Meanwhile, Microsoft has begun to integrate models like GPT-4 and image generator Dall-E 2 from OpenAI, in which it has heavily invested, into its Azure enterprise cloud computing services. Microsoft has also partnered with Adobe to supply its language AI to help write marketing messages and photo captions within the latter’s marketing platform.

Speaking at Adobe Summit, Mike Edmonds, Microsoft’s senior director of strategy for worldwide retail and consumer goods, made the case for brands using AI in similar terms. Edmonds outlined a number of different capabilities for which it is positioning OpenAI Azure as a solution, including marketing emails, customer service summarization and product descriptions–citing Shopify’s recently launched tool that auto-generates such listings as an example.

“Retail and consumer goods companies are under immense pressure, whether it’s on a macro level with things like economic uncertainty … or compounded with customer expectations that are still going to continue to be through the roof,” Edmonds said. “There is a ton of pressure to be able to do more with less. So, that’s why we’re talking about AI in the context of the content supply chain.”

While companies are still mostly in the experimental phase when it comes to testing out these various generative AI capabilities, Adobe’s Still said she expects to see the technology begin to meaningfully affect marketing operations in the next year or two.

“It’s gonna have impact pretty quickly,” Still said. “We’re very focused on integrating the technology into applications like Photoshop and Illustrator to make content creation faster.”