Every single solution in our arsenal mostly originates from India: Adobe MD

Adobe is working across industries with businesses that have embarked on digital transformation, Kulmeet Bawa tells Sangeeta Tanwar

How critical is the Indian market for Adobe?

Adobe India is the second largest establishment outside of America. The company globally has a workforce of 18,000-plus. And a third of Adobe is based in India. Every single solution in our arsenal largely originates from India. The company not only has a back office in the country, we also have our engineering and global delivery centre here. The small and medium industry, mid-market, citizen services are all at different stages of development in the country. The headroom for growth in India is immense.

From every single matrix — be it the country’s millennial workforce, the growing internet and smartphone market, rapid digitisation, growing fintech industry — India is a very attractive market to be in for companies like Adobe. For the company, Asia-Pacific is a high growth market. And in Asia-Pacific, India is one of the fastest growing regions for Adobe. 

What differentiates Adobe from competitors in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) deployment?

We are largely ubiquitous. Adobe is working across industries with businesses and organisations that have embarked on digital transformation. The largest banks powered by Adobe are IDFC, HDFC. Media companies like Malayalam Manorama are also our client. We also power digital business of big clients in sectors like airlines, insurance and hospitality. Retail, both online and offline, is another big opportunity area for Adobe. 

What are the key industries that Adobe India is focusing on?

Unlike some of our competitors, we are not using AI and ML technologies as generic tools. We do not have a horizontal approach to these technologies. Our solutions are domain-specific and we have deep offerings. 

Over the years — we have evolved from being a creative company to becoming a digital or experience company. Every brand and every organisation, irrespective of their size, are looking at ways in which they can improve revenue by delivering unique consumer experiences to users. 

In terms of the product portfolio, we have got creative, document and experience cloud to meet different business needs of clients in digital era. From the India standpoint, we have a big data engineering lab based in Bengaluru to experiment and develop emerging and new age technologies. We also have an AI lab in Telangana. 

You said Adobe is big on delivering experiences. What are the enabling factors that are helping the company deliver experiences to clients?

We say this often at Adobe that we are living in experience era. Digital today is not good to have, it is a must have.  It is actually embedded in every process and function. Technology will drive strategy in many ways especially when we look at digital and organisational transformation. 

Again, from an Adobe standpoint the cutting edge that we have as an organisation is our ability to provide experiences to our customers. We do not have to educate people today what digital can do for them. Today, it is all about how can businesses monetise quickly, measure and personalise their offerings for different individuals; how do they recognise a customer even when she is anonymous in the digital world through her digital footprint and how best to serve the user an experience that is tailor made. We need to put in a little bit more effort in sectors like education. Even here stakeholders now understand that there cannot be a big dichotomy between students and faculty.

So how would you go about creating a real time experience for consumers across categories?

There are two parts that have to come together to solve the experience puzzle. To deliver experiences one needs content and data. The content part is what gets delivered to clients through images or videos. We are the biggest player on content creation — that is the creative cloud. Adobe is the original creative company. We have got billions of images and trillions of data assets available to us . We are using AI to actually get some intelligent meaning out of it. For example, how do you actually select an image out of millions of images? We cannot do that manually. Again, how do you target anonymous users visiting your website and other digital assets? Apart from content, data is crucial to delivering experiences. This is where our experience cloud comes in to picture. We combine both content and data in real time to deliver experiences.