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Connect Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) once and Gradial can read your journeys, review the emails inside them, draft content updates, and move work through review, all in the thread where the brief was written. You don’t have to switch between Adobe tools or wait on a developer.
Access: The Adobe Journey Optimizer integration must be enabled for your organization. If you don’t see it in your integration list, contact your Gradial team to get access.

What You Can Do

Journeys

List and read AJO journeys so Grady can walk through what a journey does before anyone changes it.

Content & Templates

Read, create, and update content templates and fragments, and publish fragments, so new drafts match your existing AJO assets.

Journey Views in the Thread

When Gradial inspects a journey, it can show the steps in order, audience details, and a preview of each email in the thread. If you add your Experience Cloud tenant, the view also links back to the journey in AJO.

Triggers

Trigger messages and orchestrated campaigns, check the status of audience executions, and enable datasets for orchestrated campaigns.

Throttling & Capping

Create, update, deploy, and undeploy the settings that limit how fast AJO calls an external endpoint.

Loyalty Challenges

Read and manage loyalty challenges, tasks, and program configuration, and publish or unpublish challenges.

Journey Authoring (opt-in)

Build and edit unpublished journey drafts, including steps, inline email and SMS, and custom actions, with your approval for each change. Details below.

Publish, Stop & Edit Live (opt-in)

Publish a draft, stop a live journey, or start a new draft version of a live journey, each with your approval. Details below.

Before You Start

Have these ready:
  • An active Adobe Experience Cloud organization with AJO licensed and live
  • Access to the Adobe Developer Console to create a project and generate server-to-server OAuth credentials
  • The IMS Org ID for your Adobe Experience Cloud organization (it ends in @AdobeOrg)
  • The name of the AJO sandbox Gradial should connect to
  • A product profile that gives the credential access to AJO
  • A Gradial organization Administrator role
  • Optional: your Experience Cloud tenant name, for links that open journeys in AJO
  • The Gradial Environments where AJO should be available
For the opt-in journey features, also decide who approves each change, and make sure AJO already has an active email or SMS channel configuration and any custom actions you want to use. Try the integration in an AJO sandbox before you point Gradial at a production sandbox.

How to Connect

If you already connected Adobe Experience Platform and chose an option that includes AJO under Adobe products, that same credential and sandbox also serve AJO tasks, and you can skip this setup. See Adobe Experience Platform.
1

Create an Adobe Developer project

  1. Go to Adobe Developer Console and sign in with your Adobe ID.
  2. Select your organization from the org switcher.
  3. Click Create new project.
  4. Give the project a name (e.g., Gradial - AJO Integration).
2

Add the Adobe Journey Optimizer API

  1. Inside your new project, click Add API.
  2. Filter by Experience Cloud and select Adobe Journey Optimizer.
  3. Choose OAuth Server-to-Server as the authentication type and click Next.
  4. Select or create a Product Profile for the credential.
  5. Click Save configured API.
There is no scope field to fill in. What Gradial can do in AJO is set by the permissions on the product profile you choose here.
3

Copy your credentials

From the project’s OAuth Server-to-Server credential page, copy:
  • Client ID
  • Client Secret
  • Organization ID (this is your IMS Org ID, ending in @AdobeOrg)
Also have the name of the AJO sandbox you want Gradial to use.
Keep the Client Secret secure. Anyone with this credential can act on behalf of your Adobe organization within the permissions of its product profile.
4

Find your Experience Cloud tenant (optional)

Sign in to Adobe Experience Cloud. Your tenant is the part of the URL after #/@ (for example, in https://experience.adobe.com/#/@yourcompany/... the tenant is yourcompany). Gradial uses it to build links that open journeys directly in AJO.
5

Add the integration in Gradial

  1. In Gradial, go to Settings → Integrations.
  2. Find the Adobe Journey Optimizer card (use Search integrations if needed) and click it.
  3. Fill in the connection details:
  1. Click Save.
Saving checks that the required fields are filled in and correctly formatted. Adobe checks the credentials themselves the first time Gradial reads from AJO.To rotate the Client Secret later, edit the integration and enter the new secret. If you edit other fields and leave the secret alone, the stored secret is kept.
6

Assign to an Environment

  1. Go to Settings → Environments and select the Gradial Environment where AJO should be available.
  2. Add the integration to that Environment.
  3. Repeat for any additional Environments.
7

Confirm it works

In a thread in that Environment, ask Gradial to list your AJO journeys. If results come back, the credentials, IMS org ID, and sandbox are all correct.

