Pantone just made an AI tool that’s actually useful

Like every company in the world, Pantone thinks you really need AI help to do your job. Unlike most companies, however, the people who created the esperanto of color matching might have actually developed something useful. Today, Pantone is announcing a generative AI model that can automatically create a color palette. It was trained in-house on six decades of proprietary color research papers and articles, which is now available in Pantone Connect’s extension for Adobe apps.

I don’t know if designers will be into the idea of chatting with an AI to find their new product’s color palette, but according to Pantone, many are eagerly waiting for such a helper. “We observed that palettes are critical to designers and that creating palettes is a pain point for many designers in that it is, you know, time-consuming,” says Ora Solomon, Pantone’s VP of Product and Engineering. “There isn’t like a one-stop shop for inspiration.”

The system works like any other chat-based AI: Write a prompt with whatever you have in mind and you will get a color palette ready to go, along with a rationale that explains the palette and links to support the AI suggestion. Once you have this document, which looks like an executive summary with a line of color swatches on the top, you can refine it with further prompts just like you do with most chat-based AIs.

The genesis of the new Pantone Palette Generator was a practical alignment of corporate strategy and customer needs, Solomon tells me. “Pantone is owned by a parent company called Veralto. Veralto has a technology strategic partnership with Microsoft,” Solomon explains, setting the stage for the collaboration.

A first step

Solomon says that they developed the tool around a chat experience because it seemed like the easiest, most popular way to interact with AI. “Chat-based assistants are becoming increasingly Be it in regular workflows, be it in just overall everyday life,” she says.

The most significant aspect of the tool is not the interface, which looks exactly like any other LLM chat system, but the information that powers that LLM. “One thing I want to call out about these palettes is that these are essentially Pantone curated palettes,” Solomon says. “They are based on extensive, many years worth of research, of trend forecasting, of articles on data that our Pantone Color Institute has developed really since our inception.”

While Pantone trained the model using Microsoft’s tech stack, they only used their own data. “We have not gone to third-party sources for this,” Solomon says. “It was really important to us that the palettes that we generate are truly informed and based on our own data.” 

Solomon says that the Pantone model will be updated regularly as new research and articles come out. The next update, in fact, will happen when the famous Pantone’s Color of the Year comes out next month.

This closed-data approach has already prompted a specific reaction from designers who experienced the tool at last week’s Adobe MAX, she says. “What particularly resonated was the fact that it is based on Pantone data and Pantone research,” she says. “And one particular user called it, ‘oh, so it’s ethical AI,’ which I thought was a very interesting reaction.”

As a beta, Solomon says this is just the beginning for the Palette Generator. “We will continue iterating on it based on how we see usage and what feedback we get from our users,” she says. So go try it and see. The generator is now available to all Pantone Connect users, including those on the free tier.

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