AI - Advertising - Platform - Design System

IBM Watson AI services

Designing the future of AI-powered advertising experiences.

Context & Human-Centered Challenge

At IBM, I worked on advancing AI-powered advertising tools—bringing together creative automation, machine intelligence, and scalable enterprise systems. This work spanned two key initiatives:

Watson Ads Builder
AI-Powered Ad Experiences

Together, these efforts laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into IBM Watsonx—a unified platform for building, deploying, and governing AI at scale.

TEAMMATES

Georgios Saliaris, January Holmes, Robert Redmond

The Opportunity

Advertising was becoming:

More personalized
More data-driven
More complex to produce

Yet the tools available to marketers were fragmented, manual, and not built for AI-native workflows.

The opportunity was to turn AI into a creative system, not just a feature with

faster content production at scale and make advanced AI usable for non-technical teams.

My Role & Watson AI Systems Used

As a Lead Product Designer, I help to drive the intersection of AI, product, and experience, turning complex machine learning systems into usable, scalable tools for enterprise teams.

I led end-to-end design across:

- Product vision and experience strategy

- AI capability translation to user-facing features

- Scalable workflows from data to output

- Cross-functional collaboration with AI research, engineering, and product

A key part of my work involved designing experiences powered by multiple Watson AI components, each contributing to how intelligence was surfaced within the product. IBM Watson AI Systems that we used:

IBM Watson Discovery Advisor

With this system, we designed interfaces that allowed users to navigate and extract insights from complex datasets, helping create patterns and connections without requiring deep technical expertise.

IBM Watson NLP Library

We included how language understanding, such as entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and categorization, was designed in the UI, ensuring consistency and flexibility across use cases.

IBM Watson Assistant

Using conversational AI capabilities, we designed flows that relied on intent-detection models. By combining machine learning, transfer learning, and deep learning, to enabled more accurate interpretation of user input with less training data.

From Tools to Systems

WATSON ADS BUILDER

A platform to help marketers generate, customize, and deploy ads using AI.

Key contributions:

- Designed modular workflows for ad creation

- Translated AI capabilities into intuitive UI patterns

- Enabled scalable personalization across audiences

AI-POWERED AD EXPERIENCES

A broader exploration of how AI could reshape advertising beyond production.

Key contributions:

- Designed interactive, adaptive ad formats

- Explored real-time personalization using AI

- Defined new experience paradigms for engagement

Unifying Vision

While initially separate, both initiatives converged around a shared idea: "AI should power the entire content lifecycle, from creation to optimization to governance."

This thinking directly aligns with the architecture later formalized in IBM WatsonX, which enables companies to:

- Build AI models and applications (watsonx.ai)

- Manage and prepare data (watsonx.data)

- Ensure governance and trust (watsonx.governance)

Case Studies

BEHR

Driving authentic interaction with structured AI experiences. We designed a structured conversational ad experience that preserved brand tone while enabling dynamic consumer interaction.

Results:

15,000+ 1:1 conversations between BEHR and consumers
+8.5% in foot traffic to BEHR exclusive retailers
+17% in purchase consideration
~45 seconds spent within the unit

Recognition:

Silver Award — Tech Innovator Category
Festival of Media Global Awards
6 IAC Awards, including Best of Show Online

BEST WESTERN

Scalable AI workflows enabling local marketing autonomy. We designed AI-assisted creative generation workflows that empowered local marketers while maintaining brand governance.

Results:

2.2x higher time spent vs. Google Rich Media
~42 seconds spent per session
+48.6% in visits to Best Western locations

LUFTHANSA

Maintaining a premium identity while accelerating iteration. We designed an experience with a randomized set of open‑ended questions to surface users’ intent and sentiment, interpreted those responses to offer tailored recommendations, and allowed follow‑up exploration.

Results:

44M impressions served
18K active user sessions
+3.5K conversations
14K total button clicks, including 3K clicks to lufthansa.com
+3.7× time spent in the unit compared to Google Rich Media interaction benchmarks