business Intelligence analysis on data coming directly out of Adobe Analytics. As this partnership deepens and Adobe continues to enhance the Adobe Analytics Cloud, these capabilities will increase.

Open Platform: Adobe IO

Adobe has also been taking steps to enable every customer to achieve Customer Intelligence, no matter their need or BI solution. Adobe.io was announced last year at Summit and in the subsequent year, Adobe has worked hard to enhance their API capabilities and open up access to customers and third-parties.

With Adobe IO, developers and analysts can easily extract data from Adobe Analytics Cloud and surface it new and interesting ways.

Citizen Data Scientists

While the benefits of Customer Intelligence are tremendous for organizations which can leverage the data, not all organizations have the staff or capabilities to run a world-class Business Intelligence operation.

Adobe Sensei's Artificial Intelligence capabilities enable organizations to maximize the value of their analytics platform without requiring as extensive an investment into creating Business Intelligence capabilities.

One of the more exciting examples of Adobe's use of Sensei is capturing data from voice assistants. As a devoted Amazon Siri user, relevant results are the key to providing a compelling voice experience and this data, enabled by Adobe Sensei is a great first step and a demonstration of the power of Adobe's AI platform.

What's next?

Digital Analytics trends are moving faster every day as organizations realize potential value of the insights they can gather. Adobe's investment into Customer Intelligence will help organizations willing to undertake the investment. We're excited to see how the possibilities of Customer Intelligence are realized as Adobe continues to enhance the Adobe Analytics Cloud.