PepsiCo Design’s GenAI Blueprint: Empowering Creative Teams

[Music] [Daniela Maldonado] All right. Hello, Miami! [Veronica Campbell] Hello, everybody. Hi, everyone. Hi. I am so thrilled to be here. I can't believe the turnout on a Wednesday morning post Bash. Did you guys have fun yesterday? - Yeah? - I lost my voice from T-Pain. - All those lyrics just came back to me. - Yeah. If we sound a little scratchy, it's because we were having too much fun last night. But I want to thank you for choosing to be with us on your last day of MAX. It is incredible to be in front of you and sharing a little bit about our journey at PepsiCo Design. So yeah, let's get started. You guys, ready? All right. Here's the agenda for today. We're going to take you on a little journey to tell you a little bit of who we are, what we do at PepsiCo Design and share the journey that we've embarked on this year. So I'll be taking you through the four-step process and Veronica will be sharing with you some fantastic work.

But before we get started, I would like to tell you a little bit about ourselves. We have this tradition in the design center which I love. That every time a new team member comes on board, we ask them to fill out what we call a who's who page. Just to tell us a little bit about themselves, you know? Yeah. It gets us outside of all our day work job and really know who we are working with and just personal anecdotes. Correct. We clearly hire top shelf talent but we want to know who they are as people. So this is my who's who and I want to share with you. My name is Daniela Maldonado. I am a Senior Design Manager on brand Pepsi for North America. I was born and raised in Colombia. Whoo! Any Colombians in the house? Any Latin people in the house? Yeah.

I moved to New York when I was 18 to pursue my dream of becoming a painter. That clearly didn't work out too well, but it led me into this fantastic journey of discovery. I've been doing everything from visual merchandising, fashion, to creative communication, branding, packaging, design. And that's how I ended up coming to PepsiCo. After working at Sterling Brands with Debbie Millman, PepsiCo is one of our biggest clients and so yeah, I came here. I went to FIT. Actually, we both went to FIT New York City, if anyone knows FIT New York City. It's a great school.

And after a 12-year career, I took a crazy decision just because my life isn't hectic enough to go back to school and pursue an MBA in the University of Illinois. So that's currently what I'm doing. And to tell you a little bit about my professional journey, I've been at PepsiCo for eight years. That's 8 out of the 10 years that we've been a Design function. So I am very proud to say I'm one of the OGs of the Design Center, which is really cool. That has given me so many opportunities because I've gone to work on all of our sparkling beverage portfolio almost globally. I've touched on almost all of the brands that we have and done work from Super Bowl, tent pole moments like Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Weekend to global redesigns to movie partnerships when Black Panther came out. I mean, it was such a privilege to work with them and be part of that process. And now in my current role as senior manager at Pepsi, I'm going to also start working a lot more on campaign, content, social development for our brands. This summer, I got to work with Bobby Flay and Kelly Rowland creating some incredible content for our brand. So it's been quite a journey. This slide doesn't even scratch the surface, but it's a little glimpse into what we do.

All right. So my name is Veronica Campbell. Unlike Encanto, I came from the land of Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey. - Anybody? - Anybody? Okay. Good. Good.

- It's a little bit closer. - Yeah.

But yeah, when I'm not here talking to you guys, I like cars, so I go to the car track with my husband. I like to sing karaoke with my coworkers. - Oh, yes. - Hence, the voice loss. - Yeah. - And explore the world. We all just came back from Europe too. So I've always had a niche for drawing. I grew up as an only child, so I feel like it kept me busy. And my mom, as a single mom, she would just keep me busy, throw printer paper at me and a whiteboard, and that was how I just got through the day. But that's always been so special to me. But as technology grew, I just became more curious and wanted to know different mediums. So the medium of Microsoft Paint. - Everybody remember that? - Oh, yeah. Those little digital dolls that going pixel by pixel on the dresses, coding for Myspace.

And then some little After Effects for the drifting, the car drifting organization I take part of 3D. So I just feel like now it's led me to AI which everybody is here today to talk about.

