Pouring AI Into the Aisle: A Guided Tequila Concierge for Proximo Spirits

How Commerce Architects helped Proximo Spirits turn a wall of tequila bottles into a guided, AI-powered recommendation — reachable from a single QR code.

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About the Client

Proximo Spirits is a global producer and distributor of premium spirits, with a tequila portfolio that spans Jose Cuervo, 1800, Gran Centenario, and Maestro Dobel. Through its Hablas Tequila initiative, Proximo set out to help shoppers navigate that portfolio with confidence — finding the right bottle for the right moment, right at the shelf. To turn that vision into a working experience, Proximo brought together creative agency Agency 580 and Commerce Architects, pairing brand strategy with the engineering to deliver it.

The Challenge: A Wall of Bottles, and No Guide

Standing in the tequila aisle is its own kind of decision fatigue. Dozens of bottles, a blur of blanco, reposado, and añejo, and very little to tell a shopper which one actually fits the taco night, the big celebration, or the quiet glass after work. Proximo saw an opportunity hiding in that hesitation: meet shoppers at the moment of choice and turn portfolio breadth into a helpful recommendation instead of a confusing one.

The vision wasn’t a chatbot bolted onto a website. It was a guided, dynamically unfolding experience a shopper could reach by scanning a QR code on an in-store display — a short, friendly conversation that adapts to their answers (clear or brown tequila, the occasion, how they like to drink it) and lands on a tailored pick with a clear path to buy.

That ambition came with real constraints. This was Proximo’s first consumer-facing AI, so the bar for brand safety and compliance was high: age-gating, responsible-drinking messaging, brand-approved tasting notes, and tight control over everything the AI could say.

Recommendations had to follow a precise, brand-approved decision tree rather than improvise. And the clock was unforgiving — roughly ten weeks from kickoff to a launch timed for the Cinco de Mayo season, with creative and content advancing alongside the build.

The Solution: A Conversation That Builds Itself

Working as an extension of the Proximo and Agency 580 team, Commerce Architects designed the Tequila Concierge as a streaming, component-driven AI experience on AWS.

At its core, the concierge runs on Amazon Bedrock with Claude — chosen for fast, reliable responses at consumer scale. The experience is containerized on Amazon ECS, served globally through Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3, and wrapped in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to enforce Proximo’s content and compliance boundaries.

The breakthrough was in how the conversation renders. Rather than returning plain text, the concierge streams typed, on-brand interface elements — recipe cards, product cards, and side-by-side comparisons — that assemble themselves on screen as the shopper answers each question. To keep every recommendation trustworthy and on-brand, the agent only ever surfaces pre-approved recipes and brand-approved tasting notes, never improvised content, and it walks through a short, structured set of questions before suggesting a single bottle. A recommendation layer quietly encodes Proximo’s brand hierarchy to surface premium options when they fit — with pricing deliberately kept out of the model’s reach, so the AI never reasons over or reveals cost.

Behind the scenes, Commerce Architects stood up the full AWS environment and CI/CD pipeline and kept the project moving through daily standups and weekly client syncs. With creative, content, and engineering advancing in parallel, the team built a flexible workflow that integrated new brand assets and content as they arrived — keeping development in lockstep with the creative work and protecting the launch date. A disciplined QA and user-acceptance cycle then validated the conversation flows, edge cases, and brand-approved logic before the concierge went live.

The Results

Commerce Architects delivered the Tequila Concierge on schedule against a fixed retail date — no surprises. More importantly, the launch gave Proximo something it didn’t have before: a foothold in consumer AI.

For the shopper, the concierge replaces aisle guesswork with a guided, on-brand experience — a confident pick for the occasion and a frictionless step toward purchase.

For Proximo, it’s a safe, governed entry into consumer-facing AI. Pre-approved content only, compliance guardrails built in, and an experience the brand controls end to end — exactly what a first AI launch needs to clear internal and legal review with confidence.

And as a foundation, the architecture is built to extend. The same streaming, component-driven engine and brand-governed recommendation approach can power new brands, new campaigns, and new consumer experiences across Proximo’s portfolio. The Tequila Concierge isn’t just a single launch; it’s a springboard.

And the launch is built to travel. The same streaming, component-driven engine and brand-governed recommendation approach isn't specific to tequila, It’s a repeatable pattern for putting generative AI in front of consumers without giving up control of the message. New brands, new campaigns, new experiences across Proximo's portfolio can run on the foundation that's already in production.

See It in Action

A shopper scans a QR code in the aisle and is greeted by the Hablas Tequila AI Advisor. A few friendly questions later — Clear or Brown, the occasion, how they like to drink it — and the concierge surfaces a tailored, on-brand recommendation, complete with tasting notes and a clear path to purchase.

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From “Clear or Brown?” (left) to a tailored recommendation with tasting notes (right) — the Hablas Tequila AI Advisor in action.