The US department store brand and household name, Macy’s, has rolled out a AI-powered chatbot in the form of a shopping assistant for its online customers.
The company had been working on a bespoke AI agent for nearly six months, according to PAYMNTS [account wall] before changing the technological basis of the project to Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Speaking at the time, Chad Westfall, SVP, Technology Product Development, said that Macy’s internal development was too slow to keep up with “the pace of change and innovation in AI…we […] forwent some of our usual processes in order to go after this with all deliberate haste.”
The shopping assistant, Ask Macy’s, created 4.75 times higher revenue per visit among users during the beta testing phases, rather than a reduction in abandonment, according to Google Cloud. Now live, when shoppers search for an item or category, Ask Macy’s scans the entire back catalogue of products and then can ask supplemental questions to focus in on particular choices, increasing engagement and a customer’s time investment on the platform – lowering the rate of cart abandonment.
For example, queries for items of clothing are answered by Ask Macy’s asking about a customer’s preferences as to colour, cut, and cloth before they are shown a range of possible options. A virtual try-on feature can superimpose items onto an uploaded picture of the shopper and place the avatar in different settings such as a restaurant, workplace or outdoors. “We wanted to show [customers] haw technology can remove friction and elevate retail shopping […] to help them feel guided, understood, and confident,” Westfall said.
