This year, Adobe Summit again delivered sessions from the industry’s best and brightest. During 4 days in Las Vegas, the event welcomed over 17,000 delegates who witnessed leading minds provide an insider’s perspective on digital marketing, customer experience, and best practices needed to put strategies into action effectively. Focus on Customer Experience Management Shantanu Narayen kicked off the event by reiterating that people buy experiences, not products. Last year, Adobe had focused on Experience Makers wherein everyone in the company (marketing, data, technology, and so on) played a crucial role in creating a customer experience. This year, Adobe focused on Customer Experience Management. “The ability to put the customer at the center of the digital strategy, orchestrate the journey, and then deliver a compelling experience will differentiate the leaders from the laggards,” said Narayen. Experience Manager platform, along with Adobe Sensei, aims at enabling real-time hydration of profile to a single view of customers, applying AI to give actionable insights and solutions. Business to Everyone (B2E) Adobe boasted about integrating Magento into Adobe Experience Cloud, making each brand interaction personal and every experience shoppable.  With Marketo acquisition, Adobe is blurring lines between B2C and B2B, calling ‘business to everyone (B2E)’ the future of cloud marketing.    Talking about data and creativity, Adobe has broken down the customer journey based on data-driven operating model (DDOM) into 5 phases - Discover, Try, Buy, Use, and Renew. Every business requires its own DDOM version to offer a personalized yet competitive customer experience. Adobe and Microsoft Join Forces The main stage was graced by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who stated that his company has a learning culture, and focused need for companies to shift from “know-it-all’ to ‘learn-it-all’ when reinventing themselves. By hinting on Adobe and Microsoft working closely on several initiatives around data and Account Based Marketing (ABM), he highlighted that Open Data initiative (ODI) is the game changer. “The most important asset that everyone has today is data, but it is sometimes locked up in silos. If we unlock this data and help everyone enrich it irrespective the system, it will change customer interactions for the better,” he said.  As we know, Adobe and Microsoft are coming together to unite data, content, and processes to transform business and deliver the exceptional experiences that customers want at any time and across all touchpoints. Influential Speakers The event also saw actor and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon who pointed out how “customers are looking for companies that are deeply invested in giving back – whether it being central to their business strategy or more an outreach”. While the main stage was kept serious, the Community Pavillion brought in some human aspects around discussions on women in the workplace and the correct attitude of leadership at work. The Summit had everything to offer from thought leadership in digital strategy, technology integration, and Adobe solutions to group sessions and innovative practices to address challenges and drive the success of digital programs.