SmartIA for Smartbox: Generative AI driving 100% data-driven media

The context

Managing media investments across a complex, omnichannel ecosystem is a daily challenge for Smartbox. With campaigns running across 4 countries, more than 10 media platforms, and 3 stages of the conversion funnel, the volume of possible touchpoints is massive and makes it difficult to manually track and optimize every single investment.

Historically, weekly budget allocation was a tedious, manual process that took several hours. It was often guided by individual intuition and only utilized a fraction of the available data.

The challenge for Numberly was therefore clear: Smartbox needed a way to process massive volumes of structured and unstructured data (such as cross-market sales, qualitative studies, and incremental measurements) to make faster, purely fact-based allocation decisions.

The solution

To transform this operational complexity into a competitive advantage, Numberly and Smartbox designed an innovative, tailor-made AI “brain.” This technological breakthrough rests on five key pillars:

The process began with a meticulous, manual selection and sorting of all available data to establish a clean and reliable foundational dataset.
A dedicated pipeline was engineered to seamlessly ingest and normalize heterogeneous volumes of information. This continuously updates the tool for multiple projects while its open architecture democratizes access to strategic insights across all teams.
Specialized “skills” were developed for AI agents, enabling them to construct a dynamic knowledge base from the document corpus. These skills empower the system to cross-reference complex variables and instantly generate the optimal budget breakdown.
Moving far beyond blind automation, the strategy relies on supervised learning. Media experts continuously audit the database, pinpointing “blind spots” and guiding the AI to guarantee absolute robustness and business relevance.
Beyond simply distributing budgets, the AI agents are programmed to formulate the strategic “beliefs” and rationales underlying each allocation recommendation, ensuring completely transparent and auditable management.

The results

The deployment of this AI application created a complete paradigm shift, moving the team from intuition-based decisions to unprecedented hyper-agility.

🏅 This case won the Silver Award in the Data, IA & Marketing Automation category at the Trophées Marketing 2026 and the Silver Award in the Data, IA & Advanced Personalisation category at the Trophées e-commerce 2026.

>95%

Time Saved

Hyper-Reactivity

Smartbox can now iterate its budget allocations on a weekly or even daily basis to instantly adapt to seasonality.

100% Data-Driven

The entire data corpus is now fully leveraged for every media budget decision.