ACAI for SBOs: AI Co-creation for Advertising and Inspiration for Small Business Owners

2025-03-09

AI Summary

Small business owners (SBOs) face significant challenges in efficiently producing high-quality advertisements due to limited resources and design expertise. To address this, we introduce ACAI—a generative AI–driven, multimodal collaborative advertising authoring tool specifically designed for SBOs, integrating structured input, visual interaction, and user-centered design principles. Our approach introduces three core capabilities: context-aware intelligence, adaptive human–AI interaction, and lightweight brand data management; additionally, we propose a structured prompt engineering framework to enhance user agency and improve controllability over AI outputs. In an empirical study with 16 SBOs in London, ACAI significantly improved brand consistency (+42%), AI transparency (+38%), and prompt effectiveness (+51%), effectively bridging the design-skills gap.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Computer Vision: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for Vision

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Ad search and search for Web retail
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling for targeted and personalized online advertising

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.

Problem

• Addresses SBOs' lack of resources for high-quality ads
• Develops AI tool to bridge design skill gaps
• Enhances AI transparency and user control in ad creation

Innovation

• GenAI-powered multimodal advertisement creation tool
• Structured inputs enhance user agency and control
• Multimodal interface bridges design skill gap