So before that-- Oh, can you go back one slide? Oh, sure. Yeah, thank you. So before that I got into my career, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wasn't a painter, but I got offered an internship at Island Def Jam Records. And then I moved up to a senior designer doing album covers for people like Shawn Mendes, Noah Kahan, and my good old neighbor Bon Jovi. And the music industry is great, but as yesterday you heard, it's a crazy world. And you're making art for artists, and you're doing this for managers and artists. And I wanted to learn more about how you make art for people, what makes people grab things off the shelf, or be dedicated to a brand. So now, leading up to that, I worked for PepsiCo. So this was when we started, Daniela, I used to call her my mother hen, my mentor when we were on the beverage brands and we were only eight people carbonated soda. And Leon over here has expanded the team to 70 people on beverage. Whoo! So it's amazing. They do such amazing work. And I got to really hone in on my cool illustrations, doing that for work was so much fun. But I wanted to expand my area of expertise because PepsiCo is known for so many brands and something that people don't know is that PepsiCo also has snacks. So now I'm on the global snacks team overseeing a cohesive brand look and feel for LAY'S. Now they have their own team, but CHEETOS, and then DORITOS, which I'm going to take you through a super fun project in shortly.

Yeah. So Mauro Porcini, our Chief Design Officer, he calls us Unicorns. So we want to tell you about the other unicorns of the PepsiCo Design Center. So like Daniela said, it's been 10 years since we started by Mauro, and with a lot of support by Ramon Laguarta over there, our CEO. And then we've just past 10 years created a journey to be a design-driven excellence company. And we want to bring joy to the consumers and leveraging design with innovation, meaningful change, and business value. That's right. And this slide is one of my favorite slides that you're going to see here today because when we're talking about our team, this just shows you the scale, the power of design inside an organization like PepsiCo. It's a consumer company, we're selling sodas, we're selling chips, but it goes so much more beyond that because all of these brands mean something to people. So to be able to scale our design organization from one office in New York to over 17 offices around the world in all of the cities that you see here, and over 300 strong incredible designers, I mean, we have magical people that come from all sorts of backgrounds. We have over, I think 30 languages that we speak at the Design Center, and everyone brings their true authentic self to work, and they bring something different which has made our work really stand out. And that is recognized in the way of Design Awards. So not to brag, but in the last 10 years we've won over 2,100 Design Awards globally. So I think it's an astounding figure. - Yeah. - So yeah, definitely, cheers to that.

And within these regions, we have so many roles and capabilities, but we split them out into three segments. So we have brand building, where we're building cohesive brand experience across all touch-points, and then we have innovation, where we're pushing boundaries with innovation and design thinking. And then I think you all know that designers are a little crazy and all over the place. So we also have a team that's growing exponentially, and they help us with productivity, efficiency, and organization.

All right. So now that you know a little bit about ourselves, I would like to ask you all a question here. And please be honest with your answer. How many of you like change? Okay, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. That's actually more than a lot of people, but I guess that's because you're all designers and you're embracing what's coming out of change is something really to be embraced. But for the reality is that for most humans, change is hard. We tend to feel the pain of loss more acutely than the pleasure of gain, and change is often seen as a risk that could lead to losses, which makes individuals a little bit reluctant to embrace it. And that's part of our human condition. But the reality is that change is inevitable. And no matter where you are, what industry you do, change is always going to come. And throughout history, we've had revolutionary changes and new innovations in society that really when they came about, they made people very nervous. They didn't know how to adapt to them, how to respond to them, but ultimately they ended up embracing them and these changes pushed us forward as a society and have made us come up with incredible things. And that brings us to the word that you've probably been hearing this conference over and over and over again which is artificial intelligence. Take a drink as Scott would say. Exactly. I mean, artificial intelligence is the word of the day but really artificial intelligence we've been living with it for over 30 years. A lot of the mundane tasks that you do digitally are powered by artificial intelligence. But the reality is that in 2022, something truly spectacular happened and that is that the machine started talking back to us. Back to us in natural language. And in the words of Bill Gates, it's basically like AI woke up. It woke up and it started interacting with us, showing us images back to us of the natural world and everything that we've been feeding it for the past 10 years.

