Adobe Summit Mantra Machine: AI-Powered Personalization Experience

Karim Youssef created the Mantra Machine app and shaped the creative direction for WPP Enterprise Solutions in partnership with Groove Jones. Built for Adobe Summit, the activation turned a crowded event-floor interaction into a personal AI-powered content experience: guests answered a few prompts, took a photo, and received a custom mantra video designed around their inputs.

The idea was simple and ambitious: make AI feel personal, fast, and emotionally resonant inside a live enterprise event environment. Instead of asking attendees to watch a technology demo, the Mantra Machine invited them to become the subject of the experience.

The Experience

At Adobe Summit, attention is earned in seconds. The experience needed to attract people from the show floor, guide them through a clear interaction, and deliver an output that felt worth saving and sharing. The result was a personalized photo-to-video journey that combined UX, AI-driven personalization, cloud rendering, voice synthesis, lip-sync, motion design, and a polished email delivery flow.

Karim Youssef's Creative and AI Role

In that role, he served as creative director and AI expert, defining the app concept around user emotion first: what should the guest feel, what should they make, and why would they want to share it? Working with Groove Jones for WPP Enterprise Solutions, that framing shaped the interaction design, content logic, AI output style, and experience pacing.

The application guided guests through a short set of Martech and mantra-inspired questions. Those answers became the foundation for a personalized theme and mantra, turning each participant’s input into a short AI-generated video asset that felt specific to them, not generic to the event.

Embedded project video

From Prompt to Personalized Video

Once the guest completed the prompt flow, they stepped in for a selfie. The system captured a high-quality photo and sent it to a cloud-based AI pipeline, where it was transformed into a stylized video with futuristic visuals, animated typography, synthesized voice, and lip-sync personalization. The final output was delivered quickly enough to work in a live event setting and polished enough to feel like a premium takeaway.

AI GenVFX Production

The project extended beyond the booth experience. A promotional video was created to announce the WPP presence and the Mantra Machine activation. The production used a GenVFX pipeline, with Krea nodes to organize and generate assets, Nano Banana 2 for keyframes, and Veo 3.1 for video generation. The work required visual consistency across character, environment, and interface references, with additional compositing to keep key frames clear and production-ready.

Embedded GenVFX promotional video

Live Event Integration

The live footprint required reliable execution, not just creative ambition. The team worked with Nth Degree Events on fabrication design and user flow, with preconfigured hardware, onsite installation, and brand ambassador training. Cloud hosting and connectivity kept the AI pipeline moving during event traffic, while selected participant videos appeared dynamically on large screens around the activation.

Why It Worked

The Mantra Machine worked because it made personalization visible, fast, and emotionally legible. Attendees did not just interact with a brand message; they generated a piece of content that reflected their own inputs. That made the activation useful as a demonstration of AI capability, but also memorable as a human experience.

For Karim, the project reflects a core creative technology principle: the most effective AI experiences are not about showing off the model. They are about giving people a reason to care about the output.

Project Links and Credits

Original Groove Jones case study: https://www.groovejones.com/adobe-summit-mantra-machine-ai-powered-personalization-experience

AI-powered photo booth platform: https://www.groovejones.com/ai-powered-photo-booth

GenVFX pipeline: https://www.groovejones.com/what-is-genvfx

Vimeo project video

Vimeo GenVFX video

Credits: Karim Youssef Youssef - creative director, AI expert, app creation, creative direction, and experience concept. Groove Jones - creative technology production partner, AI pipeline support, event integration, cloud rendering, and activation delivery. Client: WPP Enterprise Solutions for Adobe Summit.