Expertise
AI-Powered Web Experiences
AI that does something real
Every agency in the world currently has "AI" somewhere on their website.
Most of them mean ChatGPT in the copywriting workflow, or an AI image in the pitch deck. That's fine. But it's not what we mean.
At Merlin, AI-powered experiences are interactive, user-facing products where machine learning or generative AI is embedded into the experience itself. In the hands of the user.
The difference is significant. AI that writes your headlines is a productivity tool. AI that transforms a user's photo into a ghost in real-time and sends them to collect a free beer: that's an experience. One of those drives a campaign. The other drives a news story.
User-generated content campaigns
UGC campaigns are one of the most powerful formats in digital marketing, when they're done right.
The formula is deceptively simple: give users a tool to create something personal, make sharing frictionless, and watch the brand travel. The challenge is the tool. It needs to be fast enough that no one gives up waiting. It needs to be good enough that people are proud of the output. And it needs to be reliable enough to run at campaign scale.
AI is what makes UGC campaigns genuinely interesting. With it, the tool is a transformation.
For Heineken Silver, we built a machine learning and AI-powered UGC campaign for Heineken and Publicis. The concept: upload a photo of your friend, and the tool transforms them into a ghost so they can haunt a Heineken Café and collect a free beer. The ML pipeline handled face detection, segmentation, and image synthesis in real time.
Generative AI: text, image, and 3D
The generative AI landscape has changed what's buildable for interactive experiences.
Where we're using it in products:
Image generation -- personalised visual output based on user input. Generated imagery that responds to who the user is and what they've told the system.
Text-to-3D -- emerging but increasingly usable. Models that generate 3D geometry from text prompts are getting to a point where they're useful in rapid prototyping and, in some cases, in-product content generation.
AI-driven personalisation -- dynamic content that adapts based on user behaviour, input, or preferences. Experiences that feel genuinely different for different users.
For PPG's Histor MY Color Creator, we built an AI-powered tool that finds the paint color that reflects your personality. The experience feels like a poetic interplay of blending and thinking, a metaphor for mixing paint and an intelligent guide at the same time.
Experience-first, enhanced by AI
Here's our philosophy in practice.
Start with the experience. What should the user feel? What should they be able to do? What would make this remarkable? Then, once those questions are answered, ask: where can AI make this better, faster, more personal, or more surprising?
That's the order. Experience first. AI in service of it.
The Heineken Silver campaign started with a compelling social idea: what if your friend was a ghost at the bar? The AI was the way to make that real. The Histor MY Color Creator started with the insight that choosing a paint color is strangely personal. The AI was what made the personalisation meaningful at scale.
AI Powered Web Experiences
AI-powered experiences are where machine learning and generative AI are embedded directly into the interaction, in the hands of the user. That's the work we do.
A quick TLDR; for the scanners:
