Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed additional details about the Open Data Initiative (ODI). As originally announced last September, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have embarked on a new approach to business data that will help companies transform their customer experiences through real-time insights delivered from the cloud.

The three partners outlined a common approach and set of resources for customers in an initial announcement last September, with the ambition of helping customers create new connections across previously siloed data, more seamlessly garner intelligence, and ultimately better serve brands with an improved view of their customer interactions.

From the beginning, the ODI has been focused on enhancing interoperability between the applications and platforms of the three partners through a common data model with data stored in a customer-chosen data lake. This unified data lake is intended to allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

To improve that process, the three companies plan to deliver in the coming months a new approach for publishing, enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer's data lake.

This will supposedly enable a new level of AI and machine learning enrichment to garner new insights and better serve customers. Unilever, a mutual customer and one of the early global brands to express support and excitement about the ODI,  announced their intention to simplify a previously complex business outcome based on these data connections.

At Adobe Summit, Unilever is demonstrating how they plan to bring together disparate customer, product and resource data and use AI-driven insights to help reduce their plastic packaging and encourage consumer recycling. By eliminating the silos of data, Unilever will supposedly be able to tie inventory and plastics data into Adobe data to enhance customer experiences and encourage participation.

To accelerate development of the initiative, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP also announced plans to convene a Partner Advisory Council consisting of over a dozen companies including Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, InMobi, Sprinklr and WPP.

These organisations span myriad industries and customer segments and believe there is significant opportunity in the ODI for them to drive net new value to their customers.