What if your founder could see the future?

Corporate anniversaries are commonplace, but few companies can point to having a 175-year history. Indeed, among large, listed companies, very few can trace their origins back to before 1851, with Lloyds Bank and Associated British Foods being two noteworthy examples.

That’s why our anniversary – celebrating 175 years of Smiths in 2026 – was so significant, and we wanted it to be special. More importantly, this milestone came at a pivotal moment for Smiths. In 2026, we completed a significant corporate transformation, including divesting two divisions and repositioning Smiths as a premium, focused industrial engineering company.

The challenge for our communications and creative team was clear: how do we use this anniversary to build awareness, engagement and pride in Smiths amongst key company stakeholders?

Our response was to build a year-long campaign at the heart of which was a simple narrative: proud of our past, focused on our future. The idea was to showcase our amazing history whilst also reinforcing our exciting future, our innovation and our growth potential. Every channel, story and activation was designed to reinforce this message.

One of the most ambitious activations we created was an AI-powered video, Smiths 175: An extraordinary journey. The premise was simple: what if our founder, Samuel Smith, could return and see the company his vision helped create?

Using a combination of the latest, cutting-edge AI tools, including Higgsfield and Unreal Engine (the 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games), alongside traditional production techniques, our in-house creative team brought that idea to life.

AI supported concept development, character creation, scripting, storyboarding, and visual generation, while human creativity remained firmly in control of the narrative, art direction, and final execution. The result was an incredible piece of content that was shared far and wide on our internal and external channels.

For communicators and creatives, this provides an important lesson: AI does not replace creativity. Rather, AI enables us to tell richer, more immersive stories – and those that can harness its power are well-placed to thrive in this AI-enabled age.

Building employee pride and engagement was a central theme of the campaign, and every activation was designed with this in mind. It was inspiring to see colleagues around the world sharing their own stories celebrating our heritage and their place in it.

Our annual company celebration, Smiths Day, reflected the huge pride felt across the company, and our internal comms platform was flooded with stories from around the world, including colleagues sharing our specially-created 175 branding from some extraordinary locations, from factory floors to scuba diving in Indonesia.

We also worked with the London Stock Exchange to feature in their billboard campaign celebrating the best of British publicly listed companies and were invited to hold a special market-opening ceremony at the LSE.

The journey culminated in significant employee recognition: a special award of £400 worth of free Smiths shares for each of our 10,000 employees worldwide. Why? We want colleagues not just to reflect on our success, but to own a part of it and our future growth.

As our 175th year draws to a close, I am incredibly proud of what our communications and creative teams have achieved. Our anniversary campaign not only showed how AI can elevate corporate storytelling, but, more importantly, it created engagement, pride, and a stronger sense of connection across our company.

We now have 25 years to plan for the big 200!