Just like every physical goods company has a supply chain to manage the effective delivery of products, every digital marketing function has a content supply chain, the end-to-end set of people, processes, and technologies used to plan, create, and deliver content at scale.

From our conversations with customers at the biggest brands in the world, a few common problems have emerged with the modern content supply chain:

• The amount of content is rapidly growing. An explosion of AI content, increase in channels, touchpoints, and formats, and the need to manage many personalized content variations to meet customer demand has overwhelmed web and content operations teams with new requests
• Web and marketing ops teams are struggling to handle this content proliferation. Customers increasingly demand targeted and personalized experiences, requiring management of more and more content variations
• Delivering and updating content takes longer than anyone would like. Due to the numerous approval layers, handoffs, and manual execution, getting new content and updates out to market take days and weeks. As content grows, content velocity actually goes down because of this operational bottleneck.

The current content supply chain can’t keep up. And adding AI for content creation at the start of the content supply chain, makes these problems worse, not better. Manual effort, duplicated content, disconnected processes, and unnecessary spend proliferate.

Today, 85% of marketers say they are under pressure to create and deliver content more quickly, but 70% of time is spent on non-core work, managing manual tasks in disparate systems across roles.

To successfully transform their content supply chain with AI and delivery truly personalized experiences at scale, brands must invest as much in transforming content delivery with AI as they do in content creation.

How to truly transform the content supply chain with AI

From our partnership with Adobe and our work with some of the biggest customers in the world, there are 3 critical workflows that take up a disproportionate amount of resources and slow time to market for brands leveraging the Adobe Experience platform for content delivery. These are the 3 areas where generative AI must be leveraged to transform content delivery, increasing the ROI of content creation, creative teams, and the entire content supply chain.

• Content updates.
• Page launches and migrations.
• Leveraging customer journey data for continuous CX optimization.

Below, we describe the current process at most enterprises, and how Gradial’s AI platform is augmenting services with software to streamline these tasks. Most of the focus of generative AI has gone to content creation, leading to the issues we described above. Gradial brings AI into the "deliver" and "analyze" parts of the content supply chain, streamlining operations and helping to unify the entire Adobe stack.

Automating content updates

Content updates are rife with inefficiencies. The typical process we see today with enterprise customers involves a marketer using an intake form to make a change request for a website (or many pages on a site). The intake form gets translated into a ticket in Workfront or Jira, sent to a managed service provider, validated to make sure it has the right input, then triaged, categorized, and assigned to a content author. The content author executes the change manually, then sends it to a QA author, who checks it for accessibility, aria labels, alt text, etc. The web SLA is anywhere from 2 – 5 days.

This process can be 100% automated with AI using Gradial. Gradial picks up the content update ticket, executes the change in AEM on a launch link using AI, then checks the entire page for QA and accessibility issues. A human reviews it and then promotes the launch (publishes the page). The web SLA shrinks to 2 hours.

Streamlining page launches and migrations

Launching a new page has many of the same inefficiencies as a content update, but there are many more stakeholders and rounds of revision involved. Often the process starts with a creative brief and a Figma design of the page because the CMS is daunting to interact with. There is also a separate Word “Copy Doc” that tracks every copy edit/link changes made to the page that needs to be reconciled with both the Figma, design system, briefs, and resulting page in the CMS As a result of multiple systems of record, handovers, approvals, and reiterations, a typical webpage production SLA is often 4 – 6 weeks.

Gradial can generate pages from creative inputs that are 75% complete. The same is true for when we migrate old pages into a new format or design, or migrate them from another CMS into AEM. Using our guided experience, a web strategist or designer can quickly and intuitively build a page using components and templates from AEM, a copy doc, and a Figma design. They can make changes and iterate using our visual editor, which lets you request changes in natural language that get rendered on the page instantly. Copy teams can then review the changes and keep all their version controls, comments, and tracked changes on the Gradial platform so everything is in one place. The web SLA shrinks to a week or less.

Leveraging data for continuous CX optimization

Almost all enterprises invest heavily in data and analytics alongside their CMS; most commonly with Adobe customers, we see investment in Adobe Analytics. But many organizations are reactive: they only look to Adobe Analytics when something has gone wrong (big drop off in completions month over month). Very few organizations are proactively using customer journey and clickthrough data to drive meaningful changes and action, even though all the data they need has been collected and exists already.

Gradial proactively connects data to action. Our platform look at engagement data and heatmaps, and recommends both improved content, and updates to content placement, to more effectively surface the right content to the right audience at the right time. We aggregate these proactive recommendations to let you choose what actions you want to automate and show you a measurable lift in completions and ROI over time.

About Gradial

Gradial is an AI-powered marketing operations agent that helps web and marketing ops teams at Enterprises that use Adobe cope with the pressure of being asked to do more with less. Our vision is to help marketing ops teams spend more time on creating, designing, and collaborating, and less time on operational work, routine tasks, and handoffs. By making marketing ops teams more strategic, better content can be delivered to market faster. Gradial extends the Adobe Experience Platform using AI to streamline operational workflows like content updates, page launches, migrations, and using data for CX optimization, reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing ROI from Adobe.