CASE STUDY
AI-Powered, Human-Led
Scaling a Major Retailer’s Creative With Next-Gen AI Talent
With content, there’s never a finish line, only moving benchmarks. The cycle of implementing AI to create content has quickly become what “keeping up” looks like. The target keeps moving, and today, companies are shifting toward the mentality of partnering with AI to tell brand stories in ways that feel fresh, authentic and unmistakably theirs.
Yet, this can come with risks: Move too hastily, and your brand voice gets diluted in a rush of generic outputs. Wait too long, and competitors outpace you. The real challenge is embedding AI in a way that protects brand authenticity while accelerating creativity. That was exactly the crossroads our client, a top global retailer, faced. And that’s where Cella stepped in.
The Challenge: Balancing Scale, Speed and Authenticity
Our client knew leveraging AI was imperative for improving speed-to-market, but they also recognized the risk of losing consistency and brand voice across a massive content ecosystem, spanning websites, social channels, in-store signage and digital campaigns.
There were several competing priorities to balance:
- Cover more ground creatively by integrating AI into existing workflows
- Avoid diluting brand voice in the rush to automate
- Prevent delays in speed-to-market without AI adoption
- Stay ahead of competitors experimenting with AI
However, they were knew they needed to achieve:
- Accelerate content creation: Produce engaging, high-quality content faster across multiple channels, such as websites, social media and in-store signage.
- Innovate and stay competitive: Position themselves as a leader in leveraging new technology to improve their creative processes and adapt to market changes
- Maintain brand voice consistency: Ensure AI-generated feels authentic and aligned with brand standards and their style guide
- Build internal AI expertise: Develop a team that doesn’t just use AI but leads the conversation around it as thought leaders in the creative AI space.
Our Solution: Human in the Loop, Strategy at the Core
Strategic Role Definition
- Collaborated directly with the client’s leadership to define the core responsibilities and strategic impact of new roles
- Crafted specific, precise job descriptions for two critical hires: Copy AI Specialist and Design AI Specialist
Market Expertise and Advisory
- Provided expert guidance on competitive market rates and compensation structures
- Ensured the client could attract top talent in a nascent and highly competitive talent space
Targeted Talent Acquisition
- Leveraged our extensive network and specialized search strategies to identify and engage a pool of qualified candidates with rare expertise in creative AI
- Delivered placements equipped to pioneer the client’s next phase of AI-powered creative initiative
The Roles: Creators + Strategists
The Copy AI Specialist and Design AI Specialist were intended to be more than just “operators” of tools. They would be bridges between technology and brand strategy. Their day-to-day would involve:
- Training and optimizing AI tools
- Engineering prompts and refining AI-generated outputs
- Guiding teams on partnering with AI across channels like websites, ads and in-store signage
- Establishing best practices for consistent, brand-safe outputs
- Educating partners and cross-functional teams on AI’s capabilities and limits
- Driving innovation by experimenting with new tools and trends
Together, these roles would serve as hands-on creators and strategic advisors, ensuring AI enhances, not replaces, the human touch that made the client’s content resonate.
The Results: Building a Scalable, Authentic Future
By embedding AI specialists into their creative ecosystem, the client achieved a foundation for both speed and authenticity:
- Faster speed-to-market for high-volume campaigns
- Future-proof innovation, staying competitive in a rapidly shifting retail landscape
- Consistent brand voice, no matter how the content is generated
- Internal expertise, turning the client into a thought leader in creative AI
While generating content more efficiently was one of the goals, the true outcome of this strategic embedding of AI creative capabilities resulted in better, brand-aligned content at scale, with AI as the engine and humans as the compass.That’s where Cella powered by Torc was a differentiator.
