Edge Delivery Services, Generative AI, and Other Top Innovations in Adobe Experience Manager 2024
Content is a very key and important aspect for any organization today — it’s a dynamic, evolving aspect of your brand that grows and adapts with your customers. The key to engaging your customers isn’t just about delivering top-notch content, but keeping it fresh, relevant, and personalized to each customer’s needs and preferences.
However, the task of managing content isn’t always as simple as it seems. It comes with its own set of challenges, such as the dreaded content silos, complexities of multiple channels, lack of customer insights and personalization. All these challenges can be effectively tackled by delivering standout digital experiences, curated and managed through a robust content management system ( CMS).
For instance, consider a global retail brand that uses a CMS to deliver personalized product recommendations to its customers based on their browsing history and past purchases. This not only enhances the customer’s digital experience but also ensures the brand’s content remains relevant and engaging.
What are Adobe Experience Manager Sites?
Adobe Experience Manager Sites lets you create, manage, optimize, and deliver digital experiences across channels. And you can ensure that your content across web, mobile, and apps is built efficiently and delivered quickly. Adobe Experience Manager is a two-decade-old solution adopted and being used by Fortune 500 companies across the world.
What started as an on-premise solution went through multiple rounds of innovation and evolved through various has continued to innovate and evolve, expanding its offering to include deployment models of Managed Services, and Cloud Services to the latest and greatest experience of Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service.
What are Edge Delivery Services?
The new Adobe Experience Manager Sites now include Edge Delivery Services, a new set of composable services focused on maximizing the performance of your digital properties, at the point of customer interaction, and new content authoring and editing capabilities that enable any marketer to build, edit, and publish pages within familiar tools.
With Edge Delivery Services, AEM delivers exceptional experiences that drive business outcomes, such as SEO, traffic, engagement, and conversions. AEM does so by delivering high-impact experiences that are fast to author and develop. It is a composable set of services that enables a rapid development environment where authors can update and publish quickly, and new sites are launched rapidly. As such, with Edge Delivery Services you can improve conversion, reduce costs, and provide extreme content velocity.
By using Edge Delivery Services, you can:
- Create fast sites with a perfect Lighthouse Score and continuously monitor your site performance through real user monitoring (RUM).
- Increase authoring efficiency by decoupling content sources. Out-of-the-box you can use both AEM-based authoring with Universal Editor and Document-based authoring. As such, you can work with multiple content sources on the same website.
- Accelerate building new experiences with a modern developer experience that only requires a JavaScript-based front-end skillset.
- Use a built-in experimentation framework that allows quick test creation, execution without performance impact, and fast release to the production of a test winner.
What is Adobe Experience Manager Assets?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets is a digital asset management system (DAM) that is built into the Adobe Experience Manager platform. Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a cloud-native DAM built for today’s content needs, letting you easily manage millions of assets to create, manage, deliver, and optimize personalized experiences at scale.
With Adobe Experience Manager Assets, you can:
- Boost performance with interactive and immersive assets — including videos and 3D assets.
- Empower collaboration among IT, creative, and marketing teams to create personalized experiences quickly.
- Scale the DAM capabilities over time automatically to meet the demands of customers.
- Track each asset and which team uses it to make real-time modifications and optimizations to each experience.
- Personalize and customize assets with easy design tools and Adobe Firefly to create new experiences and variations for specific use cases.
- Pull brand-approved assets from Experience Manager Assets to Adobe Express to create or localize content variations.
What is Adobe Experience Manager Forms?
AEM Forms provides an easy-to-use solution to create, manage, publish, and update complex digital forms while integrating with back-end processes, business rules, and data. Designed to work across both mobile and web. Customers can start on one device and finish on another, without having to start over. With Adobe Experience Manager Forms, you can:
- Convert a batch of outdated PDFs into mobile-friendly, digital-first forms that connect with analytics and themes — all done automatically with AI powered by Adobe Sensei.
- Cut down on customer abandonment with responsive, mobile-friendly enrollment that can be used on any screen, at any time.
- Interact with your consumers on any channel by natively integrating your forms to any app, website, chat application, and more with headless adaptive forms.
Top innovations in Adobe Experience Manager
Generate content variations based on generative AI
Generate Variations uses Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create content variations based on prompts; these prompts are either provided by Adobe or created and managed by users. If you are looking for a way to optimize your digital channels, and instantly create content % scale personalization efforts, you can use Generate Variations.
