AI-Assisted Concept Visualizations

Made an unreleased product look real enough to sell — and real enough to decide on — before it existed.

Dell Technologies - Government Sales

Concept, art direction,
AI workflow design

Contractor

Technical input

Dated visual

Dell’s Innovation Engineering team recommended me to Dell Government Sales, who wanted their dated pitch visuals modernized. The bigger problem was upstream. The products they most needed to sell didn’t exist yet: engineering had the concepts, and sales had nothing to show.

Translation / Work

I proposed generative AI. Dell had never brought an AI tool into its workflow, so the approach went through their legal counsel before I started.

I used Midjourney, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Firefly as art direction tools, not shortcuts — AI-generated bases with directed hand craft on top, iterating on the details that make an image read as photographed rather than generated: lighting behavior, material response, the incidental clutter of a real room.

The goal wasn’t a beautiful image. It was an image with no tell — because the moment a viewer registers “this is a mockup,” they go back to evaluating a hypothetical instead of reacting to a product.

Generative AI still needed human direction and curation at every step. It produced plenty of strange images that had to be deleted, hand-worked, or rebuilt through a different tool.

Dated image
Phase 1 Image updated in Illustrator
Phase 2 Working on image details with GAI
Phase 3 Final image

Dated visual

GAI-assisted updated visual

ASPIRATIONAL RENDERINGS

Once I started updating the older visuals, it was clear the same approach could visualize the innovation engineers’ concepts — pre-selling products before they were manufactured, shortening the sales cycle, and giving Dell an early read on how many to build.

I placed the products in context rather than on a seamless background.

A monitor on a real desk is an environment the customer would actually use; a floating product shot isn’t. Context answers “what is this for” and “would this fit my life” at once. I pushed the background forward in time so the product itself felt futuristic and aspirational.

Dell’s unreleased prototypes are confidential, so the renderings below are in the same vein rather than from the project.

Outcome

Realistic imagery lets enterprise customers get comfortable with a new product earlier in the sales cycle — teams can pre-sell against it, test it in front of focus groups, and inform internal go/no-go decisions well before development finishes.

Unfortunately, the government sales team was laid off shortly after the renderings were complete.

Have a product that doesn’t exist yet but needs to be seen?

LET’S TALK