Using the Integration

These work as soon as the integration is connected and assigned to an Environment. To review a journey, ask Gradial to find it by name. It shows the steps, audience, and email previews in the thread, and you can ask follow-up questions or request copy changes.
Several actions have no Gradial approval step: triggering a message or orchestrated campaign, enabling a dataset, deploying a throttling or capping configuration, and publishing a fragment or a loyalty challenge. They act on live AJO data. Grady is set up to confirm the exact action with you first, but if you need a hard limit, restrict what the product profile on your credential allows.

Triggers and dataset enablement

Grady can trigger a message from an API-triggered campaign for one person or for an audience, trigger an orchestrated campaign, and check the status of an audience execution by execution ID or schedule ID.
  • An orchestrated campaign must be live, or in draft with an active test session, before it can be triggered.
  • Adobe limits production triggers to one per hour.
Grady can also enable a dataset for orchestrated campaigns (one at a time) and check the enablement job. Adobe refuses this with a permissions error if the product profile lacks the orchestrated campaign dataset permissions.

Throttling and endpoint capping

These settings limit how fast AJO calls an external endpoint, such as the system behind a custom action. Grady can list, read, create, update, deploy, and undeploy both kinds. Gradial can’t delete them, so remove unused ones through Adobe’s API.
  • Nothing takes effect until it is deployed.
  • Throttling is organization-wide. Adobe allows one throttling configuration per organization. It must be created on a production sandbox, with maximum throughput between 200 and 5,000 events per second. When the limit is reached, Adobe queues further events for up to 6 hours.
  • Capping belongs to a sandbox. Each capping configuration is stored with the sandbox Gradial is connected to.
  • Undeploying stops enforcement. Adobe still processes events already waiting for 24 hours.

Loyalty challenges

Grady can read, create, and update loyalty challenges and tasks, duplicate challenges, and manage the program configuration behind them, such as reward providers and reward definitions. It can also look up product catalog entries and check catalog import jobs. Two actions go further than editing:
  • Publish and unpublish a challenge. Publishing makes the challenge available to your customers. Unpublishing makes it unavailable.
  • Create or update the journey behind a challenge. Adobe says this journey must also be published before the challenge goes live.
Grady can’t delete challenges. If the product profile has no loyalty permissions, Adobe refuses even reads. Publishing, unpublishing, and generating the journey need Manage Loyalty Challenges. Develop Loyalty Challenges doesn’t include them.

Permissions and limits

  • Permissions come from Adobe. Gradial can only do what the product profile on your credential allows. To limit what Gradial can change, limit that profile. Among others, you need Publish journeys to publish, Manage journeys to stop, Manage journeys events, data sources and actions (on a production sandbox) for throttling, Publish Orchestrated Campaign to trigger orchestrated campaigns, and Manage Loyalty Challenges to publish challenges.
  • Journey lists are recent by default. Adobe returns journeys modified in roughly the last week unless a date range is given, so name an older journey or a date range when you ask Grady to find it.

Journey Authoring (Opt-in)

Access: Must be enabled for your organization. Contact your Gradial team to get access. Grady can build and edit journeys as unpublished drafts in AJO, so a brief becomes a reviewable draft without anyone assembling the canvas by hand.

