Adobe Summit Day 2: Cook skewers AI Hype, serves up truth

There aren't many people who can do their first ever keynote and gazump JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon, but in the keynote sessions on Day 2 of the Adobe Summit, Hillary Cook did just that. The VP for Global Marketing Operations at hotel group Marriott skewered the hype around AI and laid down some universal and perpetual truths applying to the IT industry since day dot. The essence of it? AI is tools. The real magic at enterprise scale, is how the tools are implemented and scaled, and actually used by people in the business.

Marriott's Adobe-powered transformation

As a backgrounder, Marriott uses Adobe's technology for integrating personalised concierge experiences, enabling instant reservations and real-time data analysis across 9,000 properties. Marriott's marketing operations team improved efficiency by reducing 45 interdependent processes to one, achieving a 70% reduction in time to market and exceeding revenue goals by six times. Adobe's new B2B capabilities were showcased, including a single view of accounts, personalised journeys, and integrated customer journey analytics. AI-driven orchestration, personalisation, and real-time optimisation. Exciting? You bet! Lots of AI? Check! Ready to deploy? Hold your horses, fella.

Cook's reality check: Are we ready?

"There are some pretty incredible innovations coming our way," said Cook, "And what I'm curious about, particularly for the other practitioners in the audience, is how many of you are as excited as you are perhaps sceptical of your ability to actually implement what you're seeing?" This is a stark reality perhaps driven home by yesterday's comment from a marketer in the audience that they are not in fact using the technologies available from Adobe in their day-to-day work. That's because technology is just that. Getting it installed in the complex, labyrinthine and clunky enterprise is another thing altogether, and that's before getting people out of their old ways of working, and into the new.

The perennial challenge of readiness

Continuing, Cook said "The question that I ask myself every day, and I'm curious if you do the same, is, are we as marketers and technologists truly ready to take advantage of these innovations? I'm going to say ready for thinking, which is that we're not [ready for implantation] but I do believe that readiness is within our control, and it's far simpler than we thought. So let's talk about how we actually do personalization at scale."

She explained that Marriott operates 9500 hotels and runs 350 campaigns annually, with thousands of partners and associates looking to reach customers and 220 million Marriott loyalty members. "[Our team is] focused on creating amazing, memorable experiences for our guests. As the leader of marketing operations. I hear those stats and immediately start thinking through the implications. Can our marketers access the content they need easily? What manual work is slowing them down? Are we reaching customers in the right channels? What does success look like, and do I have the data to form the insights to measure that success. Do we have a consistent taxonomy? Do we have a taxonomy?"

Back to basics: The unsung hero

Old hands in IT implementation might recognise these as crucial, perhaps obvious, and also quite routinely absent questions when setting out on installing The Latest Shiny Thing. Cook went on to point out other necessities. "Do we understand the relationship between our brands, our destinations, our partners, and the digital assets our customers will interact with at this scale? Even in a perfect world, it's pretty complex." And it is. "But here's the thing, the biggest area is not the technology. It's us. In 2027 Marriott will turn 100 years old, whatever challenges you're facing in your organization, I promise you we have the same. Our marketing databases and capabilities are built on the idea of sending direct mail. It was a single touch point. It was a very easy process and simple assets." Quite unlike today's spaghetti bowls of complexity.

Facing the future, grounded in reality

Cook said the Marriott team started by ditching the rose-tinted specs in abundance at any tech conference and instead focused on hard and perennial truths. "We sat at the precipice of how to leverage AI and decided to be bold. We looked the future in the face, and found an objective way to assess readiness. AI is not a silver bullet for fixing decades of debt. It is, however, an incredible amplifier if you're willing to do the right work." She defined her approach and focus on the basics: "I tend to find things that other people find boring, really sexy." That means posing the very simplest of questions, often overlooked because Shiny New Thing!

Simple questions, big wins

Those questions, said Cook, include 'what are you really doing? How am I doing that? Is that real? "And the key for me, that I have found is these things document your processes. And you'll find that as you ask people in your organisation how something goes from intake to market, no one will tell you the same thing twice." From there, she said it becomes about accountability.

Proof in the pudding: Marriott's results

Proof, of course, is always about pudding, and Cook served up a helping. Applying sound basics with Adobe's technology has delivered measurable, quantifiable results, including 40 processes down to one, unified customer names, and content updated 93% faster across dynamic campaigns. And the best pudding is measured in hard returns: "We were six times ahead of our revenue goal, with a 70% reduction time to market." The lesson is clear. AI is exciting, fast moving, holds tremendous potential. But like any Latest Shiny Thing, results always rest on solid foundations.

In Dimon's headline keynote, the affable banking executive riffed with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on the global economy and innovation.