The Acquisition Will Result in a Conversational AI Shopping Experience That Puts Retailers on Par With Major Ecommerce Marketplaces and Boosts Engagement, Sales and Satisfaction by Predicting and Answering The Questions that Drive Shoppers to Buy
Bluecore, the retail technology company that empowers retailers to discover their best customers and keep them for life, has acquired AI Shopping Assistant alby. Together, alby and Bluecore will introduce a conversational shopping experience that exceeds experiences introduced by Amazon and other large-scale retailers. Using Bluecore, retailers will soon be able to make their own ecommerce sites, email campaigns, SMS and mobile apps conversational by anticipating and answering shoppers’ questions about their products. This new experience is already driving more engagement, sales, and post-sale satisfaction across early users. Bluecore anticipates full integration with alby will be complete and available to retailers in Q1 of 2025.
Major ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon have introduced AI Shopping Assistants that are gaining traction among consumers. Soon, consumers will expect similar conversational capabilities across all ecommerce brands and retailers. Bluecore’s assistant will not just answer questions, however; it will also pre-populate product pages and modules with the questions it knows shoppers are most likely to have about products. alby is already in use by major retailers, including a large online sporting goods retailer and one of the world’s largest televised commerce platforms, both of which also work with Bluecore.
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The intersection of Bluecore and alby begins at the intersection of product and customer data.
Bluecore has long leveraged AI to create real-time visibility into retailers’ vast product catalogs, predict what individual shoppers want, and then automatically engage them with personalized experiences. With alby, it will take this mission even further by anticipating the questions that shoppers will ask about specific products before they buy, such as “Is this snowboard suitable for powder jumps?”, “Is this tent easy to set up?” or “Are these jeans 100% cotton?” The new shopping assistant will leverage the retailer’s product catalog and customer lifecycle stage data to generate real-time prompts, responses and recommendations that progress the shopper toward purchase, ultimately increasing conversions. And it will do so at a scale previously inconceivable using classical AI techniques.
Alby is credited with achieving as much as $40M in annualized incremental revenue for a single ecommerce retailer. Shoppers that engage with alby are additionally two times more likely to make a purchase than other shoppers, less likely to contact customer support and, on average, rate their satisfaction with their shopping experience at 85%.
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The AI Shopping Assistant will create a better experience for shoppers and new data for retailers.
AI Shopping Assistants like alby do more than engage shoppers and customers–they create new data that improves overall understanding of customers for merchants and marketers. For Bluecore customers, this engagement data will introduce new event-triggered marketing opportunities around the conversations taking place–including conversation abandonment. Bluecore’s Customer 360 profiles already contain the lifetime of a customer’s historical and predicted activity. Equipped with this new data set, these profiles will now lend to an even greater level of individual customer knowledge–and therefore, personalization–than ever before.
“Conversational commerce is only the beginning of our vision for alby,” said Fayez Mohamood, CEO of Bluecore. “Through this acquisition, we’ll be able to equip retailers with a capability they’re eager to offer shoppers right now. But alby’s role as a Shopping Assistant is only one of many it will play. The AI at its core is built to learn skills and over time it will learn new ones that address needs that retailers don’t even know they will have around marketing, merchandising and support.”
As part of the acquisition, alby’s CEO Max Bennett–who is also one of Bluecore’s original co-founders–will join the company to lead alby’s evolution.
“We’ve spent the last two years understanding the unique needs retailers and customers have when it comes to using artificial intelligence within the shopping experience,” said alby co-founder Max Bennett. “While we’re scaling our AI Shopping Assistant across channels, we’ll be working to introduce and teach the AI new skills to acquire, convert and retain customers. Each brand and vertical will require quite different and unique skills. Unlike the technology of the past, these conversational AI systems will look very different depending on whether you are buying a fashion, consumer goods or sporting goods product. Paired with Bluecore, we can make these experiences even more magical, and create a truly intelligent retail platform that becomes smarter on its own, over time, as it learns about shoppers.”
Bluecore’s long-term plans for alby are in pursuit of creating more active customer files for profitable growth. It will explore applications that revolve around generative-based orchestration, merchant insights, customer support personalization, contextual recommendations, content development and more.
