arXiv · 2503.06729
ACAI for SBOs: AI Co-creation for Advertising and Inspiration for Small Business Owners
Abstract
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.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Nimisha Karnatak, Adrien Baranes, Rob Marchant, Triona Butler, Kristen Olson. 2025-03-09. ACAI for SBOs: AI Co-creation for Advertising and Inspiration for Small Business Owners. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06729
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.