Generate content variations capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager allows you to instantly produce high performing copy and image variations, no prompt engineering experience is required. After creating variations, you can quickly test the generated content variations to identify performance gains using the Experimentation functionality of Edge Delivery Services.
Universal Editor
Universal Editor is an advanced visual editor that lets users edit in-context for any experience and implementation — regardless of architecture, framework, or content type — with out-of-the-box extensibility.
With Universal Editor, users can use an intuitive AEM authoring experience and publish to Edge Delivery Services, boosting site performance, organic traffic, and engagement. Universal Editor also empowers content authors to do much more than just content creation by providing a highly customizable UI with various extensions, including experimentation, Workfront task management, and generating variations.
Document-based authoring
When using document-based authoring, you can work with a variety of sources such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs documents. Documents from these sources become pages on your website. Headings, lists, images, font elements, and videos can all be transferred from the initial source into your website. You can add metadata for SEO purposes or use blocks to work with structured content and add functionality.
Built-in experimentation
Adobe Experience Manager Sites allows you to quickly test, learn, and iterate on content, code, and layout to continuously optimize and succeed faster. You can:
- Run set experiments in minutes right within authoring workflows — no developer or additional tools are needed.
- Instantly create audience-specific, brand-aware copy and image variations.
- Run privacy-first testing — maintaining both privacy and high performance.
- Gain insights into experiment results with OOTB reporting available in-browser for optimization.
Real user traffic monitoring
Real-user monitoring or (RUM) is Adobe Experience Manager’s new built-in, privacy-first, solution service to that give provides real-time data to help teams understand how users interact with their website. These insights can be used to measure and maintain optimal site performance to improve Google Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals. It also provides insights on user engagement, such as page views and conversions, for optimization.
Content Hub
As a marketer, you sometimes need to collaborate with channel partners and internal business users to quickly create, manage, and deliver relevant digital content to customers. Timely delivery of relevant content across the entire customer journey is critical to driving greater demand, conversion, engagement, and customer loyalty.
However, it is a challenge to develop solutions that support efficient and secure sharing of approved brand logos, guidelines, campaign assets, or product shots with extended internal teams, partners, and resellers.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets Content Hub focuses on the marketer’s need to effectively collaborate with the globally distributed users by providing asset distribution and asset contribution capabilities.
With Content Hub, you can democratize assets across the organization to access and share content. You can integrate with downstream applications for a unified experience and gain control, governance, and velocity with a scalable DAM. Marketers can remix in-content with the power of the integration with Adobe Express with generative AI features powered by Adobe Firefly.
Integrate dynamic media everywhere
Adobe Experience Manager empowers users across the enterprise to access assets across various applications without creating copies (Asset Selector). Users can get round-trip usage on where assets are delivered to make informed decisions. Customers can drive higher conversion and 30% faster performance with modern web formats that transform at the edge and establish better governance with brand-approved content to maintain brand integrity. Customers can now integrate with WordPress and other 3rd party apps to democratize and deliver assets seamlessly.
AI across content and DAM
Adobe Experience Manager now provides easy-to-search and find existing assets via AI–powered metadata and tagging. You can automate workflows and enhance search with AI-powered capabilities:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with image-to-text
- Logo detection to identify logos.
- Automation of Alt-text generation
AI Assistant to create impactful forms for real-time conversations (available to early adopters)
Adobe Experience Manager now uses Generative AI to accelerate adaptive forms creation and optimize performance. Customers can leverage AI forms assistant to create fully functional forms — including on-brand themes, templates, and form designs in minutes to drive conversion.
Headless adaptive forms for chat (available to early adopters)
Add your external code (git) repositories directly to your Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Services program
With external GitHub repository support, we are taking insights from our Edge Delivery Services rollout and allowing all Cloud Service programs to support adding GitHub.com repositories directly. Teams will be able to access pipeline step results as GitHub actions.
Summary
Having a content management system for your digital experiences allows you to have control of your content. It means having the ability to update, change, or delete any images, text, video, or audio. It allows you to keep your site organized, up to date, and looking great.
With Adobe Experience Manager marketers get the ability to maximize the impact of their investments in content and experiences. Marketers can deliver highly personalized experiences using expanded authoring capabilities, in-built testing, and real-time user monitoring to measure the impact of the experiences.
Now powered by Generative AI, customers can create content variations in minutes for different audiences and generate adaptive forms using AI assistants. These are truly revolutionary innovations that will change the entire experience of Adobe Experience Manager.