Pantone and Microsoft want to help put the “art” in “artificial intelligence.”
The companies announced Wednesday that they have teamed to launch a tool they call Palette Generator, a conversational AI tool that creates a color palette for designers and creatives based on a prompt. The AI model has been trained on Pantone’s repository of color data, psychology, forecasting, insights and research and does not rely on external information and data, according to the company.
Ora Solomon, vice president of product and engineering at Pantone, said that helps users trust the output Palette Generator offers while also ensuring that the information users receive has been touched by a human along the way.
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“To be true to ourselves—and our philosophy that we want to free creators to be creative—it was really important that we use our own data,” Solomon said. “That is the differentiator with other palette generators out there. We want our users to feel confident that these palettes that we are giving them, or we are suggesting to them, are essentially Pantone-approved palettes.”
Pantone is beta testing the tool now and has made it available to all Pantone Connect users, whether they use the premium or free version of the platform. Designers and creatives use Pantone Connect to access information about colors, put together palettes and draw inspiration for collections.
A designer could ask Palette Generator to “create a color story for a men’s collection based on the feeling of the first frost of fall” or to “suggest a group of colors to use for a women’s collection with parallels to a soft spring morning.” From there, the tool offers up five colors, with explanations for how each suits the theme or prompt and links back to further information about those colors and their importance.
While Solomon said she didn’t know exactly how much time the tool could save designers, her hope is that it helps designers bring inspiration from sources that could previously have been difficult to locate.
“We’re hoping that our hypothesis holds true—and the hypothesis is that this will really make that inspiration phase more efficient or will help validate the directions that the designers might have already been taking,” she said. “We’re really playing in that inspiration phase and aiming to solve some of the pain points that exist in that space.”
Kathleen Mitford, corporate vice president, global industry marketing at Microsoft, said she expects that Palette Generator—as well as other generative AI tools the technology giant has partnered with consumer-facing companies on—can give people time back to handle the more hands-on portions of their roles.
“I think why this partnership is so exciting is because Pantone is showing the creative field what it means to be frontier and how you can use AI to transform your experience, whether that experience is the customer experience, whether that experience is your employee experience or whether that experience is the type of workflows that you’re reimagining,” Mitford told Sourcing Journal.
The Palette Generator marks Pantone’s first customer-facing step with generative AI, Solomon said. When selecting a specific use case to pursue, Pantone considered the struggles its customers had previously brought to the company’s attention and surveyed other tools on the market for designers and creatives.
“We know that palettes are important, from our own data. We also know that there are a number of palette generators out there, indicating that this is truly addressing a pain point for designers,” she said. “From our perspective, it seemed clear that this would be a great first step in helping address a real need that customers have.”
To further refine the experience for users, Microsoft and Pantone will collect data about specific engagement points—wehtehr customers save palettes or individual swatches, whether they ask the tool for changes to its suggestions and more.
Solomon said Pantone kicked this project with Microsoft in early Q2. Today, the tool is primarily geared toward designers working in fashion, home and interior, because it leverages Pantone’s Fashion Home + Interior (FHI) library. In the future, Solomon said, the company plans to expand the tool’s remit to include other libraries its users leverage for digital-first creation.
Beyond the eventual upgrades Pantone plans to make to Palette Generator as it collects incremental data on the tool, it is actively cooking up other AI-based experiences for designers and creatives.
Solomon said one such initiative focuses on the fidelity—often called achievability and visualization by designers—of color transfer onto different materials. As one of its 2026 initiatives, Pantone is working to leverage technology to bridge that gap.
“A big pain point today for…designers is that, when they’re designing, they don’t necessarily know if that color is achievable or if it’s going to look materially different on a different substrate or different material,” Solomon said. “So one of the things that we are building is achievability and visualization.”
