• by Jess Nelson , July 28, 2017

Adobe announced Thursday that Adobe Target is being upgraded with Sensei, the company’s framework for artificial intelligence.

Adobe Target is Adobe’s testing and optimization platform, and will now become the “personalization engine of the marketing cloud,” says Kevin Lindsay, director of product marketing at Adobe Target. 

Adobe is aiming to make the creative development process easier with one-touch personalization across channels including email marketing, mobile, and connected devices. 

“Brands are really struggling with personalization because different people care about different lines of businesses,” says Lindsay. “This struggle is just compounded by mobile technology and connected experiences.” 

A/B testing enables the analysis of multiple variations of content, and is the most common way that email marketers personalize messages, but Adobe Target will now be able to significantly expand its testing capabilities with the help of Sensei by automatically targeting customers for personalized experiences instead. 

Sensei uses machine learning to determine the best experience for the individual. Marketers can then quickly deliver that experience across digital properties with one-click personalization, as Adobe Target uses Sensei to continuously update a customer’s profile and preferences after every action. 

An automated offer feature also helps marketers send the best promotional offer to subscribers who are predicted to be most interested in that content. This could be especially helpful for email marketers during times of high traffic, such as the holidays. Adobe has also added a backup policy, so marketers can hold back a certain amount of traffic and only send new content to a control group.

Sensei “takes manual optimization to the next level because it takes all variables in to consideration,” says Lindsay. “We don’t believe that any human can possible appreciate what’s happening on a large scale when millions of people are coming to a site. Real-time signals can tell a story that might not immediately be obvious to us mere mortals.”

The solution also contains visualization of analytics so marketers can see trends and quickly react to them, and variables that are having an impact on an experience can be pulled to the surface.

Lindsay says creative teams should not feel threatened by the machines. 

“Putting creative in front of the right people at scale will allow marketers to be even more creative,” he says. “It can better ensure the right people are seeing the right products and efforts.” 

In addition, Adobe announced plans to a launch the beta version of a new recommendations algorithm in September. Lindsay says the recommendation engine has been outperforming previous algorithms by as much as 60%, and will be available for email marketers. 

“It’s inspired by natural language,” explains Lindsay. “It basically does an analysis of a customer’s entire online behavior, and starts to look at the signal these interactions provide. As the machine ingests more and more data, it begins to interpret them almost like words.”

Finally, Adobe hinted at a new open technology the company is working on that will allow brands to plug in their own proprietary algorithms into Adobe Target for customized personalization. The tool is not yet available, but Adobe says they it will provide more details once product development is completed next year.

The standard pricing for Adobe Target includes more rules-based targeting, such as A/B testing, but the premium version has now been upgraded with Sensei. Subscribers to the Adobe Marketing Premium product will be able to access the new personalization solution Friday morning when they enter their office.