Build for a Selfie, Not a Slide Deck

In April 2023, Warner Bros. and a photo-editing startup called Photoroom built an AI tool in under an hour. BarbieSelfie.ai let anyone upload a selfie and get dropped into an official "Barbie" movie poster in under 300 milliseconds. Three months before the film opened, the tool had been used more than 13 million times. Rihanna posted hers. So did Pedro Pascal. The film went on to cross $1 billion at the box office and lift real Barbie-doll sales 16%.

No ad campaign put people in a Barbie box. They put themselves there, then showed everyone they knew. That's the difference between a message aimed at an audience and an experience an audience joins.

Leonard Sweet, in the chapter of my book I call "The Missionary Mindset," names four qualities of anything that actually lands with people today: it has to be Experiential (you live it, not just hear about it), Participatory (you do something, not just watch), Image-based (it moves through pictures before words), and Communal (it means something because you shared it with others). The Barbie selfie hit all four in a single afternoon of engineering. Most corporate AI launches hit none of them — a memo, a town hall slide, a login credential for a tool nobody asked to try.

If you're rolling out an AI initiative inside your organization and wondering why adoption is stalling, run it through Sweet's four questions before you blame the tool. Did people experience it, or were they told about it? Did they participate, or were they informed? Was it a picture, or a paragraph? And when it worked, did anyone have someone to show?

From Dancing in the Wind, my book on leading through complexity and change.

What would your next AI rollout look like if you built for a selfie, not a slide deck?