March 6 (Reuters) - International Business Machines ( IBM )

on Wednesday said that its initial testing of generative

artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Adobe has

resulted in productivity improvements.

IBM ( IBM ) said it was using Adobe's tools, which can generate

images from text-based prompts, to help with marketing

campaigns. It is an early test of Adobe's strategy to create AI

systems trained on its own proprietary data with legal

guarantees against lawsuits, a strategy that Adobe hopes will

lure in large businesses.

Billy Seabrook, the global chief design officer for IBM's ( IBM )

consulting arm, said that the 1,600 designers in his unit used

Adobe's tools to help generate ideas quickly and create variants

of them to be used in different parts of marketing campaigns.

"What typically would take us two weeks for an end-to-end

cycle, we've gotten down to two days," Seabrook told Reuters.

Overall IBM ( IBM ) said it expects a 10-fold increase in the

productivity of designers, who will be able to devote more time

to brainstorming and creating storyboards instead of generating

minor design variants.

Seabrook said that in the short term, the most likely impact

to design industry employment from use of the new tools will be

to use existing teams to do more work.

"There's typically a rule of prioritization of what big bets

you are going to go after and what staff you're going to put

towards a problem. Theoretically, you're opening up more

headroom to focus on some of those other problems," he said.

The long term impact on employment is less clear. Seabrook

said recent IBM ( IBM ) survey data showed most business leaders think

designers are more important than ever.

"They have to be almost the tastemakers and the quality

checkers of the output of the generative AI, as well as a little

bit of the empathy in the room that helps train and fine-tune

and curate that AI," Seabrook said.

But in other parts of the survey data, "everyone agrees

there are going to be fewer jobs," Seabrook said. "We're waiting

to see what happens."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by

Michael Perry`)