These models are trained on big data and when I mean big data is everything that we have put on the internet for over 30 years. So they know everything about us at this point and it's-- Did anyone see the humanoid robots that Tesla unveiled last week? - Yeah. - Right? It's a little bit-- It's starting to get too, Sci-Fi, but the reality is that that is happening. That is coming. There is no going back. So that brought us as an organization to really ask the question is, okay, so what does that mean for PepsiCo Design and what does that mean for the overall creative community? Even though this GenAI revolution is just starting, we wanted to be very intentional about keeping up to speed with major developments, trying to understand how this will affect the creative community, our designers. And we took this bold decision to embark in this journey of adoption and really start bringing it into everything that we do at PepsiCo. So I'm going to be taking you through what the journey has looked like and I'm going to be very open and transparent with you. It hasn't been always easy, but it's definitely something that as leaders, we have to take responsibility and push forward for. So this is actually one of the most important slides of the journey if you guys want to take a picture of it. Because after months and months of trial and error of design thinking, of prototyping, implementing, going back and reiterating, this was the best way to put everything together into one simple diagram, if you will, of everything that we've been doing. And this is not a linear journey. This is not like start here and you end here. This is really-- That's why it's a wheel. It's like a little spin the wheel type of situation because you can choose your adventure. But at the center of it, I want to really emphasize what we have which is people. People are at the center of this GenAI revolution, how we train them, how we empower them, how we communicate with them, and how we put them at ease is the most important thing about this journey. So let's get started with bold implementation. And I just told you this is not a linear journey, but I do believe that starting here is probably the best way to start because you have to define your why. Technologies come and go, fads come and go. And really when something as big and as revolutionary as AI comes about, you need to understand why do you want to embrace it. What is this going to mean for your team? What is this going to mean for your organization? What does this mean for the values of your organization? So for us at PepsiCo Design, we have four strong pillars of what is our why. First of all, our name is PepsiCo Design and Innovation, which means that innovation is in our blood. We always want to be at the vanguard of technology and design. Secondly, for us, it was really about supercharging creativity and empowering collaboration within our teams. If any of you work in big organizations like PepsiCo, you understand how easy it is to get siloed, to just work on with one thing. And we see AI as a really powerful way to empower more collaboration across teams, across departments. Then we also feel a huge responsibility to make sure that our workforce is not left behind. We want to bring everyone along in this revolution. We want to create a baseline for everyone so that they know what is going on with AI and they can be prepared for a competitive landscape in the future. And then lastly, and this is one of the most important things for us as a company, as a consumer-driven company, is that we need to adapt to the ever-changing consumer preferences and expectations, especially around personalization at scale.

It's another drinking word, personalization. Yeah. So the next step is really choosing the right partner. There are so many platforms, new AI models that are coming out all of the time. So many technology companies that are jumping into the AI bandwagon. But really I would encourage you to do your due diligence, research, understand what partner is going to align the best with your company values, with what you want to achieve. And really choosing the right partner is going to be crucial for you to get started into this journey. For us, Adobe was an obvious choice because they are really prioritizing ethics, how they train their models, how they support the creative community. You guys saw everything about content credentials yesterday. So out of so many technology partners out there, they have been the ones that really were willing to jump in with us, and make sure that we were trying to do this in the most ethical and responsible way as possible.

Then this slide is I think very important because in order for you to start any transformative journey, you need friends in high places. You need to make sure that leadership is there with you, that they understand the vision, that they are bold, I mean, I wouldn't be standing here without the support of my leadership and if they didn't understand how important this is. So make sure you have these conversations, this journey is a lot about managing up and managing down. So you have to understand what the vision is from leadership, how to bring them along, how to show them why this is the right thing for you, and then that then is disseminated into the rest of the organization. But this is truly important for you to get started, to get resources, all of that good stuff. And then this is an obvious slide but if you want to get started in this journey you need to have the right tools in place. The right systems, the right computers, a solid internet connection in your offices which-- Hard to come nice-- Sometimes it's a little bit tricky. But really if you don't have the right infrastructure in place, it's going to be really hard for teams to be excited and to jump in because they're going to just find more excuses to find resistance if these things are not working. So my advice is talk to your IT department. Make them your coconspirators. Bring them along the way in everything. I mean, we have an amazing IT support team and they're here with us today. So this is also truly one of the reasons why we were set up for success. Shout out to Andre over there. Woo-hoo! All right. So now we're moving to training and this is the part where you design and execute the plan. And the first step on this step is really to assess current skills. So get yourself some data, talk to your team whether it's in the form of formal surveys, chats, forums like whatever. Depending on the size of your team and the size of your organization, it is very important to start with just understanding where people are at in this journey. Where are they at in their understanding of AI? We've been coming to these conferences, we have the privilege of knowing what's at the forefront, but some people don't. So you need to make sure that everyone is-- You need to know where people stand before you get started. The most important thing here is that you're going to try to create a baseline that is across the organization so that people have at least a good place to launch and you might have some people that are very enthusiastic about AI. You may have some people that cringe at the word. So this is how you understand where people in your team are.

