I came across a case study about Tyson Foods that illustrates something I discuss in I Need That:
The most powerful innovations often happen behind the scenes, invisible to customers, yet transforming their entire experience.
While consumers know Tyson through brands like Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm, and Ball Park, they don’t see the technological transformation reshaping how these and other Tyson Foods products get to their plates.
Tyson tackled a deceptively complex problem: helping foodservice operators (think: restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals) find EXACTLY the right products and recipes among its vast catalog of 1,200 active products and 600 recipes.
The previous system was a basic keyword search — rigid, fragile, and frustrating.
Horrendous UX and cruddy results for a task that’s super important to customers.
You had to know exactly what to type, or you’d get nothing useful back.
This created a particularly painful experience for small restaurant operators with razor-thin margins who desperately need efficiency solutions (like buying cooked chicken breasts instead of raw) but lack time to wrestle with clunky, often pointless search tools.
Enter generative AI.
By partnering with AWS‘s Generative AI Innovation Center, Tyson completely reimagined their search experience. The results? A conversational, intuitive system that understands context and intent rather than just matching keywords.
To me, what makes this case study especially interesting is the speed of implementation — less than three months from concept to live deployment. (Um, what?)
This astonishing turnaround reveals important lessons for any product maker:
Product Payoff: Sephora applied similar thinking to revolutionize beauty product discovery through its Virtual Artist feature. Rather than forcing customers to know specific product names or categories, Sephora created an intuitive, image-based system that understands the intent behind searches like “summer look” or “professional makeup.” This seemingly simple improvement led to a 28% increase in mobile conversions as customers found products that actually matched their needs instead of abandoning searches in frustration.
Action for today: Identify the most frustrating “discovery moment” in your customer journey — that place where potential customers struggle to find what they actually need from your product or service list. Then ask these three questions:
- Are we forcing customers to use OUR language instead of theirs?
- Do customers need to already know what they’re looking for in order to find it?
- What contextual information might make discovery dramatically easier?
The answers will likely point to your biggest opportunity for transformative improvement.
Want to explore how generative AI might reshape your customer experience? Tap that reply arrow and let’s discuss potential applications for your product discovery process. Or reach out to my team of product marketing experts at Graphos Product.