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 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 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.