And once you have some of those insights, that's when you start to design the training. Depending on how many early adapters, or enthusiasts, or people who don't want anything to do with it, then you'll figure out what's the best way to start training your team, and then you understand if you need more one-on-one trainings or more big broad town hall situations. But this will all be empowered and informed by some of your insights that you gained in the previous step. So this is a slide where we try to break down a little bit of what our training process has been like so far.

I'm going to be honest with you. We're still very much in the crawl stage of our process. If you're familiar with crawl, walk, run. We're still crawling, we're still getting to that place where we're trying to create that baseline for everyone, where we are trying to get people to understand the vision. And so one of the first things that we did was to start scheduling a bunch of enablement sessions after we did the survey and understood where people are, and then understanding of integration in some of the programs.

We did specialized trainings for Creative Cloud. We did specialized training for Adobe Express, for all of the different segments of tools that designers use, and then also enablements around Firefly. So really explaining what is Firefly? What does this model do? Why is it responsible? All of the things that we've been learning here about Firefly really try to disseminate that into our team. So that part of our training took around five months where we did all of these sessions online. And then we had an amazing, amazing, amazing hands on workshop in June this year, where after all of this training and being digitally connected via Zoom, we got to get everyone under one roof and, I mean, 70 people, it was incredible to be able to do that and have them all participate in this hands up workshop that we designed where we created a challenge type of event called Creative Jam. We did two different briefs to key projects that we had going on in the beverage team at that time was Mountain Dew redesign which launched last week. I don't know if any of you have seen the new one-- Anybody have the bottles? Yeah. Thank you. That was our team and we were in the middle of that when we did this training. And so we used this training as a way to superpower brainstorming, collaboration, more ideas because we were very much into the journey of redesigning but out of this workshop came a lot of great ideas. And then after that, we also had the Gatorade brief in this session and it was amazing. It went really, really well. So I'm just going to-- Oh, before I move forward to the next slide, the last step is we did enablements, we did our hands-on workshop, and then what we've been doing after those combination of the two steps is to have continuous updates. So you have to find the right balance between overloading your team with information but also keeping them up to speed with the latest developments. So I'm going to show you a little video of what that hands-on workshop look like for you to understand the power of it.

# It's always a good time # [Man] We're out with all of PBNA. [Man] We're going to spend a few days doing some workshops, events with Adobe, some Creative Jams. [Woman] The idea really is to create a mood board, a social asset. You're going to have four minutes to present. [Man] It's always fun to do in-person stuff, especially with a challenge event. It just brings out the best in everybody. It's just a lot of fun. [Man] IRL is definitely better than over Zoom. To actually interact with them in-person is so much better and just having that bond is great. The whole meeting people face-to-face, the in real life interactions makes a huge difference. It's an incredible experience. [All] PepsiCo! Yay. That little bit just fills me so it's so much joy and pride because it was a great day. The creativity that came out of that workshop was just mind blowing. We were all impressed what the teams were able to do in four and a half hours with the help of Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express. I mean, it was incredible what they were able to do. So this brings us to our last point of the training which is really creating a culture of learning and making it fun. Create incentives, create fun workshops, find ways training on new things is hard because we all have so much on our plates. There's so much work that you have to do on your day-to-day on your brands and so that whenever there's new trainings that you have to do, it's looked like a hassle. So it's up to us as leaders to find creative ways to make it a little bit more incentivizing and engaging.

