Adobe today announced that is partnering with Avanade, Microsoft and Accenture’s joint venture, to help customers rapidly develop, implement and derive value from Adobe and Microsoft’s digital business solutions. Marketers will benefit from their combined capabilities to excel in CXM. Avanade will build an Adobe practice, connecting Adobe Experience Cloud with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure to provide each client with a customized solution specific to its unique needs and objectives. The Accenture Microsoft Business Group will help accelerate these opportunities.

Avanade is Microsoft’s a system integrator and operates in close alliance with Accenture Interactive,  and Adobe’s 2018 Global Digital Experience Solution Partner of the Year.

“The partnership with Adobe and Microsoft puts us in an excellent position to help our clients create hyper-relevant, future-ready experiences at scale,” commented Pam Maynard, President, Product and Innovation, Avanade.  “Recognized alongside Accenture as Microsoft’s 2019 Digital Transformation Partner of the Year, our focus on human centered experiences, through our Digital Studios, will bridge the gap between Dynamics 365 and Adobe to help our clients build best of breed marketing and sales solutions.”

“Avanade is the market leader for Dynamics 365 solutions, recognized for 11 consecutive years as our Alliance SI Partner of the Year,” said Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner Chief, Microsoft. “The combination of Microsoft solutions, Adobe products, and Avanade, will help organizations transform their businesses and deliver the personalized, exceptional experiences that our customers expect.”

Leveraging Adobe and Microsoft’s joint solutions

Avanade will deliver Adobe and Microsoft’s end-to-end marketing, sales and service solutions to customers, including:

• The integration of Adobe Experience Manager (part of Adobe Marketing Cloud in Adobe Experience Cloud) and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure and Azure Machine Learning to unify sales and marketing activities and create compelling,personalized experiences online and in-person based on customer intent.
• The integration of Adobe Campaign (part of Marketing Cloud in Experience Cloud) for experience delivery and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to create a single view of the customer that can be used to personalize 1:1 experiences across touchpoints.

Avanade will focus on customer verticals, including banking, healthcare, retail, loyalty and membership, insurance and automotive.

Leaning into ODI

“Nearly every customer and prospect I speak with acknowledges that integrating siloed data to obtain a comprehensive view of the data consumers’ share is one of – if not the – top business challenge for their companies. ODI aims to solve this industry-wide challenge by transforming static, siloed data into structured, actionable information that provides an improved view of customer interactions and can be leveraged across enterprise solutions to further delight consumers.” Wrote Jay Dettling Vice President of Global Partners at Adobe on Adobe’s official blog.

Aligned to the broader work that Accenture is undertaking as an inaugural partner of ODI, Avanade plans to leverage ODI in the future to help enterprises create new connections across previously siloed data by mapping natural customer journeys to data in Adobe and Microsoft solutions, and external sources like social media. As a result, marketing, sales and service departments will be able to more efficiently glean insights and share an enriched view of each interaction. Avanade will work in lockstep with Microsoft and Adobe to deploy a framework that unlocks the value of customer data and exponentially improves customers experience.

With the help of partners like Avanade, Adobe and Microsoft are helping enterprises reinvent CXM every day.

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Experts around the world are getting increasingly worried about new AI tools that make it easier than ever to edit images and videos — especially with social media’s power to share shocking content quickly and without fact-checking. Some of those tools are being developed by Adobe, but the company is also working on an antidote of sorts by researching how machine learning can be used to automatically spot edited pictures.

The company’s latest work, showcased this month at the CVPR computer vision conference, demonstrates how digital forensics done by humans can be automated by machines in much less time. The research paper does not represent a breakthrough in the field, and it’s not yet available as a commercial product, but it’s interesting to see Adobe — a name synonymous with image editing — take an interest in this line of work.

Speaking to The Verge, a spokesperson for the company said that this was an “early-stage research project,” but in the future, the company wants to play a role in “developing technology that helps monitor and verify authenticity of digital media.” Exactly what this might mean isn’t clear, since Adobe has never before released software designed to spot fake images. But, the company points to its work with law enforcement (using digital forensics to help find missing children, for example) as evidence of its responsible attitude toward its technology.

The new research paper shows how machine learning can be used to identify three common types of image manipulation: splicing, where two parts of different images are combined; cloning, where objects within an image are copy and pasted; and removal, when an object is edited out altogether.

To spot this sort of tampering, digital forensics experts typically look for clues in hidden layers of the image. When these sorts of edits are made, they leave behind digital artifacts, like inconsistencies in the random variations in color and brightness created by image sensors (also known as image noise). When you splice together two different images, for example, or copy and paste an object from one part of an image to another, this background noise doesn’t match, like a stain on a wall covered with a slightly different paint color.

As with many other machine learning systems, Adobe’s was taught using a large dataset of edited images. From this, it learned to spot the common patterns that indicate tampering. It scored higher in some tests than similar systems built by other teams, but not dramatically so. However, the research has no direct application in spotting deepfakes, a new breed of edited videos created using artificial intelligence.

“The benefit of these new ML approaches is that they hold the potential to discover artifacts that are not obvious and not previously known,” digital forensics expert Hany Farid told The Verge. “The drawback of these approaches is that they are only as good as the training data fed into the networks, and are, for now at least, less likely to learn higher-level artifacts like inconsistencies in the geometry of shadows and reflections.”

These caveats aside, it’s good to see more research being done that can help us spot digital fakes. If those sounding the alarm are right and we’re headed to some sort of post-truth world, we’re going to need all the tools we can get to sort fact from fiction. AI can hurt, but it can help as well.

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