About
Could artificial intelligence help close a growing empathy gap? For Coca-Cola, we set out to find out. Pembie was an experimental AI empathy bot designed to reach people through genuine conversation and create a more optimistic, connected experience. Built for Facebook Messenger and powered in part by emerging Microsoft AI tools, Pembie used conversation and curated content to uplift users one interaction at a time.

Challenge
An AI that communicates primarily through text has a limited emotional range. The challenge was to invent the visual language that would make Pembie feel genuinely warm, funny, and human, defining from scratch what emotionally appropriate visual content looks like for an AI trying to lift someone up. There was no playbook for this, and the system had to scale across seven distinct conversation types for a bot designed to send millions of messages.

Solution
I helped build Pembie’s visual voice from the ground up. That meant developing an emotional content taxonomy of over two hundred curated image and video pieces, each named, justified, and paired to a specific moment in the conversation. It also meant designing Pembie’s owned visual world: stickers, emojis, Pembiegrams, and Spotify playlist covers that gave the bot an identity it could genuinely call its own.

Outcome
In a two-week alpha test with 446 users, Pembie brightened people’s days 3,344 times. Eighty percent reported higher spirits, seventy-one percent completed onboarding, and fifty-three percent returned every day. But the number that stayed with me was this: nearly half of all interactions came from people who simply wanted to talk. Not use a feature. Not complete a task. Just connect. That was one of the clearest signals that the experience was doing something more human than utility alone.