Okay, so now we get to the empowering the creatives which is all about communication. So remember I told you at the beginning, change is not easy. It's all about how you communicate with your team. How do you talk to them about what the vision is? A lot of people have a little bit of resistance to AI. They're not very sure what this is going to mean for them. So this is where change management and the communication becomes really, really crucial. So make sure that you're being empathetic, that you're being kind, that you're listening, that you're having these conversations with an open heart and open ears. And this brings us to creating feedback loops. Make sure that you're constantly checking in with your team, again, whether it's through surveys or more impersonal conversations. We've been doing a lot of surveys and people I feel like to put certain things in surveys, but then when I actually talk to them. Some designers have come up to me and been very vulnerable and tell me what they think, what they like, what they dislike and that is actually really good feedback for us to go back and implement back into our trainings. So having feedback loops is great. - They're real at the Design Center too. - Yes. They don't hold anything back. Exactly. And then lastly but not most importantly is make sure you track success. I think this is one of the most tricky parts is to really create KPIs that are measurable and trackable. What is important for you in your organization and the type of work that you do? Is it getting to approvals of something faster? Is it reducing the amount of time that it requires to do menial tasks? Again, depending on the size of your organization, the type of creative work you do, you need to figure out what are those KPIs that are going to be the ones that you're going to be able to measure and track and then use that as a selling story for leadership.

All right, so this is the part of the training where everything that we've talked about so far in the previous three quadrants come to life. And that is because this is the strategy in practice. So this is the moment where you look around your team, you look around everything that you have for the year, what are the key priorities for your business and you identify one or two projects where you think that AI can really create a difference. What is the one or two project that is going to be your shining object to go back to leadership and be like, "Look, this is what AI can do." You need to create some use cases that are not just fun but that actually bring and deliver business value. So we're going to be showing you two projects. I'm going to just quickly show you a Gatorade reel. Did anyone here go to the fantastic Gatorade activation at the Creative Park? - Hopefully-- - Did you have any? Yeah. Your bottles. - Yeah, yeah. - Amazing. So we encourage you to keep playing on Gatorade.com and just let your creativity go. But that was an incredible project that was supercharged by AI and that we were able to complete in record time really due to our collaboration and partnership with Adobe that just enhanced an already existing platform and brought it to the next level. And then Veronica is going to take you through an amazing, amazing DORITOS project as well. So with this slide, I will pass it on to Veronica. [Music] Yay! - Whoo! - So proud.

I'm glad everybody got a chance to see all the Gatorade stuff. So you guys are still with us, right? All right.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the DORITOS side and talk about custom models.

So like Scott said, "Every time you take a drink, you've heard Firefly way too often." But have a lot of you heard of custom models though? Okay. So I mean, Adobe has been an amazing partner, and we work with them closely on these amazing new platforms where we can give them feedback and then they give us access. So custom models is one of them. So it's an enterprise add-on that enables PepsiCo to fine-tune the foundation by using Firefly. But the good part about it is it's all closed in. So we can use all of our brand assets and PepsiCo's users can train on it. But, sorry guys, you can't.

But just here's a brief example of what I mean and what the capabilities are. So this is the same prompt across the board. So there's Firefly where it looks pretty generic, and then we have Firefly with Style Match, which it looks better, but it could get better. And then Firefly custom model where we get it to where we really want.

But I don't know if you're asking me what the hell is on your screen right now? What are you showing me right now? But does everybody know what DORITOS is here? Does anybody like DORITOS? Call out your favorite flavor. Nacho Cheese, COOL RANCH. Okay. - COOL RANCH. - Okay. All right. COOL RANCH is always a favorite. - Yeah. - All right. Well, from a design standpoint, we've been working, oh, two years on this brand new viz. And we're calling this our bold new era. And we're focusing and honing in on our iconic triangle. And this triangle represents a symbol of crunchy goodness, a beacon of bold flavor, and a statement to celebrate diversity. And here's a little hype reel to show the new viz.

[Music] All right. Well-- Okay, so everybody knows what DORITOS is, but how do we push this new beacon of flavor even more? And we want to celebrate all of this amazing work, and we want to take this to a new level. So we're doing a new angle of DORITOS called DORITOS Loaded. It's our new culinary platform that flips the chips on all expectations. And it's going beyond the bag and using it at home as your favorite base to any ingredient. And luckily, because Adobe is such great partners, we just launched this globally on October 1st. So you're actually getting a sneak peek of it but Adobe planned their whole Adobe MAX around it. So thanks guys.

