Overview
A marketing sales division in food distribution produced weekly promotional materials the hard way. Two specialists sank four to five hours each — eight to ten hours combined — into manual work. Past references lived in file servers. Formats varied person to person. Promotional patterns stayed trapped as tacit knowledge inside individual heads.
The stated ask was “faster document production.” But when we presented a working probe, the decision-maker reacted differently — they asked, unprompted, “Could this also generate frozen food promotional imagery?” The real problem wasn’t hours. It was that sales staff had no structural way to own creative end-to-end.
This project was never about making AI write documents. It was about giving operators their creative authority back, with AI as the intermediary.
Approach
-
Structuring promotional patterns. We analyzed 438 past documents from the prior year and codified them into 10 major and 24 minor promotional patterns. Tacit knowledge became explicit schema.
-
Collaborative AI design. Not fire-and-forget. Operators work with the AI to complete each document. Template recommendation, product information extraction, regional variation, and image generation are handled by AI. Adjustments to each merchandiser’s preferences and final judgment stay with the human.
-
From PDF input straight to PPTX. Product codes, brands, sizes, retail prices, and cost prices are structurally extracted from source PDFs. python-pptx pours them into proprietary formats, with automatic SharePoint archival at the end of the pipeline.
-
Invisible technology. Flask + React + GCP Cloud Run on the backend. Claude for text generation, Gemini for visual generation. The operator never sees the stack.
Outcome
- Weekly document production: two specialists × 8–10 hours collapsed to a combined one hour
- 438 past materials auto-classified into 10 major / 24 minor patterns, keeping quality uniform across operators
- Scope expanded to the entire division as a foundation for format standardization
- Positioned not as a “document tool” but as a design to return creative self-determination, with next phases ahead: promotional imagery generation and POS data integration