ACE (AI Content Expert)
ROYAL LONDON
For Royal London’s Brand & Marketing team, reviewing thousands of content assets each year had become an operational headache. Each one typically took several working days to get through review and approval — often stretching across weeks and involving input from multiple employees. As regulatory scrutiny increased with the introduction of Consumer Duty, the stakes got even higher, placing more pressure on teams already working at capacity.
In response, we led the design and delivery of a custom internal tool called ACE (AI Content Expert), built to dramatically streamline the content review process. I directed a cross-functional team of 15 — spanning architects, researchers, designers, analysts, engineers and data scientists — to develop a secure, scalable AI solution embedded directly within Royal London’s Azure environment.
Using Microsoft’s OpenAI services, we created a review workflow that let employees simply upload a piece of content for instant feedback. No prompt engineering, no extra documentation — just actionable guidance aligned to the organisation’s own marketing checklist, covering tone of voice, clarity, accessibility, FCA regulations, ASA standards and more. ACE also returned a rewritten version of the content, allowing employees to immediately act on the suggestions.
Behind the scenes, the tool orchestrated a suite of specialised AI agents — each responsible for different aspects of the review. A sequence of reviewer agents evaluated the content from their own domain perspectives, feeding their outputs to a Consolidator agent, which summarised and structured the collective feedback. A final Refiner agent then rewrote the content, fully aligned to Royal London’s brand voice and compliance standards.
The impact has been promising. Rolled out to 90 users in its first year, early data suggests ACE could reduce the number of iterations required to approve content by as much as 40%. If realised at scale, this would significantly cut time, effort and cost — allowing teams to refocus on strategic growth rather than repetitive updates.
The success of ACE has already been recognised externally, winning The Financial Services Forum's 2024 Awards for Innovation & Transformation and for Best Use of AI or Automation, as well as earning a nomination for the DataIQ Award 2024 for Most Innovative Use of AI (Brand).
Looking ahead, Royal London plans to expand its use of generative AI — exploring applications in asset creation, from copywriting to imagery — building on the solid foundation ACE has laid.
LEADERSHIP | INNOVATION | PRODUCT MANAGEMENT | AGILE METHODS | CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Agency: Nile | Work: Live Project
