PILOTING AI WITH PURPOSE

Bringing LLMs to consumer UX at scale

CHALLENGE

People Inc. had a broad strategic push: “find consumer-facing use cases for AI.” My team led the effort to shape ambiguous intent into testable product experiments. The opportunity: use LLMs to power contextual Q&A and product recommendation widgets that could increase page engagement and commerce revenue—especially on editorial content not typically optimized for conversion.

ACTION

I led ideating, design & implementation of two pilots:

Contextual Q&A embedded in articles to engage users and promote recirculation
AI-driven product rec widgets that used article context to recommend relevant products

I managed stakeholder pivots (e.g., moving from an interactive “bottom sheet” to a static component due to ad and tech constraints) and coached the team through fast experimentation.

RESULT

While the pilots weren’t scaled immediately, they produced strong learnings:

Q&A drove high engagement—when placed high enough on the page
Product widgets opened new monetization potential
The process helped reframe AI as a problem-solving tool, not a trend

These pilots set the model for how our org now approaches consumer-facing AI: rapid tests, strong hypotheses, and UX-led discovery.