Acquia DAM Introduces New Generative AI Integrations for Product and Image Descriptions

AI continues to dominate the news cycle across the digital experience ecosystem, and Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions are no exception. 

While many platforms are harnessing LLMs to enhance productivity and ease the content workflow, Acquia is also leveraging AI for high-utility applications within its Acquia DAM. 

Last week, the DXP announced new integrations between its signature DAM (formerly Widen) and industry-leading generative AI solutions ChatGPT and Clarifai, enabling new capabilities for generating product and image descriptions.

CMS Critic spoke with Nathan Holmes, Manager, Product Marketing at Acquia, about the new features. 

Why it matters

According to Acquia's press release, the new integrations will enable creative and marketing professionals who use Acquia DAM to create on-brand, search-engine-optimized product descriptions and image alt text via generative AI. The features will reduce the burden of creating these content elements, accelerating time to market while enhancing accessibility. 

It's worth noting that Acquia DAM can be utilized as a standalone solution or with content management systems such as Drupal. It can also be used with other products available in the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (Acquia DXP).

“Using generative AI, marketers and creatives can improve the searchability, usability, and accessibility of their product content and asset metadata,” said Jake Athey, Vice President, Go-To-Market, DAM at Acquia. “These new integrations… enable organizations to create compelling content that improves search results and drives conversions – in less time.” 

Built for creative and marketing pros

As previously noted, the new generative AI integrations are targeted at creatives and marketers, helping them to be faster and more productive with their digital assets. The combination of both ChatGPT and Clarifai integrations delivers a complete solution that automates the generation of both product and image descriptions.

With native integration between Acquia DAM and ChatGPT, product marketers can quickly create compelling product listings on their own websites and popular commerce sites such as Walmart, commerce platforms like Shopify, and more. This solution enables teams to create on-brand content for their entire product line much faster, based on product attributes in Acquia DAM, reducing time to market and ensuring accuracy across digital channels. Teams can also use target keywords as inputs for the AI-generated description to optimize for search.

Digital content managers using Acquia DAM may now leverage the native integration with Clarifai for keywords and ChatGPT to create alt text descriptions placed in a metadata field for images. Alt text is important to use because it enables images to be both search engine friendly and accessible to people with visual impairments. As an organization’s image library grows, the integration monitors all new or newly versioned image assets, ensuring no assets fall through the cracks. This advancement further supports Acquia’s commitment to accessibility and enabling digital experience creation for all.

Introduced at Henry Stewart DAM New York

Acquia made the announcement at the Henry Stewart DAM New York event last week, where attendees saw 40+ DAM tools in action along with the latest product innovations at the world’s leading exhibition of DAM providers.

Also at the conference, Acquia and Velir, a full-service digital agency and preferred Acquia partner, presented a session on the topic of digital asset management and generative AI called “TechLab: Metadata, AI, and ChatGPT: What’s DAM got to do with it?”

“Marketers in all industries are actively exploring ways to integrate and utilize AI to streamline processes and meet ever-changing consumer needs,” said Dave Valliere, CEO of Velir. “The ChatGPT module built for Drupal is another example of how marketers can use AI to create efficiencies from a content perspective. This will free up time for teams to spend on impactful digital marketing strategies such as personalization, audience analysis, and segmentation that are proven to drive business outcomes.”

Q&A with Nathan Holmes

CMS Critic connected with Acquia's Nathan Holmes for some additional details about the new integrations. 

CMS Critic (CC): How long has this feature been in development?

Nathan Holmes (NH): Acquia has had this feature in development for about four months. We moved on it very quickly once we determined it would be of high value to our customers. Most digital asset management platforms use computer vision to generate keyword metadata. 

The new integration between Acquia DAM's computer vision technology and the large language model goes a step further to generate alt text descriptions. This saves content managers another step in making their images optimized for search in the DAM, as well as when it's embedded on the web.

CC: How are users responding to it? Do you have test feedback that’s encouraging thus far?

(NH): Customer response to the new integrations between Acquia DAM and generative AI technologies has been strong. Several are interested in adopting the integration and are moving to test it.

It’s appealing because marketers and creatives don’t generally have the time to write alt text descriptions for their images. We think of it as "No alt text left behind." All marketers know it's important to help web visitors who use screen readers, and that image alt text is crawled by search engines, which can help improve your page rankings. Yet, with the volume of content assets being created, it can be hard to keep up. So this can be a huge time saver for teams and greatly improve their search experience. In turn, this can help them get content and digital experiences to their own customers, citizens, or students faster.

Also, by doing it in the DAM, instead of waiting to apply it in the CMS, the alt text can be used on other websites or social media posts.

CC: How are humans able to validate the alt text and meta descriptions in any AI-generated fields?

(NH): Humans are able – and encouraged – to review and edit the alt text and metadata descriptions in the AI-generated fields. This can be done during the upload process, or using the Paths feature in Acquia DAM, [where] content managers can set up automated emails to notify subject matter experts of new assets with metadata for their review.

CC: Is there an additional cost for this capability?

(NH): The AI-generated keywords capability is included with all Acquia DAM subscriptions. AI-generated alt text is an additional cost for the native integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.