IBM announced on Wednesday its deployment of the Adobe Firefly generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool within its design and marketing teams to enhance productivity.
Billy Seabrook, IBM Consulting’s global chief design officer, stated in an interview with FOX Business that IBM’s design teams have been utilizing Firefly since its launch last year, gradually expanding its usage leading up to the recent announcement.
Seabrook mentioned that IBM has over 20,000 individuals utilizing Adobe Creative Cloud, with experimentation on Firefly beginning during its beta phase in March of the previous year. This initial phase involved internal testing to understand the tool’s capabilities.
With Firefly’s general availability, IBM proceeded to evaluate the tool comprehensively, eventually deciding to deploy it across all of its practitioners in its current state.
Seabrook elaborated that during the initial internal pilot phase, IBM’s design teams leveraged Firefly to explore ways to augment their approach to the design process.
He emphasized the tool’s potential to accelerate the ideation process by generating numerous ideas and creative stimuli. Additionally, Firefly facilitated the creation of prototypes or storyboards for various concepts, enhancing the visualization of ideas on a journey map.
As Adobe Firefly’s capabilities evolved since its launch last year and the model transitioned to version 2.0 with new features like style matching, IBM’s design teams broadened their utilization of the AI tool.
“We’ve expanded and also integrated into some of the core tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. We expanded our use of it accordingly. So we started to take advantage of the generative fill capabilities and what have you in our typical production process,” Seabrook explained. “It wasn’t just an ideation, kind of inspiration tool – it became an actual productivity tool in terms of creating content at scale.”
IBM employs Adobe Firefly with its internal teams to produce IBM-branded materials, with Seabrook noting the tool’s utilization in a social media campaign.
“We did a great social media campaign last year as an experiment. It was a nice, tight creative concept that took advantage of the benefits of generative AI, specifically Firefly. We did this concept around textures – texturing an image, a symbol – and the variety that came out was great. The productivity improvements were huge and it performed really well, it was a great example of personalization at scale,” Seabrook shared.
IBM’s consulting teams are extending their utilization of Firefly to aid external clients in harnessing the power of the generative AI tool for content creation and creative concept development. Additionally, they are assisting clients in establishing internal workflows and governance models to responsibly adopt AI.
“If they want to ingest their style guides and their image library into an AI model in a way that’s not training the underlying model, it’s proprietary protected data, we’re helping them strategize how to do that with Firefly to ensure that the output is on-brand,” Seabrook elaborated.
“That’s a concern of theirs as well. It’s not only a creative quality metric, but it’s also sort of a brand relevancy metric that we’re helping them with and actually getting to the point of coaching them on how to do prompt engineering so that they can get the output from the tool using the language that the model really understands and reflects the brand the best,” he added.
Seabrook emphasized that IBM’s expanded use of Adobe Firefly signifies “the next evolution of our partnership with Adobe,” highlighting IBM’s significant utilization of Adobe software and marketing cloud services.
“I think with this innovation of AI, I think we’re able to create a really compelling value proposition that transforms these marketing organizations. And ultimately this North Star of delivering personalization at scale, which has been sort of the holy grail of marketing for decades, we’re very optimistic that the capabilities of AI might unlock that for us,” Seabrook expressed.