Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Sean Aylmer.
Chapter 2: How is artificial intelligence changing business operations?
Artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses operate. We know that already. But beyond the headlines and hype, many organizations are still trying to work out exactly how AI can help them. be more productive, create better content, market more effectively, and ultimately grow faster.
Adobe sits at the intersection of creativity, marketing, and productivity, three areas being reshaped by AI. Ben Goodman is president of Asia Pacific at Adobe, which is a great supporter of Fear and Greed. He joins me in the studio. Ben, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A. Thank you very much. Great to meet you, Sean. So let's start with the big picture. We move beyond asking whether AI matters.
We know that. The question now is how businesses use it. What are you seeing?
So we're now through this period of AI experimentation.
Chapter 3: What are the real-world applications of AI for businesses?
I think businesses have now spent a lot of time, money, focus and teams really trying to understand what's possible. And now getting to the point of what makes sense for us to do. How does AI help us elevate our customer experience? How does it help us better understand our customers? How does it help us drive productivity?
We're seeing a lot of businesses now step back and go, right, for their experimentation that we've done, which ones actually had an impact? And that is probably the crux of the business conversations. Like any investment, when you go through the first hype cycles, people just throw time and resource at it to see what's possible. Now we're getting to that period of, right, what is probable?
What is impactful? What scales? And how do I have to think about my organization, my customers differently as I start to bring it in as a mainstay of my organization that's really turning up in lots of different places?
So is that why you theme together the ideas of creativity, marketing, productivity? Is that why they're all kind of linked?
Absolutely. So if you think the transformation today is how do I get closer to my customer? If you think about Australia, 26, 27 million people, it's not a large population. And so brands really need to stand out, whether you're a bank or whether you're an insurance company or a retailer. You have to make sure your brand stands out, and that involves intimacy, understanding your customer.
Number two is respect for your customer. Privacy, consent, all those things become critical. Number three is making sure the content is suited to them. Are you engaging them in the way they want to be engaged? Is it email? Is it TikTok? Is it advertising? Whatever the method is. And finally, are you doing it at the pace that the market is evolving?
Are you reacting and responding in real time to the things happening globally and locally? When you bring all those together, that is the definition of business today in terms of engaging your customer. And so AI, the productivity element, is how do I activate my teams to really do their best work at the pace the market is adapting? We start to think about the creativity elements.
How do I create content That really engages people and helps people to really think that something was personalized for them in a way that emotes and drives action. And then from a digital marketing perspective, it's around the spectrum of how organizations can engage. We don't have tens of channels.
We have thousands of channels evolving and choosing what to do where is really a critical decision for brands. And it's not simple. You have to look at data, you have to look at insight, and so AI is really bringing the ability for organisations to think more deeply about their customer engagement.
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Chapter 4: How can AI enhance customer experience and productivity?
And so for brands thinking about solving for that, it's about making sure that you are looking at the real-time data as it evolves. Making sure that, yes, you must make long-term decisions, long-term investments, but you have to constantly be looking at what is the latest channel. As an example, all old things have become new again. That's the cycle that we go through.
Radio, critical now is more people spend time in traffic. podcasts critical as more people choose to listen to what they want to listen to. TV, streaming, all of those formats are still relevant, plus all the social media channels. So as a brand, how do you make sure you're capturing insight from all those channels?
How do you make sure that the partnerships you have in market, whether it's the agencies or the data partnerships or the technology, allows you to actually have the insight to make the decisions? And this is the power of AI. It's actually about...
enabling people to synthesize a lot more data in a way where they can make an objective decision and actually implement changes in the way they do things really easily. I want to talk about creativity. Is AI creative? AI is an amplification of creativity.
The best example I can give is if you think about artists who are creating digital artwork, the core human emotion in terms of building the story and the artwork and immersing people in that experience. Advertising is a great example. We still need the human emotion. It still needs to connect to people at a personal level. It needs to emote them to do something.
I don't believe AI does that today. But what it allows people to do is tell that story in lots of different ways at scale so that you can tell your story in a long format, in a movie, you can turn it into a podcast, you can turn it into an advert. There's lots of different channels that you can expand your story.
So I look at it as being an amplification opportunity for the artisans and the creatives and the creators to tell their story through different ways but still keep the core of the story actually what they designed. And that's where I think we see the big uplift around AI when it comes to creativity is amplifying creators, creatives, artisans in a way they've never been able to get scale before.
And the beauty is you know what's working and what's not if you're a brand then because you can be creative, you can amplify it, and you can measure it. Absolutely. Absolutely. What about productivity? I mean, in a sense, it's obviously going to help productivity.
But when there are so many more channels, so many more things to do, in layman's terms, how do you ensure that you are more productive at the end of the day?
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Chapter 5: What is the relationship between creativity, marketing, and productivity in AI?
I think a lot of organizations have learned that yes, you can drive a lot of productivity out of the LLMs, but you have to have the human checks and balances to make sure that those recommendations are appropriate, that they're not hallucinating information, that they're not misinterpreting data in a certain way.
So I think the balance between driving productivity through the use of the tools, Adobe Acrobat Studio is a great example as a business tool to help drive productivity and creativity, but making sure the humans in the loop still have an understanding of what's gone into that, that the sources and citations are valid, that the inputs in making business decisions are the right inputs.
And that is where I think policy, human-in-the-loop validation becomes critical for organisations, just to make sure that people aren't placing big investments in things that don't have the level of due diligence that organisations need.
Moving on to Acrobat, and I mean, it's almost synonymous with PDF, dare I say, but it does a lot more than that? Absolutely.
We've seen the evolution of Acrobat from PDF over the last 10, 15 years. And if you look at the most recent announcements around Acrobat Studio, which is really our productivity and collaboration platform, its intent is to recognize that business documentation and business content is constantly evolving.
We need to produce content, whether it's strategy documents or communications, and they will evolve consistently over time. And the formats that people want to consume those in will vary. If you're looking to consume a board paper, you might prefer it in a traditional format.
If you are an executive wanting to listen to a podcast of a board paper while you're out in a run in the morning, that's now a format that people need to think about.
Acrobat Studio brings together the power of AI to help organizations import business data and effectively make recommendations and drive outcomes, but also the ability to repurpose that into any format that makes sense for the business. And what we're finding is that organizations are leveraging this, are being able to engage internal stakeholders, business stakeholders in different ways.
Because suddenly as an executive, I don't need to read a 17-page document. I can listen to a seven-minute podcast that tells me everything I need to know because that's my preferred method for consuming information. And we're now starting to meet people where they are in terms of the best way for them to engage. I think that's a really powerful element of the evolution of Acrobat and Studio.
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