TL;DR Summary
Lavazza built an AI assistant, “Lucy,” designed to give honest, insight-based feedback—not generic AI praise.
The persona was created using Lavazza’s proprietary research and powered by Stravito’s platform.
Lucy supports global teams with packaging decisions, creative evaluation, and media planning.
Grounded data reduces hallucinations and encourages constructive critique.
Ad Age featured the story as an example of how brands are redefining AI for real marketing impact.
The word is out and we couldn’t be more pleased; Ad Age just spotlighted how our latest innovation, Stravito AI Personas, is helping Lavazza Group make critical GTM decisions.
This collaboration forces people to reimagine what AI can look like inside a modern marketing organization, and how insights can be put to immediate, practical use.
Why Lavazza Group wanted a different kind of AI
Like many marketers, Lavazza Group’s teams were running into a challenge with generic AI tools: they delivered overly-positive, overly-polished responses that weren’t particularly helpful for making decisions.
Using Stravito AI Personas, Lavazza Group set out to create something that till now has been rare: an AI persona that doesn’t over-affirm, and instead tells teams what they need to hear (and not necessarily what they want to hear).
In fact, Lavazza Group created several virtual “team members” to reflect regional differences and give marketers, researchers, and product teams an instant sounding board.
For the USA, her name is Lucy.
Breakfast of Champions
To make Lucy genuinely useful, Lavazza Group needed to ground her thinking in segment-specific data. Using the Stravito platform, Lavazza Group trained her on a vast but curated mix of high-quality research and consumer insights interviews, category analyses, and other behavioral research.
Clear prompting strategies and persona training help Lucy deliver the kind of constructive criticism marketing teams actually need.
Together, a solid foundation and process help Lucy do something AI tools often struggle with:
delivering honest, bias-reduced, context-rich opinions.
And Lavazza Group is making the most of it.
No Pushover
Whether the team is refining packaging, testing visuals, or evaluating a new idea, they can ask Lucy questions the same way they would with a colleague:
“Which design resonates most?”
“What would you change?”
“How would this message land with consumers like you?”
As Simone Ballarini, Lavazza Group’s Head of Business Intelligence & Consumer Insights, puts it in the article:
“We do not simply investigate their attitude towards coffee; we investigated their attitude towards life.”
–Simone Ballarini, Head of Business Intelligence & Consumer Insights, Lavazza Group
One of the examples of Lucy’s impact that was highlighted by Ad Age involves Lavazza’s “Dolcevita” line of coffee.
The brand was exploring multiple packaging concepts. Lucy reviewed the designs and provided *frank* feedback based on the underlying consumer data she was built on.
Her input led Lavazza Groupto refine colors and visual cues, shifting toward the version that ultimately resonated best.
The Lavazza Group team was then able to move ahead and validate concepts with live consumer testing across digital channels to confirm performance.
This new process delivered greater clarity, stronger engagement, and a faster, more informed creative process.
Read the Full Story in Ad Age
We’re incredibly proud to see this collaboration featured in Ad Age and even prouder of what Lucy represents:
AI that’s grounded, honest, useful, and truly insight-led.
You can read the full article on Ad Age: Inside the AI assistant that stopped saying yes—and what Lavazza learned from it.
Meanwhile, Stravito continues to work with Lavazza Group to expand this work across additional markets and use cases, from creative testing to media planning.
We can’t wait to celebrate more stories of everything we accomplish together. We are also thrilled to see more client companies following suit with pioneering uses of Stravito AI Personas across different industries.
With AI Personas, the future is looking bright. And salty.
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