Summit Sneaks: True Colours and Fast Filtered Commerce Innovations

Adobe Summit 2023's "Sneaks" session showcased experimental features showcasing Adobe's commerce innovation pipeline. Two innovations particularly captured industry attention: True Colours, an AI-powered colour recommendation engine, and Fast Filtered Commerce, an intelligent product filtering system. These previewed features highlight Adobe's investment in customer discovery and conversion optimisation.

True Colours: AI-Powered Colour Recommendations

True Colours uses machine learning to recommend products based on customer colour preferences. The innovation addresses a genuine customer pain point: many shoppers browse by colour but existing search and filtering is limited. True Colours changes this by:

• Analysing customer interaction patterns with coloured products
• Learning individual preferences through browsing and purchase history
• Recommending products matching preferred colours across product categories
• Adapting recommendations in real-time as customer preferences evolve

The technology has profound implications for fashion, home, and beauty merchants where colour is a primary purchase decision driver. By making colour discovery effortless, True Colours increases basket sizes and customer satisfaction. Early testing showed engagement increases of 20-30% for merchants using colour-driven recommendations.

Fast Filtered Commerce: Intelligent Product Discovery

Fast Filtered Commerce reimagines product filtering through machine learning. Traditional filtering requires customers to navigate facets like size, colour, price, and brand. Fast Filtered Commerce improves this experience by:

• Predicting which filters matter most to each customer based on browsing behaviour
• Surfacing relevant facets first, reducing cognitive load
• Learning from click patterns to understand attribute importance
• Personalising filter order per customer segment
• Reducing time-to-purchase by 15-25% in pilot implementations

For merchants selling across diverse product categories, Fast Filtered Commerce automatically adapts filter presentation. Fashion merchants see size and colour prominence, whilst furniture merchants see dimension and material filters. This personalisation improves search relevance and reduces filter abandonment.

Underlying Technology

Both innovations leverage Adobe Sensei, Adobe's AI and machine learning platform. Rather than requiring merchants to implement custom models, Sensei learns from aggregated, anonymised data across the Adobe Commerce ecosystem. This means even smaller merchants benefit from intelligence trained on billions of transactions and interactions.

Privacy and Data Governance

Critically, both features incorporate privacy-first design. Data collection is transparent, customers can opt out, and no data leaves customer infrastructure unless explicitly enabled. For European merchants subject to GDPR, Adobe designed both features with compliance built-in.

Timeline and Availability

True Colours and Fast Filtered Commerce were previewed at Summit as experimental features with availability expected later in 2023. Merchants interested in early access should engage with Adobe account teams to join pilot programmes.

Competitive Advantage

For merchants deploying these features early, competitive advantage is real. Customer discovery driven by intelligent recommendations and filtering directly improves conversion rates and average order value. As these features become industry standard, early adopters compound advantages through superior customer experience and increased data quality.

Strategic Recommendation

Merchants should monitor the 2023 release calendar for True Colours and Fast Filtered Commerce availability. If your store operates in fashion, beauty, home, or multi-category retail, these innovations should feature prominently in roadmap discussions. The conversion uplift opportunity justifies planning implementation timelines now.