At Packaging Innovation 2025 held at the Birmingham NEC, UK, Tey Bannerman, partner and head of design, Europe, at McKinsey & Company, spoke of the many ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming creative design practices – and how that transformation relates to the packaging industry.
The end of creativity as we know it?
Since generative AI emerged into the mainstream in 2023, the technology has moved at breakneck speed and re-shaped the business landscape. From automation and the creative industries to politics and security, AI has prompted a reckoning regarding its use and impact.
The level of investment involved suggests the technology is here to stay; and planning for its effects would be vital for business continuity.
But how do developments in AI apply to the packaging world?
According to McKinsey, almost twice as many people use generative AI regularly for work and outside of work in 2024 than in 2023, with an uptick in use across all regions but particularly in APAC and Greater China. (Source: McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 1,363 participants at all levels of the organization, Feb 22-Mar 5, 2024)
Across different demographics, the split is fairly even, too, making this “one of the first technologies where older people are using it just as much as younger people,” as Bannerman explained.
Global push for AI regulation
Last year, the United Nations general assembly adopted a draft resolution urging member states to ‘refrain from or cease the use of artificial intelligence systems that are impossible to operate in compliance with international human rights law or that pose undue risks to the enjoyment of human rights’. The assembly also urged member states, the private sector, civil society, research organizations and the media, to develop and support regulatory and governance approaches and frameworks related to the safe and secure use of AI.
In September 2024, a report from a UN expert group found that the need for the global regulation of AI was ‘irrefutable’, highlighting that decision-making powers were skewed towards 7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US – and that human rights could be endangered as the world races to source raw materials such as rare minerals.
Earlier this month (February 11, 2025), France, the UN Environment Program and the International Telecommunication Union spearheaded a coalition of more than 100 stakeholders from governments, academia, civil society, and the private sector, to discuss support for AI innovation, adequate regulation and the technology’s environmental impact such as the high levels of power AI models require to operate.
“You typically don’t see that – you see the opposite. But if you [look at the data for] those aged 60 or over, they use AI more regularly outside of work than any other age group. So it’s a very accessible piece of technology as well.”
Meanwhile, retail and CPG are two of the industries where AI holds the most potential, he added. “Last year was the first time we saw a substantial uplift in companies saying [they were] using AI in [their] workplace, and a lot of that was driven by companies using generative AI for the first time,” he added.
“So, not only are individuals using AI more in their day-to-day and becoming more accustomed to the tools; but across the world we see companies that really start to use them for simple things initially but there is an opportunity to use them with a lot more complexity as well.”
Bannerman referenced Heineken’s hybrid use of gen AI to help its marketing and product development teams come up with new product concepts; though the company’s global consumer and market insights director Tony Costella told Forbes that nothing that ends up on shelf is AI-generated ‘right now’.
The brewer has also used the technology to create a ‘knowledge management system’ that combines consumer insights, market data and brand information, to be retrieved by staff without having to sift manually through documents.
It’s Heineken’s ‘hybrid’ approach that is typically being used more widely right now, Bannerman suggested; with creative designers tapping into the technology to offer up slightly different concepts of a particular label design, or enhance an image render in ways that would otherwise take a single designer multiple hours to complete the task.
But what would that mean for packaging designers right now and in the future?
From sketching to physics simulation
Bannerman suggested that creatives could harness the power of AI by letting it come up with early-stage design concepts; then use these to refine and adapt the final product.
Take the role of a brand or an industrial designer; a lot of their work “involves conceptualizing and refining ideas, working with engineering teams, doing market research, and so on,” Bannerman said.
“There are AI tools that allow an individual to very roughly sketch out an idea.
“And then what happens is AI is working in the background to take that visual and translate it into an image based on brand guidelines; visualize [the idea] in a very high-fidelity manner.”
Meanwhile, “on the engineering side, we have AI tools that are coming out that allow you to model everything from physics dynamics to fit the whole range of environmental factors, also in a very visual manner.”
AI-driven physics simulation platforms – such as the open-source Genesis, launched in December 2024 – are indeed starting to come out, with major implications for industries from robotics to 4D object generation and animation.
Here are several examples of how brand marketeers could use physics AI to render visualization by using a text prompt.
“This is an example of technology that didn’t exist a few years ago,” Bannerman said. “Just in terms of being able to very, very quickly say, ‘Here’s what I want to model’ and get to the detail and depth to really understand how these things work.”
No need for specialized skills, software
While AI’s impact on creative processes is still a point of contention, the technology’s relative accessibility compared to the knowledge requirements of using 3D modelling programs (with the caveat about AI’s energy requirements and climate impact) may remove some professional barriers while allowing designers to more quickly translate their ideas into concepts.
“These tools are very accessible – someone can download this on their laptop and start to use it tomorrow if they want to,” Bannerman said.
“When you think about the process of designing products actively, you’re in a world where you can simulate things much easier than you could a few years ago when you needed complex kind of machinery, when you needed large data stores. You’re in a world where you can take a product, take out an image and really stimulate it under multiple conditions.”
CPG: Simulating the on-shelf experience
For CPG companies, the technology can also be used to simulate how their product would look on-shelf under different conditions.
“Today, you have AI tools that are able to show you a preview of your model design on a retail shelf, or in an out-of-home or e-commerce environment versus others in that category.
“And AI is automatically pulling in category data to show you a preview of what that model design would look like.
“A designer or anyone else involved in the process, they could try a different variation of that design and then see how it looks on the shelf versus other products.
“So again, the technology is giving us that speed and scale – not just in terms of the design process but also in terms of different kind of data sources and other considerations that go along with developing products.”
