Visitors to Johnnie Walker Princes Street in Edinburgh can discover the ‘Johnnie Walker x Scott Naismith’ experience, a generative AI-powered experience that is believed to be the first ever to combine Scotch whisky, art and AI.
Guests are asked to answer three simple questions that are then used to influence key themes in artist Scott Naismith’s work.
These prompts then generate various colors, locations and artistic styles; resulting in a bottle label design that is printed in a few minutes.
Why turn to generative AI? Diageo notes that consumers are increasingly searching for unique experiences and products that ‘signal belonging, status and personality’, whether it’s for themselves or as a gift for others.
As the London-headquartered spirits giant puts it: "Consumers are going beyond the most up-to-date cultural movements, seeking things that feel entirely original, with personalization now a necessity."
Consumers can complement their bottle with an expert-led tasting of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, as well as a guided tasting of the limited edition Johnnie Walker Blue Label ‘Elusive Umami’ in the rooftop Explorers’ Bothy bar.
Art vs AI
At its base, generative AI is artificial intelligence that can create text, images or video in response to prompts from humans.
It learns patterns and structures from input training data, and then generates new data with similar characteristics.
In this way, Project Halo has been able to teach the generative AI how to recognize the style and colors of Scott Naismith’s work.
Scott Naismith is a Scottish artist known for his contemporary landscape art: including bold, colorful abstractions of Scottish skies, coasts and landscapes. He's also admired for his YouTube videos, which have 35.5k followers and more than 4m views.
Naismith had already teamed up with Diageo to create artwork for its distilleries and the bar at the visitors experience - as illustrated in the video below.
But how can artistic originality sit alongside AI?
Diageo has used Amazon’s Titan bedrock model, which ensures the ethical protection of an artist’s work while also allowing consumers to co-create images.
Breakthrough Innovation
The tech is powered by ‘Project Halo’, a Diageo Breakthrough Innovation that allows brands and consumers to create the personalized label designs and bottle artwork.
This first launch under Project Halo also represents a premium experience for consumers: with the tasting sessions and AI bottle bundled together as a £240 ($309) experience at Johnnie Walker Princes Street.
The £150m ($193m) visitors center opened in 2021, representing the single largest investment ever made in Scotch whisky tourism. The visitors center offers five-star tours, immersive tastings, views of Edinburgh Castle, expertly crafted cocktails, a restaurant and store.
Diageo’s ‘Breakthrough Innovation’ team launched earlier this year with the task of pushing forward innovation beyond the development of new products: instead thinking about how people socialize and live out experiences.
The team is particularly focused on new areas such as AI and next-generation technologies.
“The Johnnie Walker bottle is the first pilot in a wider platform that the Breakthrough Innovation team is exploring: looking at how we can use AI responsibly to enable co-collaboration between fans and artists. Demand for personalization shows no signs of slowing down, so we’re delighted to offer the chance to create one-of-a-kind AI-enabled designs with Scott."
- Will Harvey, Senior Global Innovation Manager at Diageo
The core remit of the team is to ‘drive innovators to think, behave and create differently’, and build new business models with transformational value.
Diageo partnering with industry-leading experts including Phantom, Amazon AWS, Hybrid Software, GMG and Roland DG to push its innovations forward.
For example, the ‘What’s Your Whisky’ platform helps consumers find the whisky profile best suited to their tastes. The platform - revealed in 2019 - draws on AI and machine learning.
Meanwhile, Diageo’s Accelerator program ‘Fusion by Diageo’ helps identify leading innovators to co-develop with Diageo the next generation of digital products.
Coca-Cola is also exploring generative AI with a 5-year partnership with Microsoft in a $1.1bn partnership.