What Grady can do

  • Create a draft. A new, unpublished journey with a name, description, and time zone, and a minimal start-to-end flow. Grady is set up to look for existing journeys with a similar structure first and ask whether to reuse one.
  • Edit a draft. Change the name, description, entry and re-entry settings, and the canvas. Only the latest unpublished draft that is not in test mode can be edited.
  • Add steps.
  • Add an inline email or SMS. Grady creates the message inside the journey, from scratch or by copying an existing inline message you name, and attaches it to a step. It can update the subject and HTML, or the text, of an inline message in the draft. It can also add a follow-up email for people who don’t open or click in time.
    • Email uses an active email channel configuration from AJO. Every email is a marketing email, and Gradial refuses HTML that has no absolute web link marked as the opt-out link. Images from AEM Assets work when your AEM is an AEM as a Cloud Service repository. Links to AEM author URLs are rejected, because AJO can’t fetch them.
    • SMS uses an active SMS channel configuration and sends to the mobile phone number on the profile. The journey’s identity namespace has to match the one Grady selects.
  • Personalize. Email subjects, HTML, and SMS text can use a simple profile field such as {{profile.person.name.firstName}}. Gradial checks the field against your sandbox’s profile schema before saving, and rejects unknown fields, fields that hold more than one value, and anything beyond a simple field reference.
  • Add a custom action. Grady lists the custom actions your admins have configured in AJO and adds one to the draft. It supports text parameters mapped to a query string or JSON body, and refuses other parameter types.

Approvals

  • Every change to a draft needs your approval. That covers every edit, step, message, and custom action. Creating the first, empty draft and reading a draft don’t. Each approval covers one action, with the details shown on the card.
  • Stale drafts are refused. If the draft changed in AJO after Grady read it, Gradial refuses the change and Grady has to read it again. Avoid editing the same draft in AJO while Grady is working on it.
  • Nothing here goes live. These actions create and edit drafts only. They don’t publish, test, send, or schedule anything.

Not supported

Grady can’t create channel configurations or custom actions. Your AJO admins set those up. It also doesn’t support the Optimize, Journey fragment, Content decision, Dataset lookup, Update profile, and Jump steps, or custom events. Build those in AJO.

Example

Share the brief, the AEP audience, and the email configuration to use. Grady builds the draft one step at a time, and you approve each change as it appears. Then open the draft in AJO from the link in the thread, test it, and publish it there, or approve a publish in the thread if publish, stop, and edit live is enabled.

Publish, Stop, and Edit Live (Opt-in)

Access: Must be enabled for your organization. Contact your Gradial team to get access. Journey authoring must also be enabled. These actions take real journeys live or halt them, and each needs your approval.
  • Publish a draft. Gradial first runs Adobe’s publish readiness check and passes on Adobe’s blockers word for word if it fails. The draft must be unchanged since Grady read it. Grady then waits for Adobe to confirm the journey is live, and tells you if Adobe hasn’t confirmed yet. Publishing a journey that is already live does nothing. Gradial doesn’t run an AJO test first, so test in AJO before you approve.
  • Stop a live journey. Adobe treats stopping as the emergency option. Everyone already in the journey is halted, and Adobe won’t let you publish that stopped version again. Gradial can’t close a journey to new entries only, which Adobe recommends where it fits.
  • Edit a live or stopped journey. Grady creates a new editable draft version from it. The live version keeps running until you approve publishing the new one. Then Adobe closes the previous version (it shows as Finished): no new entries, and people already in it finish there. Editing a stopped journey is how you bring it back.
When the journey is shown in the thread, these actions update the journey view with the new state and version. Adobe requires the Publish journeys permission to publish and Manage journeys to stop. Your product profile has to grant them.

Not Supported Yet

  • Deleting objects in AJO, and managing AJO users or permissions.
  • Listing or searching campaigns on their own. Grady reads journeys, and the journey view shows the emails inside them.
  • Pausing or resuming a journey, and running a journey test.
  • Creating sender settings. Use the AJO UI.
  • Journey authoring and publishing, unless they are enabled for your organization. Without them, make canvas changes in AJO.
  • Adobe Analytics or AEP audience details. These come from your Analytics and AEP integrations.

Troubleshooting

Support

Contact your Gradial onboarding lead or email [email protected] for help with setup.