International Business Machines (IBM.N) said its initial tests of Adobe’s (ADBE.O) generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools resulted in productivity improvements.
IBM said it used Adobe’s tools, which can generate images from text prompts, to aid its marketing campaigns. It’s an early test of Adobe’s strategy to create AI systems trained on its own proprietary data with legal safeguards against lawsuits, a strategy that Adobe hopes will attract big companies.
Billy Seabrook, global design director for IBM’s consulting arm, said his unit’s 1,600 designers use Adobe’s tools to quickly generate ideas and create variations of them for use in different parts of marketing campaigns. .
“What would usually take us two weeks for an end-to-end cycle, we’re down to two days,” Seabrook told Reuters.
Overall, IBM said it expects a 10-fold increase in productivity for designers, who will be able to spend more time brainstorming and creating storyboards instead of generating minor design variations.
Seabrook said that in the short term, the most likely impact of using the new tools on employment in the design industry will be to use existing teams to do more work.
“There’s usually a rule of prioritization as to what big bets you’re going to pursue and how much staff you’re going to dedicate to a problem. Theoretically, you have more room to focus on some of these other issues,” he said.
The long-term impact on employment is less clear. Seabrook said data from a recent IBM survey shows that most business leaders think designers are more important than ever.
“They need to be almost the trendsetters and quality controllers of the results of generative AI, as well as some empathy in the room that helps train, refine and organize that AI,” said Seabrook.
But in other parts of the survey data, “everyone agrees there will be fewer jobs,” Seabrook said. “We’re waiting to see what happens.”
Source: Reuters
