You might associate Adobe with creative software suites, but the company’s bid to help business users deliver the kind of personalised marketing most brands now crave, is leading it ever deeper into the data science realm – with the company today making two tools generally available that were first teased in a beta release late last year.

The company’s cloud-based hub for “customer experience management”, Adobe Experience Platform, synthesises all customer data in one place for users. But it has lacked ways for data scientists to really tap that data and put it to good use to inform marketing campaigns. Today’s two releases aim to make that much easier.

Adobe Experience: Segment-of-One Marketing Needs a Lot of Data Crunching

New Query Service

The first, Adobe Experience Platform Query Service, introduces a standard query language to manage the datasets – which might include behavioural data, as well as point-of-sale (PoS) or customer relationship management (CRM) data –, along with the querying capabilities to turn those datasets into actions.

As the company noted when pushing out the beta release, “a retailer can see how a customer’s visit to its website contributed to an in-store purchase and create data models to find new customers that will convert.”

AI Workspace

The second, Adobe Experience Platform Data Science Workspace (Adobe is nothing if not adept at creating clunky and forgettable names for its enterprise tools) helps data scientists streamline their workflow, “from gathering data to authoring models to deploying intelligent services in Adobe Experience Platform.”

Read this: Adobe Marketing Survey: Brands Chafing at “Walled Gardens”

Users can tap it to create and train custom data models, using either pre-built models (e.g. for propensity scoring and anomaly detection, and train those models with their company-specific data) or creating custom models from scratch. The company’s AI service Adobe Sensei then automatically also works to pull key insights from the data.

As Adobe’s Monica Lay put put it: “Massive amounts of data are a blessing for any brand… historically, when someone had a data-related question that needed an immediate answer, brands would struggle with combing through siloed datasets – compromising the ability to obtain the answer in real-time.”

The releases come as Adobe makes a concerted attempt to showcase its ability to provide sophisticated data tools to brands that are increasingly looking to prioritise generating and securing their own customer data, and are chafing at their reliance on opaque third-party advertising platforms like Facebook and Google.

The company’s Digital Trends Report (based in a survey of 13,000 marketing, creative and technology professionals around the world earlier this year) cited “walled garden” data silos as respondents’ “number one headache” – a reference to external advertising platforms that require brands to relinquish control over their data.

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