Authentic Brands Group owns a portfolio of 50 well-known global brands that includes Reebok, Juicy Couture, Shaquille O’Neal, David Beckham, and Sports Illustrated.

The company’s brands will do more than $38 billion in systemwide retail sales worldwide in 2026, but they remain lean, with just under 600 employees. To work faster and smarter while telling great brand stories, Authentic created a private AI operating system, called Authentic Intelligence, in under six months with help from Google.

“We own this iconic intellectual property, these incredible brands,” says Adam Kronengold, Chief Digital Officer, Authentic Brands Group. “It's our job to make sure that that product really comes to life and those brand stories reach the audience.”

Authentic's digital team supports everything from managing ecommerce operations and maintaining enterprise technology to managing customer data and analytics and performance marketing and empowering other teams to build the solutions they need. AI’s emergence dovetailed perfectly with the company’s ambitious global business goals and desire to streamline operations and free up more time for strategic work. The digital team decided to centralize all their data, including customer, accounting, brand, and other information, into one operating system that would be accessible to every employee at the company.

Kronengold and team picked Google’s AI technology because they could best ensure a secure environment and support bringing proprietary data to life realistically and on-brand.

With the Authentic Intelligence operating system, Authentic has built in image and video enhancement and creation with easy access for all teams. Adopting Google AI has also allowed Authentic to build a variety of agents to meet specific team needs, like generating brand pitch deck presentations for potential licensees or streamlining the development of marketing assets.

Authentic decided to build a private AI operating system for security reasons as well as to pull in the best models available for specific tasks. They also maintain a huge set of valuable data, having built a customer data platform (CDP) already.

“With all of the data we have,” says Kronengold, “it gives us an advantage to actually train the various models. Depending on the brand, we have over a hundred years of material to train the models and make sure the content we’re producing is completely on brand.”

Google provided Authentic with a blueprint to get started with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, then access the models they chose, including Gemini and Veo 3, a sophisticated video generation model from DeepMind. Veo 3 lets the team create additional assets for the ecommerce business, such as tailored holiday details or adding beach backgrounds.

“It's our opinion at Authentic Brands Group that Veo 3 is the most advanced video generation model on the planet today,” says Kronengold.

Authentic used Gemini to build the AI operating system’s enhancement layer, which includes capabilities like upscaling and annotating images, and making changes to images in real time without having to export to different design tools. It’s saved a ton of time and improved results as well.

“When we launched a new Reebok golf shoe line, we had a lot of products on plain white backgrounds in a studio setting,” Kronengold says. “Our Authentic Images model, which uses Gemini, transformed it so each of those golf shoes is on a golf course.”

Those images fit in nicely to various ad campaigns, and the results spoke for themselves: the AI-enhanced images of the Reebok golf shoes showed a 60% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS, a key marketing efficiency metric) versus the unenhanced imagery.

For even more day-to-day efficiency across the entire organization, the digital team used the Google models to create Authentic agents, designed for hyper-specific tasks and workflows within each team. That includes generating creative assets for pitch decks or identifying new partnership opportunities.

Developing and deploying an owned AI operating system has led to increased output and team ownership across Authentic. The tailored agents in particular have democratized data and AI access across the organization. Any employee can use the presentation agent, for example, which generates robust presentations with on-brand images and content in a matter of minutes. Previously, the process of turning an idea into a presentation took one to two weeks, with the involvement of four teams across creative, brand, copywriting, and business development.

“AI has become a powerful business development and creative ideation tool across Authentic,” said Kronengold. “Our teams use it to identify whitespace opportunities across the portfolio, generate product concepts aligned to a brand’s DNA, and quickly build customized pitch materials.”

AI helps Authentic’s teams move faster and more creatively, streamlining brainstorming, refining ideas in real time, incorporating partner feedback more efficiently, and building more compelling presentations throughout the deal-making process.

A successful global rollout has opened the door for new ideas and innovation across the organization’s teams.

“These tools are allowing them to power through a lot of the more manual work that they previously had to do,” says Kronengold, “so they can now focus on growth and strategy.” He’s looking forward to continued evolution of Google’s models, so that Authentic will automatically evolve and grow in tandem.

“I truly believe we're just scratching the service with Authentic Intelligence,” Kronengold says.