Imagine shopping in any store and having an expert right by your side to share everything about that store and any product it contains. It will offer suggestions based on your needs and guide you to the exact items you want at the best price. That’s the promise of Quin, an artificial intelligence tool from AI company Verneek.
“Quin Shopping AI is basically this very holistic AI that is going to be your trusted source of information, your trusted advisor, your trusted ally, wherever you go as a shopper,” Verneek co-founder Nasrin Mostafazadeh says on this episode of NRF’s Retail Gets Real podcast.
“It can help answer any and every question that you have throughout your journey, whether online, whether in a store, or wherever else you end up being.”
Shoppers who walk into a Quin-enabled store will see a sign that says, “Hi, I’m Quin, you’re shopping AI. Ask me anything.” After scanning the QR code, shoppers can compare products, get nutritional information, find out about a store’s return policies, ask which aisle has the peanut butter or get recipes for a family of four under $30 tailored to dietary preferences or food sensitivities.
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“All these very sophisticated questions are things that are already on the minds of your average Americans, but they literally never had help,” Mostafazadeh says. “They were left to their own devices when they would walk into the store. They just are left with … 40,000 products that they had to just navigate and make decisions as to what they can and cannot buy given their health or budget constraints or even … their preferences.”
Retail is a natural fit for holistic, generative AI such as Quin, according to Mostafazadeh. “We really wanted to apply our technology first and foremost in a domain that really will interface with every average American. And what better world than retail, because everyone uses it anywhere, at any time. That was really one of the reasons why we gravitated toward picking retail as the first contender.”
She knew customers would embrace Quin, but Mostafazadeh was less sure of the reaction among retail staff and managers.
“To our surprise, the store managers and store associates are actually our biggest allies,” she says. “All these expert questions are the ones that store associates and store managers love to delegate to Quin. They see it as a way of increasing their productivity and increasing their accuracy.”
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Mostafazadeh says Quin allows retailers to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
“The bottom line for retailers is that they’re super low margin, so they are all homed in on increasing sales. Now that we’ve been in the market and we’ve collected all the data, we have actually shown that we have increased the sales in these retailers significantly,” she says.
“And we have also decreased the operation cost significantly by virtue of the store associates and store workers being able to focus on their own day-to-day jobs. Retailers love that part.”
Listen to the full podcast to hear about Mostafazadeh’s career path in robotics and AI, the monkey/banana dilemma that generative technology got stuck on until ChatGPT and Mostafazadeh’s thoughts on the real threats and opportunities AI represents.
The retail industry impacts everyone, everywhere, every day.
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