Managing design consistency for one of the world’s most recognizable companies — one that has 200+ brands spanning across more than 200 countries — makes brand governance essential. Because this is nearly impossible to achieve manually, the global design team at The Coca-Cola Company set out to solve this challenge.
As The Coca-Cola Company’s Senior Director, Global Design Intelligence and Technology Experiences, Dominik Heinrich drives the integration of emerging technologies into the company’s design ecosystem, including scaling design capabilities through artificial intelligence. Project Fizzion, a new AI-powered design system co-developed by The Coca-Cola Company and Adobe, solves an increasingly complex challenge: how to allow designers to train AI models during the creative process to achieve accurate content creation and quality at scale.
Fizzion is built using Adobe Firefly Services and Adobe Firefly Custom Models, which are tailored to Coca-Cola’s brand identity and Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service. These tools allow Coca-Cola’s designers to train AI to generate on-brand content at scale while preserving creative intent.
In this conversation, Heinrich shares the thinking behind Fizzion, the value of Adobe’s partnership, and why AI should follow creative intent, not override it.
https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3463939?hidetitle=true
What originally sparked the vision behind Fizzion?
Like many brands, we've long faced the challenge of design consistency at scale. In Coca-Cola’s case, the challenge is exponentially more complicated. Coca-Cola operates one of the largest, most complex marketing ecosystems in the world and creates thousands of campaign assets. We created Project Fizzion with a simple idea: use AI to make design assets (such as our logo) intelligent by learning how to behave from designers, rather than designers learning hundreds of pages of visual brand guidelines. It brings the design focus back to creativity and craft.
Was there a specific operational or creative challenge that drove your team to rethink the way design systems should work?
Our goal was to solve the challenge around misinterpreted brand guidelines — a critical hurdle for making AI-powered content generation platforms succeed. What’s already hard for humans becomes even harder for AI. The system is based on StyleIDs, allowing designers to create context as they work, and instantly see how AI interprets their intent. It eliminates the lengthy, error-prone process of engineers training AI on brand guidelines through a disconnected lens.
How would you explain Fizzion to someone unfamiliar with design systems or AI?
It’s like putting your brand’s creative soul inside every asset, making static design objects intelligent. Fizzion learns directly from how designers work and creates machine-readable StyleIDs that ensure brand rules are followed, automatically and at scale.
Can you talk more about StyleIDs and how they work for your team?
StyleIDs are at the core of Fizzion. They encode creative intent into a living system. Once trained, they guide every layout, adaptation, and variation. Designers stay in control, while AI ensures execution is fast and always on brand.
As designers build layouts, refine typography, and make real-time decisions, Fizzion captures that creative intent and encodes it into a StyleID — a machine-readable identity that automatically applies brand rules across formats, platforms, and markets.
Once trained, StyleIDs act as real-time guides, enabling Coca-Cola teams and agency partners to generate hundreds of campaign variations — from resizing layouts to adapting campaign visuals across platforms and regions — with precision and consistency, which frees creatives to focus on storytelling rather than formatting. The result is fewer errors, faster execution, and stronger brand integrity.
What has the partnership with Adobe been like?
It’s been true co-innovation. Adobe brought the tech foundation and creative AI knowledge, including Adobe Firefly generative AI and capabilities from Creative Cloud. We brought brand complexity and design intelligence. Together, we created an AI system that learns from design intent, rather than just code or guidelines. And we share the same goal: to ultimately create a universal solution for any brand.
Why embed Fizzion directly into Adobe Creative Cloud?
Because that’s where our designers already live. Embedding Fizzion functionalities into Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop means there's no need to switch tools or workflows. One of the key aspects of designing experiences in an AI world is to integrate them seamlessly into existing user experiences for easy adoption. We also believe AI solutions for designers should be trained by design professionals, not by engineers and data scientists.
What would you say to designers worried about AI replacing them?
Fizzion proves the opposite. I like to say that if you use AI to be faster, you are only tapping into part of its potential. If you use AI to improve, not just accelerate, you gain a competitive edge. Designers lead, and AI follows. In fact, AI makes the designer’s role more essential than ever to break through the sometimes overly predictive outcomes of AI. And with time, we can experiment and innovate more, focusing on creative concepts. We’ve unlocked time for creativity instead of compliance.
What’s next for Fizzion?
A product accessible to every brand in the world. For nearly 140 years, Coca-Cola has led brand innovation by setting blueprints that others across industries followed. From pioneering the contour bottle to standardizing global identity systems, Coca-Cola has continuously redefined how brands scale creative excellence. Fizzion builds on that legacy as a blueprint that can inspire others. We created a system that remembers the rules, understands the nuances and ultimately helps designers do what they do best: tell great stories, at scale.
Learn more about Adobe Firefly Services.
Explore Adobe Custom Models.
Ash King is the Senior Director of Firefly Enterprise Solutions at Adobe, where he leads the solution consulting, solution architecture, and value engineering teams focused on Adobe Firefly and generative AI integrations for enterprise customers. With a deep background in content strategy, digital experience consulting, and creative technologies, Ash has helped Fortune 100 brands reimagine how they create, scale, and personalize content. Ash previously led Adobe’s global GenAI Consulting Practice and has played a pivotal role in building Adobe’s early generative AI use cases in collaboration with customers like Coca-Cola and Newell Brands. A frequent speaker and thought leader, he bridges creative ambition with enterprise-grade execution — helping customers unlock the full potential of AI-powered design systems, smart asset pipelines, and content velocity strategies. At the core of Ash’s work is a belief in human-centered AI — where success is defined not by tools, but by the quality of the use cases they empower and the creative potential they unlock.
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