Company

Pet Circle, Australia's leading online pet retailer, built its reputation on delivering vet-backed pet care advice alongside products. The company's strength lies in combining e-commerce with trusted veterinary guidance, a differentiator that drives customer loyalty but historically required manual curation by their internal vet team.

The Challenge

Pet Circle's marketing team faced two interconnected problems: customer acquisition costs were rising, and valuable data from existing customers remained underutilized. They needed a scalable, low-CPC (cost per click) mechanism to attract new customers while enriching customer profiles to drive personalized marketing and repeat purchases. The technical hurdle was significant: transforming manually curated veterinary advice into an automated AI-driven experience without compromising the quality and trust customers expected from vet-backed content. Each personalized Pet Plan previously required veterinarian time to draft, creating a bottleneck that prevented the marketing team from scaling their most effective engagement tool.

The Solution

Ned Moorfield, A.Team Product Manager, brought expertise in generative AI and product strategy to address both the acquisition and retention challenges. Moorfield proposed starting with an internal proof of concept to validate AI quality against veterinary standards before any customer-facing deployment. The team trained a custom AI agent on 200+ anonymized vet-authored plans, then fine-tuned prompt design to generate engaging, HTML-formatted outputs. The breakthrough came through a collaborative QA loop with Pet Circle's vet team, who manually reviewed and rated AI outputs to improve quality iteratively. This human-in-the-loop approach maintained Pet Circle's brand promise while proving the technology could scale. Once internal validation succeeded, Moorfield designed an MVP for live campaigns, including CRM integration and continued veterinary oversight to ensure every customer-facing output met professional standards.