Turning an early AI prototype into something that runs in production is rare. Tesco’s Kraków team has done it at scale.
At ASPIRE 2026, Hanna Jarlaczyńska and Ahmed Hassanien of Tesco Technology closed The Zone with a live case study of the Product Intelligence Platform, which now enriches millions of products. The F&F online launch alone, powered by the platform, contributed £4.2m in online sales.
What the team did:
→ Built a reusable “AI factory” for product onboarding, which cut time-to-market by 70% and made large-scale auto-categorisation, content generation and attribute extraction possible.
→ Shipped imperfect AI solutions deliberately, balancing trust and control with confidence scores, automated reviewers and policy-based data quality checks, and putting people in the loop where needed.
→ Kept cost and reliability in check by preferring deterministic logic and cheaper models first, using caching and delayed processing, and reserving premium models for difficult cases.
Tesco Technology also won the ASPIRE Dragon Award for the Poster Competition (Elevator Pitch), by delegate vote.