ACAI for SBOs: AI Co-creation for Advertising and Inspiration for Small Business Owners
This addresses the challenge for small business owners who need effective advertising but lack design skills, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI tools with specific enhancements.
The researchers tackled the problem of small business owners lacking resources and design experience for creating high-quality advertisements by developing ACAI, a GenAI-powered multimodal advertisement creation tool, and found through a user study with 16 SBOs that structured inputs enhance user agency and control while improving AI outputs by facilitating better brand alignment and transparency.
Small business owners (SBOs) often lack the resources and design experience needed to produce high-quality advertisements. To address this, we developed ACAI (AI Co-Creation for Advertising and Inspiration), an GenAI-powered multimodal advertisement creation tool, and conducted a user study with 16 SBOs in London to explore their perceptions of and interactions with ACAI in advertisement creation. Our findings reveal that structured inputs enhance user agency and control while improving AI outputs by facilitating better brand alignment, enhancing AI transparency, and offering scaffolding that assists novice designers, such as SBOs, in formulating prompts. We also found that ACAI's multimodal interface bridges the design skill gap for SBOs with a clear advertisement vision, but who lack the design jargon necessary for effective prompting. Building on our findings, we propose three capabilities: contextual intelligence, adaptive interactions, and data management, with corresponding design recommendations to advance the co-creative attributes of AI-mediated design tools.