How a US Marketing Services Organisation Made Campaign Scenario Planning 85% More Efficient With an AI-Ready Simulation Platform
Replacing expert-dependent manual planning with a dynamic simulation engine, built for future AI expansion
How a US Marketing Services Organisation Made Campaign Scenario Planning 85% More Efficient With an AI-Ready Simulation Platform
Replacing expert-dependent manual planning with a dynamic simulation engine, built for future AI expansion
Outcomes at a Glance
Efficiency improvement over manual scenario planning
85%
Scenarios generated through the platform per day
500+
Time to generate a scenario result
Approximately 5 seconds
Initial engagement extended into a multi-phase AI programme
Ongoing AI expansion underway
About the Client
The Situation
The client runs marketing strategy for financial services and retail clients, which means translating client goals and budget constraints into campaign plans across channels, audiences, and product lines. Their existing process for doing this relied on manual configuration of complex calculation models, with subject matter experts involved at each decision point. When a client changed their requirements, adjusting the strategy meant going back through the same manual steps.
The vision was to replace this with a dynamic simulation platform: one where strategists could adjust variables and see projected outcomes instantly, without needing engineering or expert involvement for every change. Edstem was engaged to build that platform and design its architecture with a future conversational AI layer in mind.
The Impact
When scenario planning requires expert involvement at every step, the bottleneck is not the thinking. It is the process. Strategists working on financial services and retail campaigns need to compare multiple approaches quickly: different budget allocations, audience mixes, channels, and product combinations. Each iteration through a manual system added time and required access to people whose involvement was expensive and limited.
The client's inability to run what-if scenarios at scale also constrained what they could offer their own clients. Real-time projections and rapid strategic adjustments were not possible when every change required reconfiguration by hand.
The Resolution
Edstem built the Performance Simulator, a dynamic scenario simulation application that allows non-technical marketing strategists to adjust campaign variables (budgets, audiences, products, channels) and see projected outcomes in approximately 5 seconds. Scenario planning that previously required manual expert configuration can now be done independently by strategists. The platform generates over 500 scenarios per day.
The simulation engine digitised the client's existing marketing strategy models, including complex business rules and decision trees for credit card and product promotion campaigns, into a flexible calculation framework. Tableau integration gives strategists immediate visual access to simulation results without switching tools.
Alongside the simulator, Edstem modernised the client's HCMA platform, improving data pipeline reliability and accuracy to support the simulator's data requirements.
The architecture was designed from the start to support a future conversational AI agent, one that could interpret natural-language queries about campaign strategy and generate recommendations autonomously. That foundation is in place. Following delivery of the simulator, the engagement was extended into a multi-phase AI programme to build that next layer.
Building a simulation or AI-ready platform for marketing or campaign strategy?
Edstem has experience translating complex domain logic into self-service tools and designing the architecture to support AI expansion.
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