The Slack AI assistant automating creative tasks and driving data-driven decision making

At this year’s Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, the mission to change the world through digital experiences was gathering pace. There was something for everyone from empowering people to create and transforming how business compete to giving away one-year subscriptions for Adobe Rush video to all of the 17,000 attendees.

Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix have all played a part in raising the expectation levels of their consumers across the globe. But many businesses  are currently faced with a continuously increasing pile of data and asking the question, “I want to know what will happen, not what has already happened.”

People are buying experiences, not products was the key message. But nobody says I cannot wait to see if there is a mattress sale in my Gmail and if you do, you are weird said Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas. In a world where nobody likes to be sold to, it’s clear that we need to think differently and even redefine the customer journey entirely.

The “Sneaks” event at Adobe Summit is one of the company’s major innovation programs. Built on the belief that great ideas can come from anywhere, Adobe provides all of its staff with an open invitation to submit their game-changing ideas for a chance to present their work in front of 17,000 people. This year, the event is hosted by Mindy Kaling where the top 7 projects leveraged technology trends from AI and mixed reality, to voice.

Before the event, I got hands-on with an AI assistant for Slack that promises to help teams leverage data insights for decision making while automating content editing. It also leverages Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning platform. All the familiar buzzwords were present, but what problem does it solve?

For many teams of creatives, Slack has become the collaboration tool of choice to share ideas, address problems in real-time and even improve your well-being. The ability to work seamlessly together in a digital utopia outside of the increasingly dated looking email inbox offers obvious appeal. But, actionable insights during the creation process are noticeably absent from the current collaboration methods.

Project Expert Assist, the AI assistant acts as a virtual bridge between the company’s dataset and creatives. In a marketing campaign, teams often explore content will resonate with their audience. A simple “/sensei openrate” command instantly enables a creative team to propose a different line of copy and allow the AI assistant to predict the open rate. If it is low, the team can brainstorm more copy — all without leaving Slack.

Adobe Sensei can already deeply understand the language of digital content such as images, videos, animations, and illustrations. It has allowed Adobe’s AI to understand not only objects in a picture but more complex concepts like composition, aesthetic qualities, and color palette.

What makes Project Expert Assist so intriguing is that it brings all of these capabilities directly into Slack for seamless collaboration. Another notable command, “/sensei placetext” can then automatically insert the copy into the different variations—in an intuitive way that does not disrupt the creative.

Unfortunately, this and all of the “Sneaks” showcased at the Adobe Summit in front of an excited audience are still just research projects at this point. But, Adobe has a good record of rolling ideas such as Expert Assist into future products

The possibility of leveraging data insights for decision making, while automating content editing and all without leaving Slack will be a mouth-watering prospect for many. But this latest proof of concept also reveals a fresh approach to content analysis and attempts to redefine the creation process.

At this years summit, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen advised that “Overcoming organizational and data silos are key to putting customers at the center of your digital business and delivering a leading experience.” Expert Assist seems to address this very real problem directly with an AI assistant and a handful of Slack commands.

As data-driven decision making becomes increasingly important to marketers, creatives need the flexibility to automate repetitive and cumbersome tasks. For these reasons alone, I think this is one R&D project that we will be seeing much more of in the future.