Closer teams, faster results, lower costs: How GenAI helps companies scale effectively

Straits Times

5 hours ago

Mr Shashank Sharma, Adobe's senior director for digital experience for South-east Asia and Korea, presenting the company's latest AI solutions that help businesses speed up content creation at the Adobe Summit in Singapore. PHOTO: ADOBE
BRANDED CONTENT Closer teams, faster results, lower costs: How GenAI helps companies scale effectively At Singapore's Adobe Summit, executives shared how Adobe's AI-enhanced digital solutions can accelerate each company's growth, helping them stay competitive
Since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022, generative AI (GenAI) has rapidly developed into a core business tool not just for efficiency, but for delivering faster, more personalised customer experiences at scale.
In Asia-Pacific, GenAI adoption has now gone beyond experimentation to bring real-world improvements to the way businesses market their products and services.
Speaking at the Adobe Summit in Singapore earlier this month, Mr Shashank Sharma, Adobe's senior director for digital experience for South-east Asia and Korea, noted how GenAI is reshaping the expectations and pace of modern creative work.
'AI is accelerating,' he said. 'It is opening content floodgates, tapping into everybody's imagination and redefining what we mean by the word 'scale'.'
The annual summit brought together over 600 partners and customers to explore the future of digital experiences. This year's event highlighted how AI is no longer just about efficiency – it is also fuelling creativity and enabling more expressive, visual communication at scale.
As part of this shift, Adobe introduced new features within its Experience Platform, which brings together customer data and content tools in one place to help teams work more effectively.
The latest additions include Product Support Agent, which helps marketing teams quickly troubleshoot technical issues such as missing campaign data, broken links in customer journeys or problems connecting different tools, and Data Insights Agent, which lets users ask questions about their data in plain English and get instant visual answers.
Both tools reflect Adobe's approach to using AI to lighten the load by automating routine tasks and simplifying complex processes – helping people focus on creative and strategic work rather than replacing them.
Putting GenAI to work
(From left) Ms Mel Lim, Adobe's regional head, Singapore, Mr Tay Yan Long, senior manager, Enterprise Digital Ecosystem & Business at Changi Airport Group, and Mr Gourab Kundu, head of digital growth for Asia South at Citi Wealth, share insights on how GenAI is transforming marketing and customer engagement. PHOTO: ADOBE
At the Adobe Summit in Singapore, regional businesses shared how GenAI is already enhancing marketing and customer experience.
For instance, The Coca‑Cola Company is using Adobe Firefly to speed up brand-aligned content creation with images and copy, all while preserving brand voice and copyright compliance.
In practice, such tools enable faster content localisation, on-demand creative production and significant time and cost savings across teams.
Changi Airport Group (CAG) is also pushing the boundaries of digital engagement by harnessing the power of GenAI. 'At Changi Airport, we're tapping into GenAI to turbocharge our experimentation capabilities and scale our content, enabling richer, more personalised and truly dynamic interactions with our customers,' said Mr Tay Yan Long, senior manager, Enterprise Digital Ecosystem & Business at CAG.
His team is using Adobe's GenAI tools for journey orchestration, predictive insights and agentic marketing to test and scale ideas more efficiently.
For Citibank, GenAI is enhancing service delivery through proactive problem-solving and predictive analytics, which significantly improve customer satisfaction.
'The future of banking lies in anticipating customer needs, not just reacting to them,' said Mr Gourab Kundu, head of digital growth for Asia South at Citi Wealth.
Mr Prabu Purushothaman, senior director for digital experience and platforms COE at ServiceNow, presents how the company is partnering with Adobe to create personalised, real-time customer journeys. PHOTO: ADOBE
Adobe has also partnered with firms like ServiceNow to improve business-to-business customer journeys.
'Customers are always seeking more rewarding and meaningful interactions,' said Mr Prabu Purushothaman, senior director for digital experience and platforms COE at ServiceNow. 'We are working with Adobe to help create real-time personalised customer journeys at scale for ServiceNow.'
Why GenAI is shifting to real results
A new Adobe study released at the summit shows GenAI adoption in Asia is maturing, with more companies reporting tangible business benefits.
In a late-2024 survey of over 500 executives across Hong Kong, South Korea and South-east Asia, 55 per cent said GenAI has freed up resources for strategic work, while 53 per cent credited it with boosting revenue through more effective marketing.
Use cases vary – from chatbots to social media content generation – but all point to a shared goal: faster, smarter personalisation. Eighty-seven per cent of senior executives expect content production to become quicker and more scalable in 2025, with agentic AI helping to lower support costs.
Still, many organisations face hurdles like siloed data and poor cross-team collaboration.
'The challenge is content creation, production, workflow and asset management,' said Mr Sharma. 'When we see things holistically, you can bring in more creativity and leverage that.'
To tackle these gaps, eight in 10 senior executives plan to increase tech investments, with nearly a third expecting to spend significantly more. Many also plan to invest in talent, recognising AI as a tool to amplify – not replace – human capabilities.
'Digital transformation is as much about enhancing experiences as it is about improving operational efficiency.
'It is still important that AI be complemented with the human element, ensuring that customers can still connect with brands and feel that services are authentic,' said Mr Sharma.
Find out how businesses are adopting GenAI in Asia-Pacific in Adobe's study of the region's corporate leaders here.
AI tools for businesses
In March, Adobe unveiled a suite of product innovations that drive customer experience orchestration with the help of AI, called Adobe AI Platform. Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator helps businesses to manage and orchestrate AI agents – across Adobe and third parties – through a single interface.
Adobe Brand Concierge enables businesses to configure and manage AI agents that guide consumers from exploration to confident purchase decisions, using immersive and conversational experiences.
Adobe GenStudio is an end-to-end content supply chain solution that optimises the process of planning, creating, managing, activating and measuring content for marketing campaigns and personalised customer experiences.
Adobe Firefly Services application programming interfaces support video and 3D workflows by handling high-volume and time-consuming tasks.
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