While on the ground at the recent Adobe Summit 2025 conference, which was filled with announcements of how AI can revolutionize the creative industry and customer service, I spoke to Anjul Bhambhri, SVP for Adobe Experience Cloud, about the real impacts AI can have on both customers and CX workers which weren’t covered in the main keynote sessions.
Throughout the whole event, the candidness exhibited by the speakers was already more evident than I’d expected, given the intention to show off new products, but Bhambhri made this more evident in opening up to me about how Adobe really goes about driving AI innovations.
The key themes of our discussion were customer centricity and transparency, which Bhambhri covered from all angles – both Adobe’s commitment to protecting workers and how Adobe’s clients can pass this value on to their customers.
How transparency should guide your AI strategy
I probed Bhambhri to offer SMBs advice on how they can keep up with evolving trends, and that sense of transparency rang true.
She noted that all businesses must remain agile by actively listening to customers to pinpoint their unique pain points, which would lead them to create more impactful products.
With the industry still taking shape, I criticized governments, companies and regulatory organizations for not offering enough guidance, which makes it challenging for anybody adopting AI to know that they’re doing it right – a sentiment felt even more so by SMBs and startups with limited resources.
Bhambhri added that ensuring data governance with clearly defined roles and responsibilities is just as important as being ‘on the ground’ with customers.
Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA and FERPA all set out how data should be managed, and it’s the responsibility of any company, AI-enhanced or not, to manage customer data responsibly.
However, all of this requires huge amounts of capital, human resources and computational power, which can come at the expense of sustainability. I asked Bhambhri how smaller companies can handle these huge expenses when resources can be so limited, particularly in the current climate.
The SVP explained to me how Adobe categorizes data into hot, warm and cold storage to manage resources more effectively in order to minimize environmental impacts.
Setting a strong foundation for data management today is vital, because the amount of data we produce is rising exponentially both as businesses and as consumers – think about it, when was the last time you cleared through your iCloud photo library?
Companies can also consider splitting storage across SSDs and HDDs, finding the most optimal balance for storage acquisition and energy consumption.
Whatever the advice was that Bhambhri had given to me, she was keen to stress one thing – businesses should keep their clients in the loop at all points of the transaction, whether that means simply telling them that their data might be moved from different storage categories or given them the choice to get more involved.
Although Summit 2025 focused on Adobe’s own innovations, my brief discussion with Anjul Bhambhri highlighted two key takeaways that small businesses can adopt so that they’re not left behind on the AI wave: transparency both with customers and about services is paramount, and the proper management of data both from a regulatory and an environmental standpoint is vital.
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