GenAI Copy Engine
Large Athletics Retailer (Fortune 500)
January – June 2025
Executive Summary
A Fortune 500 athletics retailer replaced agency copywriting with an in-house GenAI Copy Engine embedded in "Lexi 2.0," its next-generation marketing platform.
In six months the program delivered transformational results across cost, quality, and speed metrics.
Program Outcomes
The Challenge
- High vendor spend: $1.9M/yr outsourced to third-party copy shops.
- Late launches: 11% of PDPs missed seasonal deadlines by > 12 days.
- Inconsistent voice: Multiple partners diluted brand tone & SEO quality.
- Scalability ceiling: Hundreds of new SKUs each season overwhelmed human writers.
Objectives
| KPI | Target | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor spend vs. baseline | –$1.8M/yr | ✅ |
| Copy coverage wholesale/SNKRS | > 95% by end-of-season | ✅ |
| Copy turnaround time | < 48 hrs from SKU brief | ✅ |
| ATC lift (PDP A/B) | ≥ +5% | ✅ |
| Writer NPS | +20 pts | ✅ |
Solution Architecture
GenAI Micro-service (Python + Vertex AI)
Template-guided prompts generate outline → draft → tone-polish.
Lexi 2.0 Integration
New "Create > Wholesale Copy" flow triggers GenAI, surfaces in rich editor, auto-publishes to PIM & the ecommerce platform.
Governance Layer
Brand-voice rules, policy & restricted-term filters, PE Langchain evaluation.
Feedback Module
Writers embed 3-click rating; low-score samples auto-retrain nightly.
Observability
Datadog dashboards on latency, hallucination, acceptance rate.
Results
| Metric | Baseline | Post-launch | Δ | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agency spend | $1.9M | $0 | –100% | Contract retired |
| Copy SLAs hit | 72% | 100% | +28 pp | FY25Q2 audit |
| Writer output | 1.0 | 1.15× | +15% | Words per hour |
| ATC lift | — | +8.9% (mid) | p < 0.01 | 50/50 PDP split |
| Revenue influence | — | $24M/yr | Model, Finance |
Business Impact
- Cost avoidance: $1.9M vendor run-rate + $1.26M FTE hires averted.
- Revenue upside: Incremental $24M if deployed across Women's & Men's apparel globally.
- Creative capacity: ~120 copy-hours/collection freed for storytelling.
- Platform reuse: Same GenAI service now piloting for Retail & Packaging copy.
My Role — Lead Program Manager, GenAI
Product Strategy
Authored vision & KPI stack; aligned Marketing, Ops, Legal, Tech.
Road-mapping & Delivery
Ran two-week sprints; hit MVP in 10 weeks, full rollout by week 24.
Technical Orchestration
Defined prompt-engineering standards, evaluation harness, and P1 guardrails.
Change Management
Built writer playbooks, live trainings, and feedback loops; drove 95% adoption in 30 days.
"The GenAI Copy Engine turned a costly bottleneck into a scalable advantage—delivering brand-perfect copy at the speed of sport."
What's Next
- Expand to .com & Retail PDPs → coverage goal 100% by FY26.
- Real-time A/B optimizer → dynamic headlines by geo-locale.
- Multilingual models → 7 EU languages, zero-shot benchmarking in progress.
For more GenAI program details, contact Andrew
Andrew Hallberg
Senior Program Manager – AI @ Microsoft | Co-Founder & CTO @ HirelyAI
Andrew leads cross-functional AI and digital commerce programs at Microsoft and co-founded HirelyAI, a GenAI-native hiring platform. He specializes in AI program management, product strategy, and ethical AI implementation.