So like I said, the triangle is such a pivotal part of our design and our viz and this is an extension of it. I keep calling it the cool aunt or the cool sister. But yeah, it's a new way to hack your flavors. But not only that, we're trying to take another drink personalization at scale. So you can do pizza, you can do burgers, chicken fajitas, you name it, you can personalize it with DORITOS. It's all about bold self-expression. But we got to think about this in so many different ways. So let's say you're from a different region of the world, or we want to partner with a food service, or I don't know, if you just want weird ingredients in your fridge and throw it on DORITOS, just go for it.

So with that said, we got to think about this as a holistic 360 view. I know Gatorade food truck was here, but hopefully next year we'll have a DORITOS Loaded food truck here. Yeah. Yeah. But I do want to emphasize this is a global, so US is still catching on to it. In the UK, we have to do POS because they have dippers. I don't know if anybody's from the UK, so we're doing a platform messaging, do you dip or load? So we incentivize people to do it at home. We have digital because I don't that's how everybody gets information nowadays. And then we have out of home.

But with all of those touch-points, we want to make sure we have ownable assets and a new way for consumer-- And this is a new way to think about DORITOS. When you see this, we don't want people thinking it's, okay, an LTO or limited time offer of a burger flavored DORITOS. Now we want you to make this at home or buy it from a food truck. So we have to create all of these new assets, and showcase what DORITOS Loaded is. And we've done a few different learnings, so they were at UCL last year, and then the Taste of Dubai. And we got a lot of feedback which was amazing, but we had to go back to the drawing board especially on the art direction and define what encompasses DORITOS.

So here you can see some of those points. It's fresh and tasty, but also embracing imperfections. And then it's vibrant, contrasted, and like I said, a triangle. I don't know if you guys are sick of seeing triangles yet. Welcome to my life.

So I added circles on this one instead.

But the world is big and we have so many recipes and so many different ingredients around the world. And as you can imagine, that can be so many different challenges to deploy something like this platform, and we want to ensure that consistency and design excellence is always at the forefront. And with resources, time, and budget, and even control, that's really hard. So we have this making sure that we're all together in this. And luckily, with Adobe, we can do that.

And I mean, does this really look excellent to you guys? Design excellent? You could be honest. Yeah. Please be honest with me. I was honest with myself looking at this. But we did a whole audit of the current DORITOS Loaded recipes, and pulled them onto a beautiful screen, and this is away from home, different regions. So I don't know. You saw all the upfront and all the hard work we did in that first page. What if we can turn this and have a magic button and turn it to this? - Ta-da! - This is where ooh, ah.

But it wasn't a magic button, guys. Let's just be real. There was a lot of work that was put into this and a lot of hand holding with this new tool of custom models. But as you can see, taking all the same exact ingredients and inputting it on here, we can stay within our DORITOS brand.

But not only that, we have different elements and different touch-points like I've talked about. So what if we can also do a chip dish and then also do a single chip? So when somebody comes to us, I mean, there's a-- In New Jersey, Taylor ham and pork roll were difficult. There's a issue over there, but any Philly people? - You can-- Oh, okay. - Yeah, Philly. So let's say you want a Philly Cheesesteak DORITOS Loaded. DORITOS Loaded Philly Cheesesteak. And the marketing partner comes up says, "The cheesesteak company wants to partner with us." So we can take all of that. We have our custom models ready, put it in, and this is our output. We can also do a single chip, and we can apply it to our assets.

And then we also have to think about it 360 view. So if you do want a food truck, if you do want to do this on the train station, or in a key visual, this is our consumer equation that we use. And also using Adobe Stock for that. Another one.

But with this, we found a lot of new learnings. So first, we have to train the subject and style. With custom models, you can do a subject and style, but for us we did subject because everything's staying the same, we're just altering the ingredients.

And that's about 10 to 20 images. But we're ensuring also, just thinking about ethically and how Adobe's doing that, we're ensuring that we own all of it, and it was all created in house. And then we're ensuring then we're training and maintaining. So it is easy. Adobe has made it easy for us. We don't need crazy complex prompts, engineering, or massive datasets, but we still need that human who understands the iterative process of prompting. And just getting the right results in general and having somebody really nitpick that through. And then also, this is a whole new capability. And I think Daniela talked about it. She's done a great job with Creative Jam, and hopefully we can do that with the Snack side. I was very jealous when you guys did Creative Jam that I wasn't there. But we want to empower all of the Design Centers of the 17 countries and putting that into all of our Adobe apps.

