Adobe’s mission is to change the world through digital experiences, providing tools and technologies that democratize creativity, shape the future of marketing, and advance the digital transformation of companies.

These solutions help businesses deliver outstanding experiences across all touchpoints on the customer journey, from generating sales to signing contracts. Adobe also innovates to provide quality experiences internally for employees and vendors in their day-to-day efforts to drive organizational success.

Together, Adobe and Microsoft provide best-in-class solutions that connect sales and marketing, enhance creativity and communication, and optimize customer experience management—all with a seamless flow of data.

Delivering personal experiences at scale with AI

Adobe has long pioneered the use of AI in its solutions, particularly for creative and digital workflows. Adobe Sensei —the company’s AI and machine learning technology—powers multiple capabilities across all three of its clouds: Creative, Document, and Experience.

AI and machine learning are key to Adobe’s central mission of enabling high-quality and consistent experiences for every customer. Personalization is key to positive digital customer engagements, and that requires visibility into constantly changing customer needs and preferences.

Adobe uses AI and machine learning in its products to gather and analyze customer data in ways far beyond human capabilities, as well as to make instant, automated decisions about the right actions that will create relevant, personal experiences. AI and machine learning also make it possible to scale this process in real time.

“When you're online trying to get the right deal for yourself, nobody's going to wait for even a second or two. You need to be able to bring the data sources into one place, build real-time customer profiles, and deliver personalized experiences at scale across devices and channels for millions of consumers, within milliseconds,” says Ankur Jain, Director of Product Management, Ecosystem Solutions at Adobe.

For Adobe, AI and machine learning provide critical value by driving the right content at the right time to the right channel.

Collaborating to serve customers

The partnership between Adobe and Microsoft has been built on a strong foundation over time. Adobe has worked with Microsoft for more than 20 years to ensure that Adobe solutions perform well for Microsoft users. In 2016, the two companies formed an official partnership to better serve their joint customers. And in 2020, Adobe was recognized as the Microsoft Alliance Global ISV Partner of the Year.

One of the most important ways that Adobe and Microsoft work together is by creating out-of-the-box integrations, especially in marketing and sales automation.

For example, Adobe products integrate closely with Microsoft Dynamics 365, including Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Sign, and Adobe Commerce Cloud, just to name a few. Adobe’s Document Cloud business also has strong integrations with Microsoft Office products and Microsoft Power Platform.

These synergies enable users to create holistic views of customers by aligning data between different departments—such as sales and marketing—that are typically siloed.

Most importantly, these capabilities help organizations solve big problems. Real-life examples range from a government that vastly increased efficiency while reducing paperwork to a major retailer that successfully delivered a premium digital experience to its customers amid the unprecedented demand of the pandemic.

Another key piece of the partnership is technological infrastructure. Over the past five years, Adobe has embraced Microsoft Azure to take AI, machine learning, and data analytics even further.

Many of Adobe’s newest AI intelligence capabilities are built on Azure. For example, the Adobe Experience Platform runs entirely on top of Azure, which provides the secure, compliant environment needed to deliver experiences at scale using real-time customer profiles. It’s also important for Adobe customers to run solutions globally, wherever their customers are, and Azure provides that capability. In addition, Adobe uses the capabilities of Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Data Lake Analytics.

“Bringing all of our data together in an Azure Data Lake and being able to stream data in milliseconds is really important. Azure’s fast, scalable architecture, which is globally deployed and highly secure, is critical to us and our customers,” says Dave Welch, Vice President & Solution Leader, Microsoft Solutions at Adobe.

Providing experience solutions across industries

The Adobe-Microsoft partnership offers a wealth of solutions that have had major impact on businesses in a variety of industries.

For example, one of the world’s largest retail and wholesale pharmacy corporations turned to Adobe and Microsoft for help delivering a better digital experience to customers during the pandemic. Although the company had begun an extensive digital transformation in 2019, 2020 brought unprecedented digital demand. The company wanted to raise the bar to provide personalized, omnichannel customer experiences at enterprise scale.

Using Microsoft-based Adobe solutions, the retailer embarked on a project to make the most of the massive amount of data it had gathered on the 120 million customers in its loyalty program. The company was able to gain a deeper understanding of its customer base, create intelligent customer segments, and deliver more personalized, relevant messages across every channel.

Another Adobe-Microsoft customer, a state government, saved taxpayers USD5 million and vastly improved efficiency by adopting Adobe Sign for electronic signing of government documents. Previously, the state government had to physically move documents back and forth across distances for signatures, a time-consuming and expensive process. The state chose Adobe’s solution for its ease of use, reliability, and integration with business solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook. Since launching its eSign initiative, the state has delivered 400,000 electronic documents, reducing paper usage by around 24,000 pages per day.

When the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined a Midwestern professional basketball team, their marketing team kept fans interacting online with the help of Adobe and Microsoft. Employing the capabilities of Adobe Marketo Engage and Dynamics 365, marketers reached out to fans with opportunities for contests, merchandise, and more. While the rest of the league was shut down, the team still managed to add 6,000 new fans to their CRM database. The integration of Adobe Marketo Engage and Dynamics 365 gives the team the technology they need to create dynamic digital campaigns and ultimately fill their brand-new arena.

Creating a future of digital transformation

Together, Adobe and Microsoft are focused on digital transformation. The companies will continue to collaborate on their extensible platforms and solutions, such as Adobe Experience Platform on Azure. They will also invest further in engineering, development, and marketing resources for Customer Experience Management (CXM) solutions across every major industry vertical.

Adobe is continuously looking for ways to make the most of the AI and big data capabilities of the Azure platform. For example, Adobe plans to work with Microsoft on more solutions for specific industries, including industry-specialized AI.

“We are excited about our deeper partnership with Adobe to help customers accelerate digital transformation and achieve superior business value. Together, we are empowering organizations with intelligent and seamless customer experiences powered by cloud, data, analytics, and AI,” says Simran Sachar, Director of Analytics, AI & Industry, Global Partner Solutions.

Ultimately, the Adobe-Microsoft partnership enables businesses to change the world through digital experiences, democratize creativity, and advance in their digital transformation.