Microsoft Partners With Adobe For AI, Facing Off Against Salesforce, IBM
- by Jess Nelson , March 24, 2017
Adobe and Microsoft announced an expanded partnership this week to co-develop marketing solutions driven by artificial intelligence, leveraging both Adobe's Sensei and Microsoft's Cortana products.
Adobe announced the news at the Adobe Summit this week, the tech company’s annual marketing conference in Las Vegas.
Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant and search tool that provides verbal responses to search queries, while Sensei is a layer of artificial intelligence embedded in Adobe’s cloud products. The partnership will be a collaboration to develop a new service that combines Cortana’s data platform with Sensei’s intelligence.
Adobe customers can also now incorporate data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Azure into Sensei to develop more targeted and personalized customer experiences powered by CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data.
Joint customers can incorporate Microsoft Dynamics 365 into Adobe’s marketing and analytics clouds to unify siloed data sources and build out detailed customer profiles, while Microsoft Power BI can provide Adobe marketers with detailed metrics and visual analysis. Adobe Experience Manager is also now available on Microsoft Azure to help brands manage Web content more effectively.
The two technology giants also announced intentions to soon incorporate Adobe Sensei into Microsoft’s toolset, but an expected timeline for the integration has not been released.
Adobe and Microsoft will also collaborate on developing an industry standard data model to better understand customer engagement alongside AppDynamics, Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, Qualtrics, Zendesk, [24]7 and MasterCard.
The partnership was announced two weeks after a similar cooperation agreement between Salesforce’s Einstein and IBM’s Watson solutions, placing the technology vendors in a battle for domination of the AI market.
The global business market for artificial intelligence is predicted to grow from $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, according to the IDC.