So going through this process, it's just reiterated how important it is for people in this. We are still keeping them at the center when we need context and meaning, when it comes to knowing and loving our brand and having our brand assets really speak to the consumer. And I mean, overall, it's the same amount of human capabilities. And I love a good car pun, but we really just supercharged this to make it even more meaningful and valuable. And it also made it viable for the business and glocally relevant. We call it glocally here at PepsiCo. We can have a global platform, but still have all the amazing recipes locally. And it just has the flexibility and just working in the right parameters and ensuring design excellence.

So that's DORITOS Loaded.

Thank you.

Congratulations. That platform is absolutely stunning and I think it's a wonderful example of what you can do once you have trained your people, once you have partnered with the right technology company, and you've identified a real world problem. Veronica was saying the world is vast. So many different types of cuisines, so many different types of ingredients. It would take an army of people to be able to develop all of these localized recipes. But thanks to Firefly and custom models, now we have a tool that can help us really make sure that we're talking to people in an authentic way that is relevant for them no matter where they are in the globe. So with that, we're coming to the end of our chat. I want to reinforce here some key takeaways for you just to remind you, wherever you are in your journey with AI, whether this is something that you want to start kick start with your team, just some ideas and hopefully, some of these things that we have shared with you will help you kick started. So going back to bold implementation, it's really all about partnership. It's about partnership with your leadership. It's about partnership with your IT, tech department. It's about partnership with a great technology company or platform that can support you through this transition. So it's really all about how you bring people along and partner with them for your success. Then we have the training which is where it's the human aspect of this is complex. We need to be empathetic. We need to make sure that we're understanding where people are at. We need to make sure that we're listening. We need to make sure that we are creating the right types of training that engage people in a way that they get excited about this technology. Find those people that are passionate and really empower them which brings us to empowering creatives. If you only have top down communication and forcing this down to people's throats, the results are not going to be as great. But when you find those early adopters and those people who are excited about playing with new technologies and bringing them into their workflows, whether it's at work or in their personal lives, make sure you empower them to share that with the rest of your team. Create lunch and learns, create informal sessions. It is very different how communication is perceived when it comes from your peers, when it comes from people that you see every day using the tools in a way that is engaging and fun versus just having corporate email saying, we're going to start doing AI training, blah, blah, blah. It's very, very different the approach. So empower creatives to really have a platform to share their experiences and to have those communication feedback loops with you. And then lastly, the magic sauce really comes when you're able to combine all of these things together and identify the project, the one shiny beacon that you can start with. To put all of this into action, to use it as a use case, to socialize it, to really share it with the world as a success story for you to have even more partnerships and support and unlock budgets and resources to get a little bit more into this journey. So that brings us to the end. We want to again thank you so much for joining us post Bash and this last day of Adobe MAX. We cannot be more thrilled to be here. We're so honored to be representing a company that we love and we are very thankful. - Yeah. - Thank you so much, guys. Thank you so much.

[Music]

In-Person On-Demand Session

PepsiCo Design’s GenAI Blueprint: Empowering Creative Teams - S6204

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Closed captions in English will be added in early November.

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About the Session

PepsiCo Design’s approach to integrating AI into their workflows for the iconic brand has been intentional, bold, and consistently on-brand. Join senior design manager Daniela Maldonado and associate design manager Veronica Campbell as they share their approach to driving AI adoption for PepsiCo’s design teams — and why they’re pursuing a strategy rooted in human creativity.

In this session, you’ll learn: 

  • How the PepsiCo Design team got started with generative AI — and what their process looks like
  • Best practices for scaling AI adoption while keeping generated assets on-brand and aligned with your core design principles
  • Why it matters to empower creative teams with creative tech — not the other way around

Technical Level: General Audience

Category: Generative AI

Track: Creativity and Design in Business

Audience: Art/Creative Director, Business Strategist/Owner, Graphic Designer, Social Media Content Creator

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