Indian firms investing more in content creation, workflow automation: Report

Leading Indian brands have prioritised investments in the speed, scale and efficiency of their content creation capabilities and workflows to build stronger customer relationships and succeed, a new report revealed on Tuesday. 

According to the 2023 Digital Trends Report by Adobe, about 79% of senior Asia Pacific (APAC) executives, including 92% in India, say customer demand for content has significantly increased. 

"Customer demand for content-rich, personalised experiences has increased immensely," said Anindita Veluri, Marketing Director, Adobe India. He added that to meet this, businesses need to focus on content supply chain backed by intelligent workflow automation, built on a customer-centred strategy and streamlined for the entire content lifecycle". 

The report said that industry leaders are rethinking and streamlining their content supply chains, such as content campaign planning, creation, delivery, and data analysis. That said, about 43% of senior APAC executives say they have already made their content processes more efficient, as efficiency and cost reduction is the focus. 

As efforts to accelerate content creation have come at the cost of employee time and freedom, two in five (41%) marketing practitioners cite a lack of time to be creative as a barrier to delivering excellent customer experiences. However, nearly one in two (48%) Indians believe that workflow issues are the biggest challenge in providing the best customer experience. 

In order to address this issue and strengthen their content machines in 2023, leading APAC brands have prioritised workflow management and digital collaboration across their content teams. The study shows, over one-third (37%) have prioritised streamlining or automating collaboration processes to enable their teams to work faster and better. Around 43% have prioritised using workflow automation to improve marketing and customer experience process efficiency, higher than the global average of 38%. 

To be sure, Adobe is not the only company to highlight how workflow automation can help companies streamline their work process, US-based automation software provider, Kofax, in a study published in October 2022 reported that more than 20% of an employee’s time is spent on repetitive tasks. In a 40-hour workweek, manual tasks take up more than one eight-hour workday. These include follow-up sales calls, drip emails and finance approvals which can be achieved by setting up workflow automation, the company said. 

Already, many businesses are using chatbots that are equipped with AI and machine learning capabilities to improve the customer experience. Besides, Generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that is able to create new data including text, audio, video, and images, is changing the content landscape. 

The introduction AI research and deployment foundation, Open AI's artificial intelligence-powered text generating platform, ChatGPT in November 2022 and more recently its $10 billion partnership with Microsoft to bring the AI into products like the Bing search engine and Microsoft Office, generated a new interest in this technology. Google has announced Bard, as answer to ChatGPT. While still in Beta, it is likely to be integrated with Google’s search engine and other products like Gmail and Google Maps. More recently, Meta too has released framework for its own large language model, LLaMa, for a more 'responsible' alternative to Microsoft and Google generative AI. 

According to a report by market research firm Gartner published on January 26, 2023, venture capital firms have invested over $1.7 billion in generative AI solutions over the last three years, with AI-enabled drug discovery and AI software coding receiving the most funding.