Merchandising & Buying
Product description writing
Generate first-draft product descriptions from attributes, imagery, and brand guidelines. Buying team reviews, edits, and approves before publish.
60–80%
reduction in description drafting time
Use case assessment
Minor improvement. Small efficiency gain with limited effect on overall turnover or bottom line.
Very easy to implement. Ready-to-use tools exist. Can be up and running in days or weeks with minimal technical resource.
Light data requirements. Uses straightforward inputs — documents, product descriptions, customer records — that are usually accessible with minimal prep.
Very low risk. Fully internal use. A person checks everything before it goes further. Worst case is a minor internal inconvenience.
Light people impact. A new tool slots into an existing workflow. Minimal training needed. Most people will adapt quickly.
Tooling required
Things to consider
Walmart used LLMs to create or improve 850M+ data points in its product catalogue, achieving 100x productivity versus manual effort. E-commerce grew 22% globally (Retail Dive).
Brand guidelines must be clearly documented and embedded in the system prompt — inconsistent guidelines produce inconsistent outputs.
Define a review workflow before launch: who reviews, what they check for, and what the approval step looks like.
Start with a single product category to calibrate tone and quality before scaling across the full range.
Measure quality by tracking the edit rate — if reviewers are rewriting more than 30% of the content, the prompt needs refinement before scaling to the full range.
Experiment starter: Pick 20 products from one category. Run them through a well-prompted LLM using your brand guidelines and have the content team rate outputs blind against their own drafts. If 70%+ are rated usable with light editing, the case is made.
Go deeper in the playbook
Section — Opportunity Identification, including the AI Opportunity Assessment ScorecardSection — The Experimentation FrameworkThis is an augmentation opportunity — see the relevant playbook section for how to approach it.More in Merchandising & Buying
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