February 14, 2025
City of San Jose resolves 46% citizen questions without escalation, using Olis
Matt Mahan
Mayor of San Jose, California
Population size
Industry
Headquarters
975,000
Government
California, USA
Summary
Adobe’s Pricing Operations, Strategy & Monetization team based in San Jose, Headquarters, sits behind one of the most complex commercial engines in software. With over millions of SKUs across Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud, sold in 100+ countries, dozens of currencies, and every segment from individual to enterprise, education, and government. Every quote, discount, and packaging change touches a web of policy, approval thresholds, regional floors, and finance rules.
Our mission with Adobe was to ensure Olis turned that complex web into a single, sourced answer, easily accessible, and delivered to their team in seconds. Right where they work.
92%
pricing questions resolved
without an expert (SME)
42 seconds
median time to a sourced answer
38%
faster deal-desk approvals
Challenge
For years, the team’s hardest problem was retrieval. The knowledge needed to price a single enterprise deal correctly lived in too many places at once: pricing policy decks, the CPQ rulebook, regional price books, the deal-desk approval matrix, FX and tax tables, legal guardrails, and the institutional memory of a handful of senior experts.
So the work became a grind of millions of small, exacting procedures, each requiring expert-level judgment and uninterrupted concentration. A single overlooked floor price or approval threshold could erode margin on a multi-million-dollar deal, so analysts double- and triple-checked, and the questions that couldn’t be answered alone piled onto the same few specialists. Deep, strategic work was constantly interrupted by lookups that felt beneath the team’s talent but were too risky to rush.
"At quarter-end, confirming just one enterprise discount was in policy forced us into opening 6 different systems. We were losing our sharpest hours to lookups we couldn't afford."
Melany Del Carpio
Senior Business Process Optimization Manager
Millions of small decisions, each one expert-level
The team's manager, Balraj Kosta, who's been leading the Adobe DX team for the last 4 years have mentioned, "I lead pricing strategy and monetization at Adobe, and for a long time our hardest problem wasn't strategy — it was retrieval. We run one of the most intricate commercial engines in the industry. Thousands of SKUs, sold in more than a 100s of countries, across dozens of currencies, to every kind of buyer from an individual creator to a global enterprise, an education system, or a government. Every quote, discount, and packaging change touches a web of policy, approval thresholds, regional floor prices, and finance rules.
The trouble was that the knowledge to get any one of those decisions right lived in too many places at once. The CPQ rulebook said one thing, the regional price book another; the approval matrix lived in a deck, the FX adjustments in a spreadsheet, the legal guardrails somewhere else entirely. So the actual work became a grind of millions of small, exacting procedures — each one requiring real expertise and uninterrupted concentration. A single overlooked floor price or missed approval threshold could quietly erode margin on a multi-million-dollar deal, so my analysts double- and triple-checked everything.
The questions they couldn't answer alone all flowed to the same two or three specialists, who became a bottleneck for the entire org. And the deep, strategic work Balraj hired these people to do kept getting interrupted by lookups that felt beneath their talent but were far too risky to rush.
One sourced answer, right where we work
In another interview, Melany said, "What drew us to Olis was that it didn't ask us to go somewhere else to get an answer. It's ambient — it lives on the screen, inside the tools my team already uses all day. Its Intent Detection reads the context in front of an analyst and surfaces the exact knowledge the moment calls for, and every answer comes back with its source and the date it was last updated."
The Adobe team connected Olis across more than 40 of our internal sources and systems — CPQ, ERP, the deal desk, finance, and legal — and it pulled all of that scattered pricing knowledge into one place. Today it indexes something on the order of 2.3 million SKU-by-region-by-segment price combinations, and instead of an analyst stitching five systems together by hand, they ask in plain language and get one answer they can trust.
The part the team didn't expect was how naturally it fit into the flow of the work. Nobody had to be trained into a new app or change how they did their job. The answer just shows up where they already are.
From a two-day relay to a 90-second answer
The change in speed was almost immediate. A routine pricing or discount question used to be a multi-day relay — a message in Slack, an email to the deal desk, a wait, a follow-up. Now the same question resolves in under 90 seconds, and 93% of them never reach a senior strategist at all. The answer arrives scoped to the deal's tier, region, and segment, with the controlling policy cited right there.
The downstream effects added up faster than the team had expected. Their analysts have each gotten back about four hours of uninterrupted, high-value time a day — time that now goes to actual strategy instead of hunting for a rule. Deal-desk cycle time has dropped 38%. And ramping a new pricing analyst, which used to take us nine weeks, now takes four, because the expert knowledge is finally self-serve from day one. That tracks with the kind of platform benchmark Olis talks about — up to 5× faster knowledge retrieval — except now the team is watching it happen within their own organization.
"We went from a 2 day relay across Slack, email, to an instant live data response in seconds. The bottleneck just disappeared.."
Balraj Kosta
Pricing Operations Manager at Adobe
Currently
When the team first moved their pricing knowledge into Olis, they were honestly nervous the team would resist one more tool. The opposite happened, and each employee reviewed and saw an internal satisfaction at 4.8 out of 5, and 96% of the team say they'd recommend it to another department. People trust the answer because the source is always one tap away.
Now, everyone sees the team pushing further. Adobe's Pricing Operations team wants Olis surfacing proactive pricing insights, not just answering the questions they think to ask. Flagging where their guardrails are out of date, where a competitor move should change a recommendation, where two policies quietly contradict each other. The team started with retrieval, and it gave each member back their concentration. The exciting part is everything they can do now that the right answer is always already there.
Adobe resolves 93% of pricing questions without escalation, using Olis
Outcome
With Olis, the team unified its scattered pricing knowledge into a single sourced answer, delivered on-screen the moment it's needed. Routine questions that once took ~2 days now resolve in under 90 seconds, 93% without ever escalating to a senior strategist. Analysts have reclaimed roughly four hours of deep-focus time a day, deal-desk cycle time is down 38%, and new-hire ramp has dropped from nine weeks to four.
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