As part of our “Future of” series, EVP and CTO Abhay Parasnis shares his perspective on the future of customer experiences. This is a revised transcript of Abhay’s conversation with Jeremy White, executive editor of Wired, at EMEA Summit.
When you started at Adobe you rearchitected the cloud platform for the next 10 years to include AR, VR and voice. What technologies are coming right now? Where are we going?
First, it wasn’t just me setting the direction for the platform. It is an extremely fast-moving industry – there isn’t a single business that moves like the software industry. You simultaneously need to take a long view of massive tech shifts, and also be nimble and humble enough to constantly adapt. I’m excited about the AI shift – we are just scratching the surface. We will look back 10 years from now and see that software at large was having its own transformation. AI, for example, has the potential to completely change the daily lives of millions of people.
The notion of autonomous agents is another area where we are doing a lot of research. Can you build autonomous agents that will make you more effective in your daily job? The convergence of hardware and software and the convergence of chips, all of that is super powerful. What we are looking at is if we can push the IP and magic that we do closer to the chip level.
Does it surprise you how few companies are preparing for voice?
A broader category is natural interfaces – and voice is probably the single most underappreciated shift in technology right now – when a computer can recognize interactions with humans. Today they are still very primitive, you have to speak carefully, and it’s not conversational. We have something in our research labs we’re working on – the cognitive ability of computers to have a conversation. Once that clicks, the interaction capabilities are going to grow exponentially.
The mouse and click, and then touch to voice, is an even bigger transformation. People will be genuinely and pleasantly surprised by voice.
Source: https://theblog.adobe.com/the-future-of-customer-experiences/
