SJR modernizes websites with Foundry-powered personalization

The high stakes of scaling personalization 

With the rise of AI and automation, personalization has fast become the new bar for global brands. Almost overnight, language models shifted consumers from decades of searching for information to a new era of expecting individual answers instantly. To meet these expectations, brands are under pressure to create reactive content that is personalized across every marketing touchpoint. This has raised the stakes for marketing agencies, which must now balance creativity with data-driven content, all while operating at the speed of culture. 

As a company that helps enterprises and brands transform digital engagement and storytelling, SJR had a vision to disrupt static websites, turning them into truly personalized experiences that converted every visitor. For SJR, a WPP company, dynamic creative was never the issue—consistent, brand-safe personalization at enterprise scale was.

To truly disrupt today’s one-size-fits-all web experiences, SJR’s solution needed to precisely tailor every interaction to a user’s intent, language, or market and do it in a way that was controlled, brand-safe, accurate, and scalable. Yet behind the scenes, outdated systems relied on manually stitched content, resulting in inconsistent accuracy and governance that couldn’t scale.

Selena Cameron, Global CEO at SJR, explains, “Our collaboration with Microsoft made GX Manager more than a website upgrade. It helped us deliver a paradigm shift in digital marketing that has opened new possibilities for intelligent content that drives conversion.”

The critical question wasn’t whether personalization was needed; it was whether it could be delivered safely at enterprise scale.

From ambition to architecture, assimilation without upheaval

The breakthrough came with Microsoft Foundry and Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools. Together, these services gave SJR a more secure, production-ready path to automate enrichment, image matching, and metadata generation—without the need to rewrite its existing infrastructure.

Allan Mazzocchi, Lead Product Manager at SJR, recalls, “Foundry gave us a foundation we could trust. It let us automate enrichment and image matching without months of custom code—and without compromising brand safety.” That trust became the project’s North Star. What began as a creative need evolved into a proof point for how seamlessly AI could integrate within enterprise environments—without disruption.

SJR’s initial priority was connection, not replacement. Developers containerized existing web scrapers and ingestion pipelines in Azure Container Apps, linking directly to live client CMS endpoints through highly secure APIs. Orchestration of ingestion, parsing, and enrichment ran in parallel using Azure Functions, reducing latency from minutes to seconds while delivering predictable cost and maintaining zero downtime on active sites. 

Developers could automate what used to be manual and error-prone, creating a system that could scale reliably. Logs and retries weren’t optional; they were a safety net.

Mazzocchi explains, “Integration was a key consideration. The only way to scale fast was to build inside the infrastructure our clients already trusted.”

By staying fully within the Azure ecosystem, SJR maintained continuity in data governance, security policies, and approval workflows. This approach enabled rapid implementation with zero disruption to live production environments.

Teaching AI to follow the rules

With the ingestion pipeline stable, the team shifted focus to intelligence and governance. Content Understanding processed a variety of unstructured assets—HTML, PDFs, images—transforming them into structured, searchable data.
With prebuilt Foundry templates, developers customized instructions for image description, metadata tagging, and summary quality to enforce brand guidelines and regional compliance. 

SJR dug into the best practices and code samples from the Content Understanding QuickStart Guide early on. That way, it could reduce roadblocks and make incorporating Foundry more straightforward. Azure Cosmos DB provided a highly secure, compliant backbone by isolating each tenant’s rules and audit trails, while supporting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and enterprise data residency requirements. Meanwhile, Application Insights delivered real-time monitoring of enrichment performance and anomaly detection.

“Every enterprise client has unique governance standards. Azure Cosmos DB let us better isolate brand data within one global architecture more securely,” adds Mazzocchi. 

For IT leaders, this combination of greater security inheritance from Foundry, built-in traceability, and automated compliance transforms risk management from theory into measurable reality.

The enterprise equation: More secure, scalable, compliant

The user experience is powered by a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model, which combines real-time information retrieval with language model generation for highly accurate, context-aware responses. When a visitor asks a question, Elasticsearch on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) retrieves pertinent text and images, supplying this context to a GPT model hosted in Foundry Tools. The system then generates a natural language answer, complete with inline citations and brand-approved visuals.

“If an answer took more than eight seconds, it was a failure. Reliability was as critical as creativity,” Mazzocchi emphasizes. The entire workflow runs on a serverless, containerized architecture that automatically scales to handle traffic surges during holiday launches, new campaigns, and regional rollouts. This process occurs without manual intervention or added infrastructure costs. 

During development, the team discovered that processing enrichment asynchronously lost critical context—such as associating headshots with bios—resulting in generic AI outputs. Running enrichment in parallel with parsing preserved essential meaning.

“We learned that post-processing is everything. AI provides speed, but human judgment ensures quality,” Mazzocchi reflects. Through continuous iteration, SJR built not only functional AI workflows but enterprise-grade confidence in their reliability.

For IT decision-makers, GX Manager’s value lies as much in its architecture as in its creative user experience and the performance intelligence that it delivers. The solution inherited the more robust security framework of Foundry—including encryption at rest, private endpoints, and role-based access control—while extending SJR’s governance to new AI capabilities. 

Measurable trust, proven results

Each component—Container Apps, Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, and Foundry—operates within the managed environment of Microsoft, helping to ensure seamless alignment with enterprise compliance certifications such as ISO, SOC, and GDPR. “For every compliance officer who asks, ‘Is this safe?’ we now show logs, not slides,” says Mazzocchi. This level of transparency has evolved into a powerful competitive advantage.

Measurable trust metrics tell the full story: 

• Onboarding time has been slashed from weeks to hours.

• Error rates dropped significantly after enrichment tuning.

• Latency remains fast and stable under load.

• Image accuracy has markedly improved through iterative testing.

Mazzocchi explains, “As much as integration was a technical challenge, it was crucial for building client confidence. It assured our clients that personalization would be compliant, predictable, and scalable for the enterprise.” This assurance has helped reduce procurement hurdles and accelerate AI adoption, the two biggest barriers in enterprise rollouts.

Building the foundation for scalable AI innovation

GX Manager didn’t build a parallel technology stack; it enhanced the trusted infrastructure already in place. SJR referred to the Content Understanding QuickStart Guide to clarify the APIs as the team got started.

By deploying Azure services end-to-end, SJR avoided the complexity and cost of managing multiple vendors, instead delivering a standardized AI platform that scales easily across diverse brands and markets. This project exemplifies how modernization can harmonize with stability—a critical message for IT decision-makers balancing innovation with risk management.

Beyond technical success, GX Manager transformed cross-disciplinary collaboration. Marketing teams gained agility, legal teams embraced automated traceability, and IT leaders gained confidence in the responsible scalability of AI. It proved that personalization can be both production-ready and policy-ready.

SJR’s GX Manager offers an enterprise-grade, replicable template for companies seeking to modernize their digital front doors without dismantling proven systems. Fueled by Foundry and Content Understanding, it interoperates more securely within complex ecosystems that are governed, observable, and auditable from day one. This reduces perceived risk, accelerates deployment, and delivers measurable business impact—all while maintaining compliance within existing security frameworks.

SJR is setting a new industry benchmark for digital personalization, driving transformation across global web experiences.

Discover more about SJR on LinkedIn.