Looking back at the video I shared (in my previous post). I’m delighted by all the progress that we’ve made over the past 5 years. I’m also excited by the opportunities that the current advancements in AI (& Gen AI) now enable…especially considering the real-time nature of our platform.
Below is a high level summary (of the events that followed) after my video was shown to Adobe execs:
A few weeks later, I had Adobe Screen’s engineering & product team in my home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Obviously, I was beyond excited. Partnering with Adobe would ensure that together, we could win any future RFP we were involved in (as we could support the end-to-end experience).
Before taking Adobe through the demo, I confirmed that we were covered under our telco client’s mutual (3-way) NDA, which they confirmed. We were also an Adobe solution partner.
I proceeded to take them through a demo of Personalisation Hub’s integration with AEM Screens. I covered how we allow staff/clients to localise & personalise displays in-store. I demonstrated how we leverage Voice-AI (Dialogflow) & are able to match campaigns (in real-time) based on a visitor’s conversational intent.
At the end of the demo, Adobe discussed a partnership. They mentioned that they were setting up an AEM Screens Centre of Excellence & demo centre in Sydney. The discussed how we could leverage their demo centre to jointly show off our solution to their larger retail clients in Australia.
I also walked the Adobe team through a number of our suggested improvements for AEM Screens (as many basic/must-have digital signage features did not work).
After the Adobe team returned to the US. We had several follow-up conversations around our “partnership” & clients that we could target together. Unfortunately none of their promises ever eventuated & not one introduction was ever made.
What did come out of Adobe’s visit, instead of fixing their basic AEM Screens issues, Adobe tried to replicate our “voice recognition” feature within their core AEM Screens product. They rolled out this new feature within one of the following AEM Screens platform releases. Their execution was terrible. We never actually managed to get their version of “voice recognition” to work.
Actually, I think the Adobe team completely missed the point of what we had built. Our platform supported an integration with our client’s own custom AI-Agents (our focus was not about “voice recognition”). Our focus was to allow clients to support common enquiries in their retail stores by leveraging these AI agents & then surfacing relevant content/self-care features on a display/tablet. The integration also allowed customers to engage with an agent on their mobile phone (so they did not have to speak out loud in front of other people in the store)…
To rub salt in the wounds, Adobe put out a case-study talking about how our telco client uses AEM Screens to seamlessly localise & personalise their retail experiences. At their 2023 Adobe Summit, they spoke about some of the features that Personalisation Hub enables within AEM Screens. As an Adobe solution partner, Adobe did not once give us any credit or mention the fact that Personalisation Hub was actually doing all the heavy lifting to support all the mentioned in-store experiences. If Adobe referenced any Microsoft or Apple capability, they would have made these dependencies very clear.
As a start-up, our experience was unfortunate, but not uncommon. The sad thing is that we worked with some phenomenal Adobe staff along the way. My word of warning within the developer community, Adobe should not be trusted. Especially by smaller businesses that do not have the resources to defend themselves.
When it comes to business, I’m still old school. Trust & integrity are everything. Within the personalisation (& AI) industry, trust is the baseline within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If a customer does not trust a brand, they will not share their data with that brand (all personalisation & AI efforts are already dead in the water).
Building trust takes years & years, however, it can be destroyed in a heartbeat.
to be continued >>
