Many in India can't read or write but know how to use smartphones: Adobe's Prativa Mohapatra on booming digital literacy

Adobe India MD Prativa Mohapatra said company-specific AI models or domain-specific AI models are the future

India is a strategic investment market for Adobe due to the rising digital adoption among enterprises and consumers in the world's second largest Internet market, Adobe India Managing Director, Prativa Mohapatra, told Moneycontrol.

"International expansion is a clearly stated objective for Adobe this year. Therefore, India is an important market where a lot of strategic investments are happening," Mohapatra said in an interview on the sidelines of the Adobe Summit 2024, the company's annual digital experience conference held at Las Vegas last week.

Mohapatra said that the country has taken a "tremendous leap" in digital adoption in recent years, going ahead of many countries, especially at the grassroots level. "In India, there are now people who possibly cannot read or write, but they know how to use smartphones and access various services," she said.

This presents a unique opportunity for marketers since they can reach out to various audience segments, including those who may not understand the language, she said.

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Mohapatra, who also serves as the company's Vice President, said the software firm is witnessing significant adoption for its products from banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), travel and tourism, and retail industries, who are among its biggest customers in the country.

This includes companies such as HDFC Bank, Tata Capital, Bajaj Allianz, ICICI Lombard, Apollo Tyres, Titan, Flipkart, Tata CLiQ, Air India, and Vistara among others.

Marketers in business-to-business companies and conglomerates, such as Asian Paints, Tata Steel, Tata Power and Aditya Birla Group, are also emerging as a key growth area for the US software giant, Mohapatra said, as these firms look to boost their digital presence and deliver engaging digital experiences to their customers.

These marketers are also adopting the latest advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their campaigns to engage consumers in the country. "A lot of AI creation is happening in India," she said.

According to a recent Adobe survey, about 94 percent of employees working at Indian brands said they had used generative AI in marketing and customer experience campaigns, with 50 percent utilising text-to-image generators to create promotional brand materials and content.

That said, only about 47 percent of employees said the company they work for currently uses generative AI tools, indicating the future potential for growth.

In November 2023, Adobe also acquired Bengaluru-based AI-powered video creation platform Rephrase.ai to bolster its generative AI capabilities.

The startup allows users to convert text to professional-looking videos within minutes. It became popular for the personalised Cadbury ad campaign in 2021, that enabled small businesses to use the actor Shah Rukh Khan as their brand ambassador.

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Adobe's new GenAI offerings

During Adobe Summit 2024, the software firm unveiled Adobe GenStudio, a new generative AI application that enables brands to plan, create, store, deliver marketing content and measure the performance of their campaigns at a single place. The application, which was first previewed in September 2023, is expected to launch in the later part of Q3-FY24.

It also announced Custom Models that enable enterprises to create and train their own custom Firefly AI models based on their IP, product and brand styles to maintain brand consistency across their creative and marketing teams.

This will enable organisations to generate AI content specific to their products and brand, from campaigns styles and backgrounds to objects, characters and subjects.

"Company-specific AI models or domain-specific AI models are the future. Then, of course, comes the question of how to embed them into your apps. Several companies in India are working on this front" Mohapatra said.

Read: Adobe unveils new GenAI tools to help marketers deliver more personalised experiences

With a workforce of about 9,000 people spread across five campuses, India houses Adobe's largest employee base outside the United States. The software firm, which entered India in 1997, claims that it is the first global tech company to run an entire business out of the country, including research and development centres that develop many of its products.

Adobe said that the India team contributes to over one-third of its global innovation efforts across the company's three cloud businesses - Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. Product development for several of the company's key products including the illustration software Illustrator and Acrobat PDF software are led by teams in India.

In April 2023, Adobe expanded its presence in the country by opening a new office tower in Bengaluru that will host over 2,000 employees. Apart from Bengaluru, the firm has offices in Noida, Gurugram, Mumbai, and Hyderabad.

(The reporter was in Las Vegas at the invitation of Adobe)