ESG and Fivestone Intelligently Accelerate AI Journeys for Lenovo's VIP Customers

Pro tennis legends Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf experience the AI Journey Accelerator at Lenovo CIO reception within Gartner IT Symposium 5th Nov. 2024 in Barcelona.

Attendees at Lenovo’s annual innovation showcase, Tech World ‘24, experienced artificial intelligence (AI) in a way few others have been able to thanks to Event Strategy Group (ESG), a leading event agency, and Fivestone Studio’s custom creation of the AI Journey Accelerator. The immersive experience reflects Tech World’s remarkable history of innovation and transformation, and fully demonstrates this year’s theme, 'Smarter AI for All.'

With Lenovo’s technology and hardware solutions leading the show, the ESG and Fivestone teams sought to develop a curated experience that matched the event’s main attractions. Enter one of Tech World’s most exciting innovations: the Lenovo Solutions and Services Group’s AI Journey Accelerator, a definitive next-generation digital photo booth experience powered by generative AI.

“We hear about AI all the time, but we don’t necessarily get to interact with it,” said Sarah Babb, creative director at ESG. “We wanted to tailor-make an experience that embraces AI to showcase Lenovo technology while telling Lenovo’s full Smarter AI for All story - from solutions and services to infrastructure and devices. We also just wanted our attendees to have some fun! The AI Journey Accelerator is a proprietary solution that checks all three boxes: it combines a set of interactive questions with a Stable Diffusion image generation model to determine where participants are in their current AI adoption process, provides personalised insights and resources, and a one-of-a-kind generative AI portrait - all run locally on Lenovo hardware.”

“This project marks Fivestone’s foray into customer-facing, AI-powered experiences, setting a new standard for interactive technology engagement,” said Fivestone Studios partner and executive creative director Traylor Woodall. “Most studios are now leveraging AI for ideation and efficiency behind the scenes, but we brought it front-and-centre by crafting an immersive branded experience that showcases Lenovo’s processing power while also redefining what a photobooth can be in the digital age. By merging creative AI with user-friendly design, we’ve expanded the creative potential for participants, giving them a tangible, memorable keepsake that blends art, technology, and strategic interaction in ground breaking ways.”

With more than half of Tech World ’24 attendees engaging with the tool, the AI Journey Accelerator is becoming a permanent feature of Lenovo’s trade show presence moving forward.

Creating the AI Journey Accelerator

To demonstrate Lenovo’s AI processing power in each engagement, the teams had the privilege of harnessing the brand’s industry-leading hardware, running the experience on a Lenovo ThinkStation P8 Workstation. For everyone involved, this ensured seamless local performance in photo capture, AI processing, and image generation.

The team worked with Lenovo to identify five key personas representing unique stages in customers’ AI adoption journeys. For these Investigator, Navigator, Catalyst, Coach, and Achiever personas, designers crafted custom logos and themes aligned with Lenovo’s brand guidelines. Fivestone also offered style options showcasing AI's creative flexibility, from painterly brushstrokes to futuristic, three-dimensional interpretations.

Understandably, the team’s process for addressing this unique challenge involved exhaustive use of the latest developments in generative AI. For the customised AI photos delivered through the AI Journey Accelerator, Fivestone’s team first ran extensive tests using existing generative AI image systems, as well as custom-built options, to optimise workflows. “The magical part of an AI photobooth is how it interprets the source image by reimagining composition, lighting, and style,” said Justin Eslinger, director of creative technology for Fivestone Studios. “Especially when the expectation is a perfectly branded image on the first try, every time, the main challenges are in consistency and control. Getting everything right requires a lot of testing with a variety of people and environments … and an artistic eye and hand to help sculpt the final result.”

Next, to develop the front-end kiosk application, the team streamlined the development pipeline by using the Unity Game Engine. With its Node.js backend, the finished application manages AI generation requests via Stable Diffusion, marketing email capture, image storage, and customer email delivery.