• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 28, 2025

Brands and agency partners have been using generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to create ads, but last week Microsoft explained how the company explored co-creating one with the technology.

The need to balance budgets with time and human resources as well as creative direction and freedom has always been important, but never more so than now with so much economic uncertainty.

Microsoft creators have been known for producing advertisements, sizzle videos, photography, 3D product renders and motion designs for Windows and Surface. Last month the company released its latest Surface for Business ad solely using GAI to tell the story.  

“Earlier this year, the Visual Design team was approached to create an ad for our latest Surface Pro and Surface Laptop for Business Copilot+ PCs,” Jay Tan, senior direction and communications manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “The challenge - it needed to be done within a month.”

People appear in the ad, but not with frontal views where faces are visible. The views are from the top and focus on laptops, keyboards and human hands.

Just six months ago, producing realistic-looking hands through prompts was highly challenging.

Microsoft Visual Designer Brian Townsend explained that the sheer number of assets required for a typical spot required the use of multiple keyboard images, 26 prints for different languages, and five physical layouts.

Crafting thousands of different prompts to capture a creative vision took patience and perseverance. The team used natural language to describe a specific shot to an AI chatbot, and asked it to transform these descriptions into a prompt format for specific AI generative tools.

Quick cuts helped to hide AI output flaws, but for hands the team suggests that the tools are powerful enough to go unnoticed.

The team determined that any intricate movement such as closeups of hands typing on keyboards had to be shot live, but quick cuts or shots with limited motion were ideal for co-creation with GAI.

Ads are not the only media that have seen a shift to GAI, and some believe that transition will eventually evolve into its own creative genre.

Siddhant Adlakha, reporter at Polygon, described a movie created by Director Cao Yiwen that “begins in a fantasy realm where the physical textures move like LSD hallucinations, and where magical creatures are awash in rainbow hues — a dreamworld of infinite creativity.”

The magical can meet reality by thinking about it a little differently, in a spiritual sense, where content is created the way some North American Indian tribes use Peyote to reach spiritual awareness that co-create with their spirituality. They combine two worlds, spiritual and physical worlds.