There's a question every brand building with AI right now is quietly wrestling with: how do you get people to actually believe the technology works, instead of just nodding politely through another demo?
This past year, four of our projects — for Google, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and illumend — ended up being four different answers to that same question. And the industry noticed: the LFL team was honored across 19 award categories for the work.
The throughline across all of it was something we're calling Proof Over Promise. Here's what we mean by that, precisely: Proof Over Promise is the practice of validating AI capabilities through live, high-stakes public demonstration rather than controlled product announcements, putting the technology in situations where failure is visible and letting audiences draw their own conclusions. Simple to say. Genuinely hard to do.
Here's what it looked like four different ways.
How do you prove edge AI works when everyone's already skeptical? A Year of Qualcomm
Qualcomm came into 2025 facing the same skepticism the whole industry was facing: people had heard the edge AI pitch for years and had never seen it actually proven. So we built a year-long experiential strategy around one principle, put the technology under real pressure, in public, with audiences watching.
Across SXSW, Computex Taipei, and Snapdragon Summit, we deployed Qualcomm's edge AI stack in progressively complex live scenarios where failure would be immediate and visible. At Snapdragon Summit, we went furthest: what if a keynote moment could plan and execute itself, live, on stage? Agentic systems ran across multiple human-centered scenarios, in front of the audience that mattered most, making the capabilities impossible to dismiss.
Eventex Awards: Won silver in Best Summit, Tech Event, and Brand Experience – Technology
The Shorty Awards: Finalist in Event & Experiential, Physical and Digital Convergence, and Creative Use of Technology
B2B experiential that drives 1,376% engagement lift
For Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce needed Agentforce to move beyond abstract demos and bombastic claims about agentic AI, and show how it actually operates inside real business workflows.
So we built a city. 17 storefronts across a footprint the size of a football field and a half, each one a research-driven recreation of a familiar environment — retail, healthcare, education, automotive, hospitality, consumer goods. Equinox carried its signature eucalyptus scent. UChicago Medicine operated like an active clinical space. PepsiCo's bodega tracked inventory and changed promotions in real time. A 14-foot Activation Tower kicked off each visitor's personalized journey, and three massive pagodas representing the Agentforce powergrid anchored the industry demo zones, all tied together with one unified light and sound system and a single signature purple marking every Agentforce interaction.
The result: 17 branded experiences, 32 industry demos, 40,000 people experienced Agentforce City in person — a 1,376% increase in scans from previous year, signaling deep and active participation.. People weren't just watching. They were testing the system and walking away with a clear sense of how Agentforce fits into the choices they make every day.
As Erin Oles, VP of Brand Experiences at Salesforce, put it, the response was unprecedented enough that the experience is now being scaled globally as a cornerstone of the 2027 events strategy.
Event Marketer's Ex Awards: Won Best Use of Event Technology
Eventex Awards: Won gold in Best B2B Event, Customer Engagement Event & Multisensory Experience | Won silver in Event Storytelling
The Shorty Awards: Finalist in Creative Use of Technology, Physical and Digital Convergence, and Event & Experiential
Compliance AI that reduces three-day reviews to five minutes: Illumend
Most AI products right now follow the same playbook: take an existing process, layer AI on top, make it faster. illumend, formerly myCOI, asked a better question: what if AI could change what's possible, not just how quickly you get there?
They brought 16 years of deep compliance expertise to the table, real institutional knowledge about where things go wrong and where the people doing this work every day get stuck. We built illumend around that foundation. At the center of the platform is Lumie, a conversational AI assistant that reads complex documents, spots what matters, and walks users through next steps in plain language. The bet: the people managing this work are smart, capable professionals who just need clearer information to make confident decisions. Lumie gives them that — through document intelligence, coverage gap detection, full-lifecycle workflow management, and audit-ready documentation, all explained in language a person can actually act on.
The proof shows up in the numbers. What once took up to three days of manual review now takes 5-6 minutes, a 99% reduction in processing time. Thousands of agreements are actively managed through the platform, with AI running at 90% average accuracy and documented cases where it outperforms human reviewers.
Globee Awards: Won silver in Artificial Intelligence | Won "Best of Category" honoree in the AI-Native Transformation of a Legacy Product
How to turn a product announcement into a developer experience worth racing to solve: Prism Shift
For Google I/O 2025, we flipped the typical one-way event announcement into something developers and fans could race to beat, a Gemini-powered game with 12+ hours of playable content across 7 distinct worlds, built to prove Google's AI capabilities through gameplay depth rather than a feature list. Android Police ranked it #1 among all Google I/O puzzles ever created, calling it a standout and the most technically complex teaser yet.
The Shorty Awards: Winner in Best Gamification | Nominated for Best Launch Campaign
The Webby Awards: Honoree in Best Game or Application, Advertising, Media & PR | Nominated for Best Puzzle, Trivia, Card & Word Games & Best Use of Immersive in Games → Apps, Software & Immersive
Eventex Awards: Gold in Best Branded Games
On to building what's next
Even being nominated for awards like these is no small thing, these competitions draw thousands of incredible activations from some of the most talented teams in the industry. Making it to finalist, let alone bringing home a win, is something we're genuinely proud of.
And honestly? It only makes us hungrier. Every nomination, every finalist nod, every win pushes us to keep reaching for work that earns belief instead of just asking for it. That's what Proof Over Promise looks like when it works, work that earns belief instead of just asking for it.
If you want to make your experience real, [reach out here].