Tech Trailblazers: Coca-Cola’s Dom Heinrich on staying one step ahead of ‘mass mediocrity’

But as a designer, Heinrich views the rapid evolution and proliferation of AI tools as a technological leap forward that could free us from the tyranny of smartphones, social media and other modern addictions. And, like many other experts, he also regards it as a potential solution for completing rote and unfulfilling work, allowing humans to attend to more rewarding pursuits.

Heinrich leads a busy life, which is well-suited to his energetic demeanor; he speaks rapidly and frequently cracks jokes in a warm German accent. He has two day jobs: one as a partner at the Creative AI Academy – a consulting firm he co-founded two years ago, through which he works with big marketing firms, including TBWA – and another as the global head of AI design at Coca-Cola, to which he was appointed earlier this year. He’s also a guest lecturer at Georgetown and is currently teaching a course in AI design at Pratt Institute. He held previous stints in adland at Omnicom’s TLGG Consulting, IPG’s McCann Group and R/GA.

He first experimented with AI design over a decade ago in a project for Latvian airline airBaltic, which used an algorithm to provide personalized exercise recommendations to people based on how much time they spent on airplanes.

“[That] was the first time where I realized how much power that technology actually has for us – and that it can actually make us healthier and more active,” he says. “It was also the first time I realized that technology needs to be more embedded in my thinking.”

Heinrich’s passion for AI has found a welcome home at Coca-Cola, a company founded more than 130 years ago that has nonetheless managed to position itself as a future-oriented early adopter of emerging technologies.

The beverage giant quickly jumped aboard the metaverse bandwagon in 2021, for example, following up with activations in adjacent trendy tech spaces such as NFTs and crypto. After marketing hype around the metaverse and web3 plummeted, the brand (like many others) embraced generative AI.

In Jne of last year, Pratik Thakar was named as the company's head generative AI. Heinrich was hired this past March.

While Thakar fronts Coca-Cola’s customer-facing generative AI work, Heinrich and the rest of the brand’s design team are responsible for ensuring that that work is paired with an engaging user interface. In short, the team is tasked with taking a concept and giving it a practical and intuitive design.

Now, Heinrich says he’s applying his years of experience in design and marketing to help reposition the Coca-Cola brand and help the beverage giant maintain its culturally prominent role in the burgeoning age of AI. “We’re trying to define our role in an AI world where everything becomes conversational, everything becomes generated in real-time, everything is hyper-personalized,” he says.

While many brand and agency leaders have been quick to jump on the generative AI bandwagon by launching ChatGPT-powered campaigns, say, or adding buzzy titles such as ‘AI thought leader’ to their LinkedIn profiles, Heinrich is focused on the more subtle, operational aspects of day-to-day-business operations that can benefit from AI.

He sees the current phase of AI hype as a distraction that will ultimately fade and give way to pragmatic applications that will become suffused into our everyday lives to the extent that we eventually take them for granted. “AI is a fundamental infrastructural change, like the Industrial Revolution,” he says, “and I think that [most] people don’t really understand that.”

One of the biggest challenges that currently face brand design teams using AI, Heinrich says, is the limited range of available tools. The generative AI boom has led to a situation in which virtually every marketer wants to leverage the technology, but there’s only a small handful of large language models –lsuch as GPT-4 and Gemini – that are deemed reliable enough to use at scale. As a result, he says, human creativity, in all its boundless variety, risks being filtered down through the pattern-detection mechanisms built into this small cohort of tools.

“We’ll create mass mediocrity, diluting brand voices and the uniqueness of brands,” he says. “This is the main issue we’re [facing] at the moment.” It’s a concern that’s been expressed by other marketing industry leaders, including IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky.

In that same vein, Heinrich worries that AI models are constantly being trained on the marketing use cases for which they’re being deployed, making it more likely that the content they’ll generate in the future will resemble those from the past. As a result, marketers using AI are faced with the added challenge of constantly having to innovate novel uses of AI in order to stay one step ahead of an ever-rising plateau.

“It’s almost as if an infinite transformation because you’re constantly pushing the AI, the AI learns and picks up with you and then it’s available then for everybody else, so you have to push again, and it picks [it] up again,” he says. “It doesn’t happen in real-time, but it happens.”

Unless they’re able to build their own LLMs (an immensely resource-intensive task that only some of the most deep-pocketed brands can feasibly afford), marketing teams and designers are stuck with this challenge, which, in Heinrich’s view, could be a greater driver for creativity. “You’ll see it in marketing over the next two years… everything AI-driven will be extremely diluted over time,” he predicts. “Skilled people who can think outside of the box and are passionate about what they do will be more successful in the age of AI.”

Heinrich’s personal formula for staying one step ahead of the AI-generated “mass mediocrity” is simple: remember that humans, not machines, are in control of the relationship.

He sums this philosophy up with a saying that’s become popular among his design team at Coke: “Designers lead. AI follows.”

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