Microsoft's Cortana, Adobe join hands to provide AI-based services

According to Adobe's VP & GM, no discussion has taken place on how to monetise the collaboration

Adobe and Microsoft are jointly working on artificial intelligence (AI) to offer better products and provide customers more automated, intelligence-based experiences, a top Adobe official said here.

Brad Rencher, executive vice-president and general manager, marketing, of Adobe, said that the two tech giants were working on standard data models and sharing of core libraries between Adobe's Sensei and Microsoft's Cortana, both based on AI.

Cortana is a search tool which can verbally provide answers to search queries and Sensei - a set of intelligent services from Adobe - integrates the advertising, marketing and analytics products offered on Cloud with back up of creatives and documentation.

Rencher, who was talking to a group of journalists here at the Adobe's annual summit, said that the joint research and development would combine the specific domain capabilities of Sensei with the wider core data platform of Cortana, thus building a service.

Adobe products can now use data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Azure into Sensei for intelligent machine learning.

Sensei will soon enter into Microsoft tools.

Rencher, however, said no discussion had taken place on how to monetise the collaboration.

Talking of Adobe's presence in India, Rencher said that it was the fastest growing market and they have had a very substantial amount of the company's research taking place in India, including on Sensei.

Rencher also said that large Indian companies are rapidly adopting Adobe's products and Cloud offerings.

"Reliance Industries was looking at how to integrate data across all its various divisions and Adobe had helped a very old newspaper, Malayala Manorama, to completely digitise its functions across the board," noted Rencher.

Despite the enormous amount of research taking place on AI, he said that he did not believe that it could replace the creative side of human beings.

"What AI can do is reduce the time taken in intelligent data crunching and sometimes understanding what went wrong very quickly," Rencher added.

"By cutting six months of manual research to, say two minutes, it adds huge amount of strength to the creative aspects of human beings," he noted.