Shanghai Edition: Reengineering global AI for China’s digital ecosystem

Responsibilities

• ROLE: Executive Producer

• CLIENT: Lufthansa

• PRODUCTION: MediaMonks

The work

When “AI” was still a buzzword in the making, we were already putting it to work.

Lufthansa’s “Life Changing Places” campaign was built around a beautifully simple idea: what if a single photo could inspire your next destination?

The international version, developed in our global HQ, used Google’s Image Recognition API to analyze users’ photos and match them to destinations around the world. It was a brilliant concept - but in China, none of those tools could be used.

So in our Shanghai office, we rebuilt the entire experience from the ground up.

We reengineered the backend using Chinese machine learning and AI libraries, creating a localized version capable of running fully within China’s digital ecosystem.

The result: a fully autonomous AI-powered experience that could analyze your photo, reveal what it saw, and match it with a meaningful travel destination - all in real time, all within China’s Great Firewall.

The experience not only worked - it surprised users with unexpected, poetic connections between their everyday images and the vast world waiting to be explored.

It was AI-driven creativity before “generative” became a household word.