Fishy AI IBM x Adobe

At the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, IBM and Adobe teamed up to deliver a bold, unexpected message about AI and trust – through fish. Lots of them.

“Fishy.AI” was a playful but pointed campaign that transformed the exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere into a giant digital fishbowl, filled with weird and wonderful fish created using Adobe Firefly. These surreal swimmers represented the quirks and pitfalls of AI-generated content when left unchecked – from hallucinations to bias to plain old nonsense.

But the fish didn’t stay in the bowl. They infiltrated the Summit experience itself, popping up at IBM’s booth, across OOH placements, in keynote presentations and inside a mobile-led digital experience that let attendees “catch” the fish – and the AI education points they represented. Each fish carried a lesson about what happens when AI drifts off course, and how IBM’s watsonx and Adobe’s cloud tools are working together to keep it on track.

Underneath the colour and comedy was a serious message: “Trust What You Create”. At a time when more brands than ever are using AI to produce content at scale, the campaign reminded marketers that not all AI outputs are created equal – and that ‘close enough’ simply isn’t good enough when it comes to brand trust, accuracy and safety.

The campaign didn’t just decorate the venue, it hijacked the conversation. The 90-second Sphere activation ran every 30 minutes over the four-day summit, supported by immersive booth takeovers, interactive posters, tabletop displays and a mobile game. Everything pointed back to the risks of poorly managed AI, and the importance of transparency, auditability and creative control – qualities that both watsonx and Adobe Firefly deliver.

And the results? “Fishy.AI” drove real, measurable impact:

• A 14% improvement in moving interest down the funnel, compared to previous years
• 21% increase in conference attendees seeing watsonx as easy to integrate with other AI tools
• 24% boost in attendee understanding that watsonx is built for enterprise
• 15% increase in trust in IBM’s watsonx offering
• A whopping 618 million earned impressions
• And a 540% surge in social engagement

With its tongue-in-cheek tone and wildly visual approach, “Fishy.AI” managed to spark serious thinking about AI governance in a way that felt fresh, funny and completely unmissable. It proved that even the most technical conversations can go down swimmingly when wrapped in the right creative.